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.
Digital Camcorders (Score:5, Interesting)
Data Integrity (Score:5, Interesting)
Reliability? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Digital Camcorders (Score:1, Interesting)
With compression you might get 50 gig (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interesting .... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyways you are right though. I can see solid state drives taking over hard drives in the future. The less moving parts the better.
All I was trying to point out was its to early now for widespread adoption.
or, an HD that works above 12,000 feet. (Score:2, Interesting)
My question is how many write operations is it rated for? Others list 300,000 -- is that a lot or a little?
Re:What about the limited number of writes? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Star Trek (Score:4, Interesting)
Shock and vibration (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interesting .... (Score:3, Interesting)
The other thing people haven't mentioned, is that many laptops use 4200 or 5400rpm drives to conserve power, which often become the limiting factor for speed on the laptop. Currently I use a 7200rpm external drive over firewire, and I picked up about a 15% increase in "percieved speed" according to my Hadlock-meter. A flash drive would give me the same sort of performance on the road, without the need for a bulky external drive + wall wart.
Re:flash wear-out (Score:1, Interesting)
They still die with distressing regularity!!!
Noone in our engineering department has ever given a good answer as to why - my guess is the parent poster is correct - VM and expecially FS tables - inodes can get hammered. At least its the best explanation I've come up with. If anyone can REALLY explain how wear leveling interacts w/ an OS and inode allocation, I'd love to hear it. What happens when an inode is written and the wear leveling algorithm "moves" the inode?
Re:Laptop Storage? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is windows is large and so is office, but thats 10G. The remainder is emails and docs, which don't take a lot of space.
Now, you add movies, mp3, games, etc . . . it won't be big enough.
Re:Another level of cache (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I remember reading some article years back about the "future of OS storage" or some such thing. I've often thought about how it would be much nicer to have your OS stored on an intermediate storage device between your primary memory and your hard drive, at least for people who don't update their OS very often. I don't know how plausible a system like this would be, but I think there would be a lot of advantages. If you could have fast SSD memory that you could put your OS on and use your hard drive for temporary files, multimedia, and whatever else, your boot time would be considerably less. Further, a physical switch of some sort that you flip on the front of your computer once you have the OS installed and configured could make the OS storage read only, improving its security from viruses and things, couldn't you? Most of the OS is not changed very often, so it seems ideal to me. You wouldn't even have to have a very large device; five or ten gigabytes would suffice. Are there systems like this? If not, why?
Seek time (Score:2, Interesting)
If flash drives were more commonplace, it would revolutionize filesystem and database development. No longer would you have to care about sequential access, keeping blocks contiguous, etc. This would change everything. I'm amazed that you don't hear more about this.
Re:Flash Drives vs. HD (Score:3, Interesting)
My own research shows the opposite is happening. Flash is charging hard after disk and the rate it is catching up is accelerating.
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddis
I am due to update this years figures but a quick analysis shows the trend is continuing.
Re:New File System Optimized for Flash? (Score:3, Interesting)