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.'"

MTBF

[Eternauta3k]

'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.'"

Is this hours of use or "real time" hours? I don't know about other people but my pendrives spend most of their time disconnected.

Better than FAT.

[Kadin2048]

To get reliability you need to use a flash file system that is designed to cope with NAND.

Any suggestions of possible candidate filesystems?

Right now, most people that I know of, use flashdrives to move data from one computer to another, in many cases across operating systems or even architectures, so FAT is used less for technical reasons than because it's probably the most widely-understood filesystem: you can read and write it on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, BSD, and most commercial UNIXes.

However, a disk that was going to be installed in a single machine could be more flexible; it would be somewhat more acceptable to use a specialized filesystem there (as long as the filesystem wasn't so specific as to make recovery impossible), particularly if you wanted to maximize reliability.

Re:Wear leveling in hardware

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The cards with internal controllers do something like you say and you can thead the SD or SmartMedia specs for details. They manage a "free pool" primarily as a way to address bad blocks, but this also provides a degree of wear levelling.

Putting a FAT partition onto such a device, or into a file via loop mounting, only gives you wear levelling. It does not buy you integrity. If you eject a FAT file system before mounting it then you are likely to damage the file system (potentially killing all the files in the partition). This might be correctable via a fschk.

Proper flash file systems are designed to be safe from bad unmounts. THese tend to be log structured (eg. YAFFS and JFFS2). Sure, you might lose the data that was in flight, but you should not lose other files. That's why most embedded systems don't use FAT for critical files and only use it where FAT-ness is important (eg. data transfer to a PC).

For how long?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Intel is a weird company when it comes to the way they do business and I am suprised they are stepping into NAND flash space. The writing was on the wall since they are members of ONFI http://www.onfi.org/ [onfi.org]

Intel bough the StrongARM off Digital, then sold it, presumably to focus on "core business" of x86 etc. They've done similar moves with their 8051 and USB parts. It is hard to see what would attract them to NAND flash which has very low margins. NAND flash now costs less than 1 cent per MByte, about a fifth or so of what it cost a year back, and there seems to be no slowing.

Intel seems to work well with high margin devices (Pentium etc) and not so well with low margin parts (USB chipsets, PXAxxx etc).It is hard to see Intel keeping in the NAND business for very long.