Dell Releases Flash-Based Laptops

joetheprogrammer writes "Dell has announced that they are going to offer a special configuration option with its Latitude D420 laptop that will allow users to swap clunky old HDs in favor of a 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drive. The only hitch comes with the price tag, which is set at a rather expensive price of $549. This will definitely ensure the laptop is set for a very high-profile consumer. 'The 1.8-inch 32GB SanDisk SSD, which SanDisk announced in January, increases performance by as much as 23 percent and is three and a half times less likely to fail when compared with HDDs currently available for the Latitude line, Dell said. The drive, currently available in North and South America, costs $549 -- on par with the 32GB drive Sony is offering exclusively in Japan for the Type-G Vaio. SanDisk will expand SSD availability to Europe and Asia in the near future.'"

Re:two questions

[NerveGas]

Flash-based drives have MUCH lower latency than spindle-based disks. If your drive has an average seek time of, say, 15 milliseconds, you're limitted to about 60 I/O operations per second no matter how little bandwidth you're using. While the actual transfer speed of flash is roughly similar to a current hard drive, the decrease in latency will be very appreciated in some situations.

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[OverlordQ]

According to the SPEC sheet, the MTTF was 2,000,000 hours. Which is above nearly every HD out there. I'd probably be correct in assuming that they figured the write-limit into their testing.

Re:What's the power advantage?

[wellingj]

SSD Sata is 220 ma @ 5v.
SSD IDE is 37 ma @ 5v.
source [memorydepot.com]

2.5" 7200rpm IDE on full seek 460 ma @ 5v
2.5" 5400rpm SATA on full seek 420 ma @ 5v
source [logicsupply.com](I think my calculations are correct)

With the increased seek speed of SSD I'd rather go with the IDE SSD because of the huge power savings.

Re:I wonder....

[Brad1138]

Isn't that close to what Vista has with ReadyBoost [msdn.com]?

What is special about the hdd versions?

[vanyel]

I've recently tried to install centos and freebsd on various cf cards with an ide adapter (my home router's hard disk is dying), and neither are happy, getting timeouts and various errors. My understanding is that the cf interface is ide, so why should it be a problem?

Re:How would I know if the HDD failed...

[crabpeople]

Same way as most hard drives: Delayed write fails, disk errors in event viewer, devloping bad blocks, frequently needing chkdsks, bsods.. HDDS make a big fuss when they are failing. Its way easier to diagnose than most things. When in doubt, ghost it and see if theres a performance improvement with the new drive.

That said, ive had flash drives go from working fine to dead in a few short static induced moments. As these drives will be inside the PC and far less likely to be treated like a portable drive, hopefully it won't have those over handling issues.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[VCAGuy]

At the end of the day, DRAM costs more than flash because of the frequencies they operate at and byte-addressability. DRAM runs at frequencies starting at 266MHz through the 1GHz range...at those frequencies, the process controls have to be very tight to keep defects down to a good level. Also, DRAM is byte-addressable, meaning that you can write/write just one byte from the DRAM. Byte-addressing means that there have to be row and column leads for every memory location. Further, because DRAM has to be refreshed on a regular basis, the chips have higher heat-dissipation requirements.

Flash memory, on the other hand, is block-addressable, meaning that it is erased and written in blocks (usually anywhere between 32K and 256K). As a consequence, reading flash memory is quick, but writing can be very slow. ...that's essentially why flash is cheaper.

Re:I for one...

[DigitalCrackPipe]

A compact flash card is much smaller than a hard drive

Actually, what the article is talking about is a 1.8 inch drive - the smaller form factor for laptop hard drives, just with no moving parts. The news here is that the flash-based device has the same bus as a hard drive and has enough capacity to replace, rather than complement, the hard drive.

While 1.8 inch drives are already in laptops, this may further push towards smaller drives as flash technology shrinks.

Re:Less likely to fail?

[gyrogeerloose]

Is it just me or are there others out there who are bothered by statements like "three and a half times less likely to fail?" From a statistical standpoint, would it not be better to say "less than one-third as likely to fail?"

Re:I for one...

[potat0man]

Not yet it isn't. How many keyboard-sized laptops are there? Not many.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[edwdig]

Perhaps SDRAM is made in newer fabs.

Maybe in some cases, but definitely not in all. If you check Intel press releases, you'll notice that when they reduce the process size, the first thing they make is flash memory.