32 GB Flash Storage Drive Announced 381
Audrius writes to tell us TG Daily is reporting that Samsung has just announced a new 32 GB Flash storage device. The aim of this new solid state disk (SSD) drive is to completely replace the traditional hard drives in many laptops on the market. Some of the advantages offered are the 1.8" form factor, read speeds more than twice that of a normal hard drive, and the promise of 95% less power use.
Interesting .... (Score:5, Informative)
$50.00~70.00 per gb is still nothing in comparison to $0.40~$0.80 you can get on hard drives.
Re:ouch (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting .... (Score:2, Informative)
amazon.com has the new Seagate 8GB CompactFlash Photo HD ST68022C-RK for a low $149.99. No rebates. Free shipping. Tax in KS, ND, WA.
4GB $74.09 shipped free.
from techbargains.com
$18.5 / GB -- and who here doesn't remember when a 100MB hard drive was $300+?
Re:What about the limited number of writes? (Score:4, Informative)
Its just a matter of time for flash.
Re:Current drives only up to 80GB? (Score:2, Informative)
Not the biggest power eater (Score:5, Informative)
Technology currently in use already (Score:4, Informative)
When placed in the right environment, this technology just screams. A good example would be for huge database operations that have hundreds if not thousands of concurrent accesses. The databases that maintain the pay information for the US Military come to mind easily.
Re:What about burnout? (Score:3, Informative)
~S
Re:Interesting .... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Current drives only up to 80GB? (Score:5, Informative)
Nice estimated price... (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA! (Score:5, Informative)
-Rick
Re:What about burnout? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about the limited number of writes? (Score:4, Informative)
With a careful configuration of Windows (no page file, no IE cache, no temporary files, use a RAM disk), this is certainly viable. In the absense of music/movie collections and monster games, even the 32GB size isn't that restrictive.
Re:Data Integrity (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um Guys? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about the limited number of writes? (Score:5, Informative)
(1) The number of rewrites is now quite large (hundreds of thousands?)
(2) The writing-to-disk software/hardware implements "load balancing." If you rewrite the same file 1000 times, it won't use the same exact block on the flash disk for each of those writes. Instead it will move from block to block with various writes/deletes/modify actions. This, coupled with some "slack" (the actual disk size is a little bit bigger than the "useable" disk size) allows for the wear to be distributed over the whole device.
(3) The system uses conventional error-correction and flagging of bad blocks.
As another poster pointed out, magnetic hard disks also have a limited number of rewrite cycles. But in practical terms we usually don't reach this limit. For critical applications I imagine you'd use a RAID of flash disks just like a RAID of magnetic drives.
Re:Read yes, what about write? (Score:3, Informative)
And now for that questionable bit, from the article: While the SSD's capacity of 32 GB cannot compete with traditional hard drives that currently offers up to 80 GB space,
I don't know abut you, but I've seen hard drives in this price range offering up to 500GB and one USB/Ethernet external that offers 1TB at less than 2x the price. Which throws the write speed into question- if 80GB drives are considered their max.
Re:ouch (Score:3, Informative)
0.0308676(Taiwan/US) * 6400(Taiwan) = 197.55264(US)
That's still $6.20 US/GB so still not very desirable, but if they can EoS down, and get the battery life trade off it may be worth it.
Re:Not relevant... (Score:3, Informative)
A worst case scenario would be a filesystem similar to Reiser4 with consolidation turned off, and lots of files growing by small amounts frequently.
Re:Technology currently in use already (Score:5, Informative)
Most large scale systems that use SSD's to increase DB performance do so using DRAM (mainly) or SRAM based units with battery backup, RAM based RAID and controllers that dump the data to disk either on an ongoing basis or in the case of a power failure (using battery power to keep things up at least long enough to write a consistent snapshot to disk).
The units are ridiculously expensive, but far faster than anything you'd manage to get with flash or harddisks (typically they're maxing out the controller/bus you connect to them via).
Re:Digital Camcorders (Score:3, Informative)
The typical number tossed around for NAND erase cycles is 100,000. You can read as often as you like, but to write data, you have to erase a block of data first, 132KB on the devices that I design with.
Of course, those are the data sheet numbers - that is what the manufacturer guarantees. Reality is usually quite a bit better. And it wouldn't surprise me if Samsung and others had some much higher performance flash memory in the pipeline.
-h-
Re:Interesting .... (Score:5, Informative)
Hmmm
The article certainly sounds like it's not using any spinning-platter/read-write heads technology -- that would not really be solid-state. That seems to be how it uses less energy and makes no noise.
To me, this doesn't sound like a "hard drive", but a big whack of Flash memory which is treated like a hard-drive.
The $6400 figure comes from the article:
So, it's not like the posted pulled the number out of thin air.
If it's got no moving parts, it's not what we would traditionally call a hard-drive.
Re:or, an HD that works above 12,000 feet. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:flash wear-out (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, this won't work. The wear levelling doesn't know if a block is 'full' or not, so it will just switch the contents of a pair of blocks. Your frequently-written file will move all over the flash chip(s), and so will your static files.
Re:What about the limited number of writes? (Score:5, Informative)
The nice thing about Flash is that after a cell has failed, it just becomes read-only. You can get around this quite easily in the OS by just marking the failed block as bad in your inode list. Over time, your flash drive will shrink in capacity. When it gets too small, you just copy it over to a new one and repeat the process.
NAND Flash HDD (Score:1, Informative)
If they could get the price down to near $10/GB I would buy one. I don't store mass amounts of audio or video on my laptop so a 16 or 32 GB would be fine for me. The decrease in power consumption and the increase in battery life could make the investment well worth the cost. I can currently get about 5.5 hours of battery life out of my laptop, if this could be increased to 7 or more from the reduced power consumption I would be all for it.
http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/P
Re:flash wear-out (Score:3, Informative)
The flash device has a control processor on board that manages the charge pump operation (for writing and erasing) and keeps the status of the array (bad blocks). When the application layer asks to store data the flash control processor goes and stores the data on the next erased block with the least number of erase cycles against it (erase is what causes damage to the flash cell). The application layer has no idea where in the array the data is physically located, nor does it care. The FCP tracks all of this and it was this layer of the device I was refering to. There is not any reason to move data from one block to another, just to free up a block with less erase cycles, as you have no idea whether that data is persistant or not.
Most flash devices have three arrays: Main array space, microcode array space, and processor(configuration) array space. There may be redundant blocks available, but of these arrays only the main array is useable for storing data.
YMMV as I work on NOR devices and as such are more closly alligned with memory devices rather than block devices.
-nB
Re:Interesting .... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Environmentally friendly too (Score:2, Informative)
Thanks for the laugh.