Intel Confirms It Will Ship 160GB Flash Drives

Lucas123 writes "Intel has confirmed plans to ship a new line of solid-state drives for laptop and notebook PCs with storage capacities of 80GB to 160GB. While it did not lock in a ship date, Intel told Computerworld that the drives would be available in the second quarter. From the story: 'An aggressive move into the laptop and PC notebook flash disk drive business would catapult Intel into direct competition with hard drive manufacturers such as Toshiba Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. that are trying to spark demand before their SATA-based offerings are released in the coming months.'"

Proof

More proof that competing companies are good for consumers. I just hope that toshiba and samsung have enough strength to come up with something that takes the lead from intel.

Indeed

More proof that competing companies are good for consumers

Quite so. I daresay this capitalism business is catching on rather quickly.

Re:Proof

1997 called, it wants its caveat back.
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html [storagesearch.com] http://www.bitmicro.com/press_resources_debunking.php [bitmicro.com]

Logical move

It's very difficult to move into an established market, like disk drives. There's tons of technical expertise to acquire, and without your share of patents to negotiate a sharing deal, you're going to be paying through the nose in royalties. You just don't see new disk drive companies popping up. The only way to enter the market is to buy or partner with an existing player.

The shift to flash drives changes all this.

This is Intel's one chance to become a major player in a component that they haven't been involved in until now.

Re:Logical move

I'm curious at what point we will quit treating these hard drive replacements as that, and instead treat them as what they are - large arrays of addressable memory. Without doing the homework to be sure, I suspect that being able to remove the overhead of an OS building the needed protocol stream to address this memory as a hard drive, and instead treating it as memory, would save significant(?) code/time.

Re:Logical move

Current hardware with simple wear leveling will give you about a solid year of continuous writes. That's writing 24/7, nonstop. I don't think a HDD could even survive that. For a consumer device, even under fairly heavy use, the hardware will be long obsolete before it runs out of write cycles.

Could we see an end to Magnetic Media?

Yes Megnetic Media is cheaper then Solid state... But higher speeds and still its prices are falling fast too, battery power usage, less points of failure. It really seems like the way to go. I could see Magnetic Media go the way of the CRT in 10 years? I think it is possible. Unless Magnetic makes some Huge Improvement in capasity and also we get a hug increase in demmand in data. Because drive size has began starting to exceed our data storage needs (at least on a personal computer Level)

Re:Could we see an end to Magnetic Media?

Because drive size has began starting to exceed our data storage needs (at least on a personal computer Level)

Er.... I have several 30 GB HD rips that would tend to disagree with you.

Multimedia content is still huge. Your standard from-the-factory PC can only hold 3-4 high quality movies. I know people who have multi-TB RAID arrays to archive their media content and are already feeling storage crunches.

Re:Will never be cheaper

Um sorry I was a sleep for 40 years and I just woke up... This Internet thing is pritty cool...

But the Difficulty of fabricating Magnetic Memory is magnitutes more diffucly compared to punching holes in some cardstock. So there will always a need for Punchcards.

Partition Filesystems

What filesystem (NTFS, ext3, etc) is best for solid-state drives anyways? All of our commom filesystems are written for spinning drives, and certain features (such as ext3 self-defragmentation) probably shorten a flash drives lifespan.

Re:Partition Filesystems

Why would you need defragmentation when there's no read head to consider? The whole idea behind defragmenting programs is to gather a file at one place so that the head doesn't have to jump to different addresses on the cylinder.

Re:Partition Filesystems

Exactly my point. Ext3 defragments itself automatically, which does more harm than good on a flash drive.

Re:Partition Filesystems

Ext3 defragments itself automatically

No it doesn't. While ext3 does try to keep files contiguous and inodes in directories close to one another, it definitely does NOT do any defragmentation. ext2/3 filesystems have a history of getting highly fragmented over time and it gets worse the less free space you have on the disk.

The ONLY way you can defragment a file is to copy the fragmented file to another partition, remove it and copy it back. If you want to defragment a complete ext2/3 filesystem, make a backup of the filesystem using tar, delete the original and restore the backup.

No, this is not something you want to do while other software may be looking for the file.

Of the common filesystems available for Linux (ext2/3, xfs, jfs, reiserfs) the only one that supports online defragmentation is xfs (using the xfs_fsr utility) and this has to be scheduled manually.

Fragmentation in ext2/3 files is a huge problem when appending to files over long periods of time. You can check the fragmentation of any file on ext2/3 using the filefrag utility. Make a copy of a highly fragmented file (even to the same partition) and you will see the number of fragments go down dramatically, unless you don't have much free space left on the partition and the space you have free is also highly fragmented.

Re:Partition Filesystems

I call bullshit.

Why is it that when someone things someone else is wrong and they reply, they must make some smart-ass comment like "I call BS?" or "You suck, I'm right you're wrong?". Come on, keep it civil. Or should I say "I call bullshit".

find / -exec (cp {} {}.defrag; rm {}; mv {}.defrag {});

Anyway, your defragmentation method is exactly the method I described. It won't defrag as well as backing it up completely, deleting all the original data and restoring because you are limited by the amount of (fragmented) free space you have. If your partition is close to empty, then it won't make much of a difference.

