Alienware Puts 64GB Solid-State Drives In Desktops

Lucas123 writes "In the face of Seagate's announcement this week of a new hybrid drive, Dell subsidiary Alienware just upped the ante by doubling the capacity of its desktop solid-state disk drives to 64 GB. Dell has remained silent on the solid-state disk front since announcing a 32-GB solid-state option for its Latitude D420 and D629 ATG notebook computers earlier this year. Now, Alienware seems to be telling users to bypass hybrid drives altogether. 'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana, Alienware's product marketing manager 'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'"

obsolete?

[orionop (1139819)]

'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'

Call me when either the capacity or price of solid state drives comes close with those obsolete drives, then we will compare...

Re:obsolete?

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

And it won't. 'Economies of scale' don't happen here. Flash memory production already outstrips HDDs. The fact is that the process of manufacturing memory, including flash memory, is expensive.

Why does your computer have a relatively small amount of RAM and huge storage? It's the same economic question we've been facing since the introduction of computing. You need some fast, temporary storage and some slower permanent storage. And the reason has nothing to do with technological barriers -- it boils down to economics. Memory is expensive, hard drives are cheap. That's it. No matter what happens, nothing is going to change that equation anytime soon. SSDs will remain a niche technology for gamers with deep pockets and maybe a few other high-end uses like scientific computing. It will take at least a decade or more before this filters down to the point that the average PC is using SSDs.

Actually

[samael (12612)]

Flash costs seem to be halving each year at the moment, while hard drive capacity is going up by a smaller amount.

Flash may eventually max out, still more expensive than hard drive space, or it may eventually overtake it. I'm not convinced that there's anything inherently more expensive about flash construction techniques in the long term.

Re:obsolete?

[vagabond_gr (762469)]

Memory is expensive, hard drives are cheap. That's it. No matter what happens, nothing is going to change that equation anytime soon.

You mean *per gigabyte* and that's true. But tape drives are even cheaper, yet few people are using them because 1) access is ridiculously slow 2) nobody needs so much space. Hard drives are taking the same path. I don't need more than 64GB on my laptop, and soon I'll have much more than that. What I do need is to replace my 4200 rpm slug with something faster, without draining my battery. If I can get a 64gb flash disk at the price of a 500gb hdd, I'll do it today.

Crash recovery

[monk.e.boy (1077985)]

Damn this is going to make crash recovery a nightmare. When my hard drive crashed I was able to read the data off by opening it up and using a magnifying glass, pen and paper. Using my notes and a typewriter I soon had my old drive data mirrored onto my new drive.

Is it possible to do this with a solid state drive?

Re:

[SamTheButcher (574069)]

This was actually my question, but seriously.

DriveSavers can crack open a drive and read each platter. What are the options, if any, with solid state/flash drives?

Backup software would see a huge spike if there's no recourse from a dead drive.

Until they notice the throughput

[akheron01 (637033)]

The parts have been available for someone with a couple thousand dollars to throw around to build themself a flash based laptop for some time now. I did all of the research and considered doing it myself, but realized that the throughput speeds of current flash technologies are far too abysmal for desktop computing. It works fine for a little web browsing and music listening station, but try working with some big media like centi-layered photoshop files and video.

Re:

[llZENll (545605)]

That may be true with a homebrew SSD, but when you are controlling each chip directly without having to go through a RAID or USB interface, you can simply multiplex the reads and writes over 10s or 100s of memory chips, increasing throughput speeds to whatever you want, 1MB/s to 1GB/s, you name it.

The School of Hard Knocks

[User 956 (568564)]

'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'

Yes, well, as a graduate of Solid State, I'm really getting a kick out of his reply.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[TubeSteak (669689)]

Yes, well, as a graduate of Solid State, I'm really getting a kick out of his reply.

As a graduate of Quantum State, I may or may not be getting a kick out of your reply.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[thegnu (557446)]

Yes, well, as a graduate of Solid State, I'm really getting a kick out of his reply.

As a graduate of Quantum State, I may or may not be getting a kick out of your reply.

And I, as a graduate of String State, am inventing 7 new dimensions to account for humor.

