Intel Stomps Into Flash Memory

jcatcw writes "Intel's first NAND flash memory product, the Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive, is a challenge to other hardware vendors. Intel claims read rates of 28 MB/sec, write speeds of 20 MB/sec., and capacity of 1GB to 8GB, which is much smaller than products from SanDisk. 'But Intel also touts extreme reliability numbers, saying the Z-U130 has an average mean time between failure of 5 million hours compared with SanDisk, which touts an MTBF of 2 million hours.'"

Info.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wear-levelling algorithms. Is there a resource for finding out which algorithms are used by various vendors' flash devices? And links to real algorithms? Hint: not some flimsy pamphlet of a "white paper" by sandisk.

I want to see how valid the claims are that you can keep writing data on a flash disk for as long as you'll ever need it. Depending on the particular wear-levelling algorithm and the write pattern, this might not be true at all.

Spinning states

[HomelessInLaJolla]

These days the platters spin so fast and the data density is so high that the math just might work out the same for a solid state device and the spinning disc--ie. the spinning disc may, mathematically, approximate the solid state device.

At first thought I agree, though. Maybe there's something inherent in the nature of the conducting materials which creates an asymptote, for conventional technologies, closing in around 30 mb/sec.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't a solid state device be able to be read faster than a spinning disc?

Yes and no.

With random access the bottleneck is going to be superb - random reads are going to be far faster than any mechanical drive (where waiting for the drive and heads to move) are a real problem.

With sustained transfers, speeds are going to depend on the interface - which in this case is USB 2.0 - which has a maximum practical transfer rate of... about 30MB/s.

What's needed are large flash drives with SATA 3 interfaces.

Re:hmm

[SatanicPuppy]

Not necessarily...Three platters spinning at 7200rpm is a lot of data.

The place where you make up time with solid state is in seek time...There is no hardware to have to move, so finding non-contiguous data is quicker.

Re:Why? what does it matter

[Jarjarthejedi]

MTBF matters because it's random. They're not saying that every drive will last that long, they're saying that the average drive will. Therefore the chance of any drive failing within a reasonable amount of time drops the more the mean time is. So with a 5000000 MTBF the chance of any one drive failing in your life time is incredibly minuscule.

Re:Info.

[EmbeddedJanitor]

These claims will be made at the flash level (ie. ignoring what the block managers and file systems do).

Different file systems and block managers do different things to code with wear levelling etc. For some file systems (eg. FAT) wear levelling is very important. For some other file systems - particularly those designed to work with NAND flash - wear levelling is not important.

MEAN time between failures, what does that MEAN

[tepples]

Did they really test these for 5 million hours or are they just pulling the number out of their ass?

It's a mean time between failures. An MTBF figure of 5 million hours means they tested 500,000 of them for 300 hours, and 30 of them failed. A rate of 150 million unit hours per 30 failures equals 5 million unit hours per failure.

Incremental layout and web accelerator

[tepples]

Remember their old Pentium add which claimed surfing the 'net would be sooooo much faster with their new Pentium, 'cause it's not like it's actually limited by the speed of you network connection?

It wasn't entirely false advertising. A web browser on a faster computer can run more iterations of the incremental layout code, so that the data looks like it's coming in faster. A faster computer can run more complex text and mark-up compression in human-acceptable time, allowing for "web accelerator" software that became especially popular during the wane of dial-up.

Wait a minute..

[aero2600-5]

"mean time between failure of 5 million hours"

Didn't we just recently learn that they're pulling these numbers out of their arse, and that they're essentially useless?

Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? [usenix.org]

This was covered on Slashdot [slashdot.org] already.

If you're going to read Slashdot, at least fucking read it.

Aero