Samsung Announces Solid State Laptop

An anonymous reader writes "Samsung has announced they'll be manufacturing solid-state laptops, with an eye for a June release in Korea. Everything you wanted from a laptop: faster boot times, quicker storage access, less noise, longer battery life. Laptop Logic has the story." From the article: "Now to the features of this laptop: Celeron M 1.2GHz, 12.1-inch screen, 512MB DDR2, Wireless LAN 802.11b/g, Digital Multimedia Broadcasting TV, and measuring 2.5 pounds. Price? $3,700 and only available in Korea in June."

Seek Time & Reduced Heat

[eldavojohn]

Seek time for a 5400 laptop hard disk [newegg.com]: ~ 12ms
Seek time for a 7200 laptop hard disk [newegg.com]: ~ 10ms
Seek time for solid state hard disk [wikipedia.org]: < 0.1ms

They're at least a hundred (if not thousand) times faster and on sale for $160 USD for 32GB size of it [yahoo.net]. Now, why is the laptop so damned expensive?

Everything you wanted from a laptop: faster boot times, quicker storage access, less noise, longer battery life...

You also forgot to say "less heat." Which is my biggest concern with the lifetime of my laptop and my sperm count [com.com].

Drive capacity?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Sadly, the article exerpt skirts the question of drive capacity, normally people don't skip that part, but for this, they have reason to. It appears to be 32GB, which is about the capacity of my four year old notebook but the drive, if sold by itself, probably would cost a couple thousand dollars, meanwhile a 160GB mechanical notebook drive costs about $250.

If you have a lot of money and don't use much space, then I suppose it is a fine option. It probably would go well in the more rugged of the Toughbook series.

Durability?

[cronot]

TFA says the solid-state harddisks are more durable than conventional laptop harddisk. Is it? I thought that Flash RAM wear was one of the main reasons things like that haven't been done before... Have the technology evolved? The write-count is higher now?

Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat

[CastrTroy]

I think that 1 million writes could last you quite a while, providing you got rid of some extra unnecessary writes. Get rid of swap and just have 1 Gig of RAM. That should be enough for most of today's applications. It's not a database server, it's a laptop. Since it's solid state, there's no need to defrag and move files around. Maybe make the drive smart so that if the bit doesn't have to change, then it won't "write" to it. I think that this would work for a lot of people. Most people I know aren't that tough on their hard drives. Besides, with people changing computers every couple years, I don't think that the 1 million write limit will cause that many problems.

Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Number of rewrites on solid state storage: ~1 million.
Number of rewrites on a laptop hard disk: Until the drive mechanism dies.

Stick some dram cache on your ssd drive & it's likely to outlast a typical hdd [bitmicro.com]:

With usage patterns of writing gigabytes per day, each flash-based SSD should last hundreds of years, depending on capacity. If it has a DRAM cache, it'll last even longer.

Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat

[ms139us]

Number of rewrites on solid state storage: ~1 million.
Number of rewrites on a laptop hard disk: Until the drive mechanism dies.

Hope you don't do a lot of swapping on your solid state flash hard drive.

Why does this myth refuse to die? These do "wear leveling" which moves the writes around the flash and means that you would need to write the whole drive one million times.

Let's do some math. One million writes of 32 GB equals 32,000,000 GB, or 32 PB.

Suppose you average 10 MB/s of writes the whole time your laptop is in use (good luck pulling that off). You would have 3.2 billion seconds of use, or 101 years of continued use.

Let's see a hard drive take that kind of pounding.