Re:

[pragma_x (644215)]

Yes, well, as a graduate of Solid State, I'm really getting a kick out of his reply.

As a graduate of Quantum State, I may or may not be getting a kick out of your reply.

And I, as a graduate of String State, am inventing 7 new dimensions to account for humor.

As a graduate of Quaker State, I found your comment rather slick.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[Hoi Polloi (522990)]

As a current student at Drunken State I have no idea what any of you are talking about but PARTY ON!

Re:

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

This overextended joke is in a sad state.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[jetpack (22743)]

As a graduate of Over State, I happen to appreciate the length of this joke.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[CopaceticOpus (965603)]

The graduate of Solid State is getting a kick out the original reply, and the Quantum State grad may or may not be getting a kick out of that. The String State guy is theorizing about humor, which the graduate from Quaker State thinks is quite slick. The Drunken State grad doesn't quite follow all this but seems happy enough. Some might say this has all reached a sad state of affairs, but the gentleman from Over State begs to differ.

Me? I'm a Re State graduate, but you probably already guessed that.

Re:

[Misch (158807)]

You could look at his transcripts, but when you observe them, you might change them.

Eventually

[iknownuttin (1099999)]

FTFA: ...the flash-based technology's steep price point continues to hamper adoption, analysts say.

Yeah, but as the first adopters and the die hard gamers looking for every advantage they can get buy more of these, we'll see the price drop eventually.

It also means that the extra speed and reliability really isn't worth the high price for most business folks who would be, I guess, the ones to really drive the market in the beginning stages after the first adopters.

Hybrid is a band-aid?

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana

Now there's a misleading quote if I ever heard one. Magnetic drives currently allow for storage of 250GB and up for a cost of $0.50/GB or less. In comparison, Flash Drives are are still measured in dollars per GB. The hybrid drive allows a bit of a tradeoff. A fast storage cache combined with massive space in exchange for a slight increase in price. Thus it's possible to have 1TB or more of storage, but with the performance characteristics of Flash memory under most circumstances.

Not too impressive...

[evilviper (135110)]

Okay, for some $1,700+ you get two 64GB SSD drives.

And what do you get for that ridiculous amount of cash? According to Alienware's best PR spin:

"speed up operating system boot and application launch/runtime by up to 2 times." ...and:

"consume up to 50 percent less power than rotating HDDs."

Those specs aren't exactly thrilling, particularly since "up to" tends to mean you'll never get close to either spec.

Seems like a complete joke to me, which oddly fits in quite well with the rest of the Alienware line-up.

Re:

[Rolgar (556636)]

If the price continues at its current 50% drop per year, we'll be looking at 2TB drives below $200 in 8 years or so. You might be able to get a 5-8TB magnetic drive for the same money in that time frame.

Right now, few people will be able to afford this, but there do exist people with too much money who will over spend for the slightest gain in performance, namely battery life, now. For business travelers, some companies might see it as justified for their employee to be able to work on his laptop on the p

Great on Battery life

[Poppageorgio (461121)]

I have a Latitude D430 for work with a 32GB SSD, and while it isn't noticeably faster than the guy next to me that has a standard HDD in the same machine, my battery life is WAY better. I'm getting 10+ hours with the extended battery out of the thing. And, I'm not as scared about losing data due to a dropped laptop. (Networking = frequently dropped laptops!)

Dell offers 128GB on XPS M1730 notebook

[The Incredible Mr. L (26085)]

funny, I was checking out the Dell choices the other day since finding out my company has a discount.

They offer a 128GB solid state drive option on their XPS M1730 notebook.

I don't know how long they've offered that but it seems that Dell does have that option.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[evol262 (721773)]

No idea who modded this 'underrated,' but those buses have nothing to do with this. The AGP bus never had any effect on storage performance (isolated), the PCIe bus is much faster than storage, etc. The IDE controller is on the Southbridge, and it's not bottlenecking. Storage is the bottleneck more often than not (seek times and raw speed). Will this cut down on seek times? Yes. Solid-state storage has nigh-instantaneous seek times, since there aren't any heads seeking.

Can we let the old "write limits" go now?