However, your defrag method IS NOT SAFE and WILL RESULT IN DATA LOSS on a live system (sorry to yell, but I don't want anyone trying it on a live system - it should be OK if you can guarantee that no-one else will modify the data on the partition)

There is a lot of opportunity in your script for data loss:

1. During the copy. If someone modifies part of the original that has already been copied, your .defrag file won't have those changes.
2. During the rm. Deleting files takes time, so there is more room for a file to try to write to the original. This step is actually completely unnecessary, just overwrite the original with your mv command.
3. After the mv. If a process has the original file open, it will continue writing to that original file, even after it's been deleted and "overwritten". It is very legal to continue file operations on an open file descriptor.

I suggest you actually try your defragmentation trick on a live filesystem which is actively in use. If you don't lose data, you're lucky.

So I'll say it again. The only filesystem which allows you do perform LIVE defragmentation is xfs using it's xfs_fsr utility.

I asked this same question on LKML 6 months ago

Check our my post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List: http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/23/5 [lkml.org] It drew a lot of responses from kernel developers.

Re:Partition Filesystems

I was reading up on this a while back and it was recommended to use EXT2 instead of EXT3 since the journal would cause a lot more wear on the flash.

I think there is definitely room for a Linux filesystem that is optimized for dealing with flash devices and limits the number of times data must be written. Furthermore, don't pad with 0's but with 1's (erased flash has all the bits as 1's).

I would love to see a simple universal flash filesystem which could be used by portable devices and PCs without all the limitations of FAT32 (i.e. 4GB file limit) which seems to be the current fs of choice for consumer devices.

JFFS2 is not suitable for regular flash drives (SD/MMC/CF/etc.) since it has its own wear leveling support and is optimized for devices without hardware wear leveling.

For non-flash devices I have switched to XFS due to the higher performance and better tools compared to EXT3.

-Aaron

Reason for using solid-state drives

Disclaimer: I paid the extra $1,000 for a SSD with my MacBook Air, so I'm probably biased, but most notebooks I've owned has had disk drive issues. It seems part of the price to pay for portable computing. Maybe I'm just brutal with them. The HDDs used in iPods seem more robust but they're slower than normal notebook drives.

The main value of an SSD in a notebook is therefore that the notebook will last longer and there is much less chance of losing data due to disk failure.

Additionally, SSDs are a bit faster, and they're silent and use less power. They are also a little lighter, I assume.

On the down side, they're really expensive and writing files is slower so I guess you want to have lots of RAM and avoid swapping.

In 3 years they'll cost 10% of what they cost today, and they'll be in more than 50% of notebooks.

I don't see the advantage of SSDs in desktops, where it's trivial and normal to have full backups, and where power consumption, noise, weight, etc. are less important.

So it's a little inaccurate to see SSDs as direct competitors to HDDs, ultimately they address two distinct markets, high capacity vs. high reliability. SSDs are always going to be for secondary computers, and portable devices. Of course it's also true that these compete with desktops.

Re:But can I afford them yet?

At the show in December [computerworld.com], another article said:

"In a short demonstration of an Intel solid-state drive at work in a laptop, Saleski showed that the drive could read and write 680MB of data and related storage in 24 seconds. The read and write speed of the solid state drive will be three to four times faster than that of most hard drives, and it will initially cost as much as three times as much as a hard drive, he said."

If in a year they are twice the price of a regular hard drive, that is a bargain for some of us, if for no other reason that to use it as a swap drive for the OS and scratch drive for Photoshop. It would also making loading game levels much faster, so an 80gb version could make an affordable addition to a regular drive that has the OS.

Re:But can I afford them yet?

3x the sustained read/write at 3x the price of a winchester drive is too good to be true. Keep in mind the access time for SSD destroys a hard drive. When you consider the value of data on a drive, and what it costs to have a tech replace one, I'd think winchester drives will quickly be obsolete in PCs for business users.

Re:I'm an idiot

160 = 10 x 2^4. So, probably 10 x 16GB chips

XYZ-byte Solid-State inevitable

I'm here today to announce the future availability of 10TB solid-state drives.

Pricing, manufacturing, and delivery date will be announced at a later date.

Re:XYZ-byte Solid-State inevitable

He said terabyte, not yottabyte. You're jumping the gun a bit there.

Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they

"The 160 GB SSD is probably 1-5x the size of your ipod..."

why do you say that? I can buy a 16gb flash drive for $60 [google.com]. Line 10 of those up and you have a 160gb flash drive for $600 that shouldn't be much bigger than a iPhone if you remove the unnecessary plastic and USB ports from the drives.

Imagine a RAID0 array of ten 16gb flash drives! 200+ mByte/sec (ten x 20mB/sec) transfers and access times in nanoseconds vs hard drive milliseconds! No more bottlenecks.

i for one welcome our new flash memory overlords!

Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they

Could that be why music players tend to have flash storage, while most PCs still have hard drives?

Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they

As far as random access on a drive is concerned, a 5MB music file is gigantic. The seek time (1 seek every 3-4 minutes) is a non-issue. If you were playing 20 snippits of different songs every second then it might matter, but for MP3 playing it is not an issue at all. Even if your file gets fragmented for some reason you're only going to be talking about a few dozen seeks at most.

That said, flash does have a bunch of advantages for music players. It's far more shock resistant (for running!), requires less power, and doesn't have to constantly be put to sleep and woken up like spinning magnetic media.