Dell Releases Flash-Based Laptops 230
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.'"
yussss (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok... now seriously, how reliable are the normal hard drives to begin with? 2 days x 3.5 = a week. yay!
Less likely to fail? (Score:1, Interesting)
I wonder how they tested that. I would think the failure rate of a flash hard drive would be much better. Basic anything you can to break it, would probably also damage components on the motherboard.
What's the power advantage? (Score:4, Interesting)
Neat to see (Score:3, Interesting)
Devils Advocate (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Interesting)
What is rather more interesting is what eliminating the hard drive will allow in terms of laptop design. A compact flash card is much smaller than a hard drive, the volume saved will be significant on compact format laptops.
Another interesting difference is that it will be easier to make the drive easily removable on compact laptops. Today this tends to be a feature of the larger models which means that corporate IT depts are less willing to offer compact units.
two questions (Score:5, Interesting)
2- Must the users permenantly use the solid state drive, or can it be replaced/hotswapped with a normal hard drive when storage capacity is needed more than speed?
What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation? (Score:5, Interesting)
The REAL use: Ruggidized laptops... (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, I'd assume this would help on the power budget, and really speed random-access workloads.
Re:Read/Write speed? (Score:5, Interesting)
At first I thought that you were correct about it being better to use more RAM, but the numbers just don't add up...
DRAM is just a capacitor and a transistor per cell. Any sort of flash memory is more complicated, as you have to provide programming voltages, floating gates, etc.
So, why is it that 1GB of DDR ram will cost about $40 and up, while you can easily get a 1GB USB drive for $10 or less.
Why the price difference? I thought that since DRAM is the densest possible memory, that it would also be cheaper per bit, but the prices on Newegg tell me differently.
I do realize that flash memory is a LOT slower and will wear out after a few years, but using flash for swap space seems like a very cost-effective way of doing things. As first I scoffed as Vista for doing this, but now I am not so sure.
flash is not so bad (Score:1, Interesting)
Conventional hard drives wear out and break too. I'm guessing these flash drives last longer than today's conventional hard drives.
Works like a charm (Score:3, Interesting)
Though the CF converter or CF card I have doesn't support UDMA, which still makes things slow, but it's ok.
Current setup:
X40 + 1GB DRAM + 4GB CF
Re:How would I know if the HDD failed... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Read/Write speed? (Score:4, Interesting)
* Raw silicon area (die size)
* Geometry (smaller features = more money)
* Process yield
* Wafer size
* Number of metal layers
Speed is more like a side-effect of the geometry, and the geometry affects the silicon area and yield.
It is just confusing to me how 1GB of SDRAM is a lot more expensive that 1GB of flash memory, when SDRAM should be smaller and cheaper to make.
Re:Great for students (Score:3, Interesting)
Battery and monitor are the limits. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Read/Write speed? (Score:2, Interesting)
Stacked capcitors essentially are huge cirular towers on top of each transistor.
Additionaly, to achieve high speeds with the very small amount of charge in each cell you need to have short bitlines which result in a large amount of sense amplifiers adding to the area of the chip.
Also, non volatile memories like FLASH inherently make it simple to have redundant memory blocks that are mapped over defective blocks: The factory just stores the mapping table in a hidden memory block. This increases yield significantly.