[Overzeetop (214511)]

I don't get it. Modern flash has 1M+ write cycles, and we might presume that there is some rudimentary write balancing in these drives. If you work 1GB of cache (not unlikely, and probably on the low side for Vista), I get 8Gb x 1M writes = 8x10^15 write operations before your 1GB area fails completely. Using load balancing, and dynamic reallocation of a 64GB disc, but taking the "limit" of useability at 50% of the write cycles before you are might start to worry, how long does it take to write 256x10^15 bits (8x10^15 x 64GB x 50%)? Well, TFA didn't give write speeds, so I'm going to presume a ludicrous write speed of 50MB/s (I'm not aware of any consumer-grade flash that writes that fast). 50x8=400Mb/s or 4x10^8 b/s. So if I've got my exponents correct, that put the 50% threshold at an even 64x10^7 seconds, or about 177,777 hours of continuous writes, or only about 20 years. That presumes you actually have your machine (a) never reading the cache, and (b) never writing anything else to the disk, since the entire bandwidth taken up by the cache writing and (c) it's doing this 24/7 (as I presume Vista attempts to do).

And at this point, your drive will be through 50% of it's theoretical write-cycle life. And about 1/1000 the capacity of the drive you would be able to buy for $100 to replace it.

Re:Can we let the old "write limits" go now?

[pslam (97660)]

I don't get it. Modern flash has 1M+ write cycles, and we might presume that there is some rudimentary write balancing in these drives.

Strangely enough, modern flash is about 100k write cycles for high density SLC NAND and 10k writes for MLC NAND. Newer flash actually gets worse as the densities get better.

Even so, with proper wear leveling and sufficient redundancy you can achieve failure rates better than a spinning media. In fact, you can pick the numbers to achieve any arbitrary failure rate.

As for speed - you're correct, no single flash chip is 50MB/sec, but you can stack many of them in parallel and get that. That's a common way of doing it.

I think you're being overly harsh and pessimistic with your figures. There are some workloads you obviously shouldn't pair with a NAND flash, but quite frankly gaming isn't going to stress these things.

Re:Can we let the old "write limits" go now?

[Overzeetop (214511)]

Well, I googled and came up with this: http://www.baydel.com/images/gallery/NAND%20flash%20resilience.pdf [baydel.com]

which is a whitepaper which shows a 64GB NAND device with a 100MB/s write speed can go for 20 years continuously, with error correction, before hitting the write limit. They didn't use the same numbers, but for a device with a likely lifetime of less than 5-6 years, they certainly seem to be up to practically any task.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[Burz (138833)]

Earth to Lumpy:

Flash drives have had wear-leveling as standard for several years.

Now, back to your utra-scuzzy crap kickers. :-D

Re:what does it do to load times?

[pslam (97660)]

What nobody is pointing out is that a standard windows install will thrash the hell out of a Solid state drive. There is a reason you need to balance your writes and not treat a SS disk like a hard drive. I destroyed a Solid state IDE drive back 6 years ago (you have been able to buy them for over 15 years now) by installing windows on it. the swap space died within weeks.

These days (well, since YEARS ago now) we have this thing called Wear Leveling which means you can't wear out NAND flash by simply writing over the same portion over and over again. The writes get spread around other areas instead.

It hasn't been possible to kill a (decent) solid state drive like this in a very long time now. Please don't misinform people.

Re:

[afidel (530433)]

You could run Windows well on flash without too much trouble, use a ramdrive and redirect TMP and TEMP to that and disable swap, set your browser to use TMP for cache or disable it altogether. Turn off timestamping on file access and it's even better. By that point if your flash has 500K writes before average failure then you have a drive that will last many years, probably longer than your average HDD.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[Plekto (1018050)]

Yes, Windows memory requirements basically quadruple with virtual memory turned off(which is rally what it is - no different than using system ram for video, for instance, and just as much of a speed killer).

Windows is a frighteningly bloated beast. But I'm pretty much preaching to the choir here I suspect.

The way to deal with the swap file is a ramdisk. 3 gigs for Windows(assuming you're NOT stupid enough to be running Vista) and the remaining 1 gig windows doesn't usually access is the swap file. Problem solved. You just tricked Windows into using real ram instead of the hard drive.(as it should have been)

It nearly quadruples speed in XP, btw.

