Flash Memory HDD for Notebooks Launched 277
ukhackster writes "Traditional magnetic hard drive platters could be on the way out, thanks to SanDisk's launch today of a hard drive based on flash memory chips. The device can store 32GB of data and is meant for notebooks . SanDisk claims that using flash chips means faster access and better reliability, so less danger of a serious system crash wiping out all your valuable data if you drop your laptop. The downside, though, is price. At an extra $600 dollars, are price-conscious consumers going to be interested?"
Just in time for Macworld? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've written about this before in a number of places, but most recently here [utah.edu] on my last trip to Argentina, but I am hoping that we will see a revised 12in Powerbook nee MacBook Pro (or smaller) in the next Macworld because I really do miss the smaller form factor. It would be tremendously useful for travelers and photographers as well as giving us better battery life.
I am currently using a 15in Powerbook that I traded up from when the 12in Powerbook was cancelled, but a smaller footprint would help tremendously with travel. With the 15in Powerbook/Macbook Pro, I love the illuminated keyboard and the performance, but would be willing to pay a premium to carry a smaller laptop, subnotebook or tablet running OS X. It does not even have to have an optical drive as I rip movies I purchase or rent to the hard drive for long airline flights and in fact, if we could get flash drives down a bit in price (or get a sweet deal on bulk purchases for the manufacturer), it would be possible to even get rid of the hard drive provided we could still pack 30-40 GBs of storage space in the device. Battery life would be improved and if you combine it with a 10in diagonal new technology LED display (or OLED), we may even be able to get away with seven or eight hours of honest full on battery life. So Steve, come on dude. We've talked about this before several times. The technology currently exists or is damn close and I am sure there is a market for such a device, so please, please, please.
HD (Score:5, Interesting)
Those things are ineffective , slow, power hungry,relative unreliable, etc. I wonder how they dis last so long.
Oh well, we are still using wheels in our cars so... maybe it's not so surprising after all.
Here is a small, clueless suggestion (Score:5, Interesting)
Effect on Battery life? (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking of which, can someone show me how power consumption is divided among the parts of a laptop (CPU, chipset, wireless, drives, graphics card if applicable, LCD, backlight, etc)?
Cringley's metal film disks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:HD (Score:3, Interesting)
Specifically, can they handle *thousands/tens of thousands* of writes as Windows (or whatever OS) does it's behind the scenes busy work?
$600 for 60GB is a bargain (Score:4, Interesting)
My thoughts?
Price:
$10/GB is not out of scale with current flash pricing, but nonetheless, the pricing will continue to fall. Initial release of "new" technologies like this inevitably start off pricey, usually dipping 50% after a year. I see this type of product falling even faster.
Advantages:
Forget security. The name of the game is power consumption. Hard drives (and DVD-ROM drives, too) suck a LOT of power on a laptop. Flash-based HDDs should offer a considerable improvement in battery life, and for many people, this is the "killer app" that will move this product from bleeding edge to consumer-level.
Re:An extra $600? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are improvements ahead with further process shrinks, but to get the same storage than a decent big HD has, you need roughly all chips of a 20cm wafer.
And creating 100s of cm^2 of memory-quality dice isnt cheap.
Re:HD (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Just in time for Macworld? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ha ha ha. Seriously though, the ideal market for this technology has been defense related work for a number of years now. However, costs are decreasing to a point where we can now start putting these drives in Toughbooks (to make 'em even tougher), or portable devices that do tend to get bumped and thrown around a fair bit more. Just witness my last passage through customs here in the US where a "Homeland Security" officer inverted my laptop bag, dumping out the contents onto a desk from over a foot high. Laptop, point and shoot camera, cell phone and a portable hard drive loaded with photos all came crashing down. If there were flash discs instead of hard drives, I would have been perhaps less pissed off.
The other category where flash drives are absolutely critical is for lots of remotely control data gathering devices. One of my friends who has been working on remotely piloted vehicles has been clamoring for just this sort of technology as it is much more rugged than hard drives for their applications (hard landings).
Re:Cringley's metal film disks (Score:1, Interesting)
Do you really trust the guy who falsely claimed to have a Stanford PhD [wikipedia.org]?
Re:HD (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just in time for Macworld? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:flash memory limited rewrites (Score:3, Interesting)
The obvious example is transient large memory use. I've got all my usual apps open. Now I want to play WoW on my lunch break. Rather than quitting everything I can just let the system swap out my apps when WoW loads and swap them back in when I quit. Maybe your laptop holds enough RAM that you don't care, but mine only holds 2 GB, and I can easily use more than that, particularly when you throw something like WoW into the mix.
I'd also consider things like an automounter -- in my use, the automounter gets called maybe 2 times a day, but it has to be running all the time to be effective. I'd rather wait for it to swap-in and run than have it taking up real memory on my system all day long. Sure, the automounter by itself isn't big, but combined with the other 25 trivial programs that are always running you can see non-trivial memory savings.