Re:

[babyrat (314371)]

enable faster reboot

you must be running windows...

Re:what does it do to load times?

[skulgnome (1114401)]

The PCI bus isn't a bottleneck until you start getting over 120 megs a second down from a hard disk. Basic parallel PCI transfers up to 133 megs per second, theoretical, and even a single lane of PCI-e is quicker than that.

Re:

[networkBoy (774728)]

Single lane PCIe is 1.25Gbps.
After you move to bytes and remove overhead you get 150 MBps.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[WindBourne (631190)]

I recently switched my home servers to using a sandisk 4G flash for / (with variable directories moved to disk; /home, /opt, and parts of /var such as /var/logs). The system now loads in about a 1/3 of the time. I have also seen that it is quieter (the regular disks sleep when not in use and the fan that ran all the time now runs infrequently ), and the temp dropped 5 degrees. I would expect that my electricity usage has dropped (as evidenced by lower heat).

All in all, I have no doubt that within a year, flash will be the rage.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[TooMuchToDo (882796)]

Now think about this. You saved some electricity by switching to flash, as well as heat output. What happens when Google does a cost benefit and sees how much power they could save across their entire cluster farm in both energy usage and heat, and swaps everything out. It's going to be a great energy conservation benefit, as well as help bring down the cost of flash (economy of scale).

Re:many write cycles?

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

What if the OS decides to write stuff to certain sectors all the time?

Most flash controllers remap the sectors on the fly to ensure that the memory is not worn down prematurely. So if you rewrite the same logical sector 5 times over, a chance exists that you'll get 5 different physical sectors.

Re:many write cycles?

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

The term is "Wear Leveling", and it's built into standards like SD Cards. Doing a quick Google search produces white papers like this one:

http://www.stec-inc.com/downloads/AN-0702_STEC_SMALL_CARDS_WEAR_LEVELING_LIFETIME_CALCULATOR.pdf [stec-inc.com]

Re:

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

WTF are you talking about? Wear leveling is usually paired with ECC to prevent exactly the types of issues you're talking about. The technology is almost exactly the same as ECC hard drive technology. Detect a bad sector, mark it as bad, remap the sector, rewrite data to new sector. Rinse and repeat.

Naive storage devices like you describe haven't been common for quite a few years now.

Re:many write cycles?

[tygerstripes (832644)]

This is an old /. topic, really. Key points:

1. Flash used to have a limit of about 500,000 read/writes. That limit has since been surpassed. I gather it can exceed 1 million now, though Wikipedia still says the former.
2. Although it wasn't addressed in the article (dammit), it has often been suggested that some on-disk monitoring and allocation mechanism will prevent areas from burning-out, or from being used if they do burn out. (This will be a particular issue for page/swap/scratch-files)
3. Given that hard drives usually have a MTBF of something like 3-5 years, the technology only has to be good enough to meet that standard before it becomes as technically viable as HDDs.
4. Given its other advantages over existing HDDs (even hybrids), I imagine that it will be considered viable - especially in laptops - long before it reaches that level of robustness.

Can I just say, it's about time they brought out a version that could compare with existing low-end laptop drives in terms of capacity. If you ask me, that's what was really holding back the big-spenders from buying into this tech.

Re:many write cycles?

[glwtta (532858)]

Given that hard drives usually have a MTBF of something like 3-5 years

Pet peeve: MTBF is not life expectancy, it's the average time between failures if you replace the drives before they are expected to die. Common MTBF are currently anywhere between 50 and 150 years (mostly made up numbers), whereas life expectancy is in the 3-5 years range (at best).

Re:

[afroborg (677708)]

in a controlled environment (inside instead of outside, etc), then, since I can go on forever that way as far as the candle is concerned, a candle has a MTBF in the trillions of years+ ???

Not quite. If you don't experience any failures, then you can't calculate the MTBF because there are no failures to calculate the mean time between. That does not imply infinite reliability, just that not enough data has been collected.

From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

MTBF and life expectancy

MTBF is not to be confused with life expectanc

Re:many write cycles?

[CastrTroy (595695)]

The OS has no power to decide which sectors are written to. The drive contains it's own map of the sectors, and does the write-leveling itself. The OS may think it's writing to sector X, but it's really only a logical sector. It could actually be writing to sector A,B, or C. At least that's how I understand it. Of course this only makes sense with solid state drives, because they don't have variable seek times depending on which sector you put the data at.

Re:No problem! -- It was in my experience

[SlashdotOgre (739181)]

A couple years ago (Fall 2005) I did my senior engineering project in college using embedded Linux devices which utilized 512MB flash drives (CF) as the only storage mechanism. The devices were basically Soekris boards with Debian and some highly custom WiFi drivers/software designed for mesh networking research. After my project, I was hired on by the research institute which funded the project, so I got to play with these things for a while. Nearly every mesh node that used flash ran into "hard drive" issues within a year (we suspected the failure frequency was directly related to how often we used the devices). Most of the time it was simply the MBR becoming corrupt which you could fix by mounting the card on a Linux computer, chroot'ing and re-running LILO; but in a few cases we had to replace the entire card due to corruption. These devices had fairly typical usage patterns of a normal desktop/laptop (booted daily), and we were no where near the 3-5 year estimates most people give flash drives.

Re:

[WillAdams (45638)]

Interesting datapoint --- however, how full were the 512 MB cards?

Did you compare their lifetime w/ 1 GB cards w/ the same data (but much more empty space)?

William

Re:No problem! -- It was in my experience

[SlashdotOgre (739181)]

Unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to investigate it much further (and I no longer work for that research institute). From what I recall, we partition the cards into two volumes. The first volume was set to read-only and contained static OS files (eg. /etc, /lib, /[s]bin...) and we had a second partition for logging (which obviously could and did fill up). I believe the read-only volume was larger than the space actually used so we never filled the cards completely; it's probably fair to estimate we hovered around 60-85% most of the time. All the CF cards were off-the-shelf components bought in one big purchase (so it may have been related to that batch); they were typical cards you'd throw into a camera and I'm unsure what speed they were. When I was hired on, I was actually developing embedded devices which would work over the mesh network provided by the mesh nodes mentioned above, so I didn't get to try larger cards, etc. (but that's an interesting theory and would have been good to test). I would also have been curious to just leave one node on for the whole time (not rebooted like the other nodes) and see if it failed around the same time.

shock

[Verte (1053342)]

How often were you writing the MBR? That's a very strange place to get a failure like this.

Re:Solid first!

[TubeSteak (669689)]

"Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state," said Diana. "Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now."

Yes hybrid is a Band-Aid, but the wound it is trying to heal is the excessive price for solid state.

Again, for the majority of computer users, swapping to the disk is more of a problem than the ultimate speed of their HD. They'd get more bang for their buck by buying another GB of RAM... which is why I don't really see solid state prices coming down anytime soon.

There isn't a significant need for it in the general consumer market.
Maybe laptops will create enough demand for lower prices... but that remains to be see.

Re:

[los furtive (232491)]

Again, for the majority of computer users, swapping to the disk is more of a problem than the ultimate speed of their HD. They'd get more bang for their buck by buying another GB of RAM

You forgot notebooks!

Anyone who's trying to breath new life into a notebook that already has as much RAM as possible will get an awesome collection of performance boosts by switching to solid state:

• a speed upgrade that in some ways is more noticeable than a CPU upgrade
• savings in battery life
• cooler temperatures
• lighter

Re:Have they solved the longevity issue?

[Amiga Lover (708890)]

I have an old mac laptop, a Powerbook 1400, which was sadly limited to 64MB RAM from the factory. Combined with a slow internal HD, the use of VM to get more use out of it slows it down like a dog. The solution to its limited RAM? Add a flashram PC card, make the VM page to it, and you have a pretty quick workaround.

It's a reasonably well-known hack, and I used this powerbook with flash-based VM storage from 2001 to 2003 as one of my main internet machines, browsing and image editing, and it had a real workout in that time. It's been resting for a few years, but still fires up OK. I've seen perhaps a dozen other people who've done this, and NEVER known of a flash VM card to die.

In short, the longevity issue doesn't need solving, as it isn't an issue for anything but running something like eBay's database server on.