Seagate to Offer Solid State Drives in 2008

Lucas123 writes "Seagate will introduce drives based on flash memory in various storage capacities across its range of products including desktop and notebook PCs, according to Sumner Lemon at IDG News Service. The drives are expected to consume less power (longer battery life), offer faster data transfer rates and be more rugged than spinning disk, which has moving parts that can be damaged from an impact."

Re:Warranty?

[maxume]

Do the math. When rewrites were a problem, how big were the chips? How big are the chips now? How many more writes are possible now? The amount of data that becomes a problem is astronomical at this point...the 'rewrite problem' will kick in long after a spinning disk has found a reason to die.

Noise

[ddoctor]

Nobody mentioned the noise! SSD's are silent.

I can't wait for ssd's. Every hard drive I've owned has been noisy and they drive me nuts.

As for durability... hrmm... maybe in its current state, flash doesn't last that long. But, the potential has got to be better than a constantly-spinning platter of disks. I've never had a RAM stick, or flash card die on me, but I've lost many hard drives.

Also, I think there may be greater potential for memory density. Spinning platters inevitably have wasted space, forming a cylinder in a rectangular prism.

I'd be interested to see the effect of SSD's on prices of normal hard drives. Normal HDD prices have been plummetting rapidly over the last couple of years - I wonder if the lure of flash will push them down further.

I think with capacity being so important, price/MB will be a big determining factor in getting flash into enterprise storage. I think the desktop, and (obviously) laptop markets will lap it up first.

Re:Warranty?

[Cyberax]

You just need to have some spare space (say 20% of additional capacity) and dynamically remap areas from the 'working' part of the disk.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Doc Ruby]

Moderation -1
    100% Flamebait

TrollMods have gone completely insane.

Re:Warranty?

[Bearhouse]

The integrated electronics do it for you, otherwise the flash drive would 'fail' sequentially, in order of cell use, and you'd steadily see your reported usable capacity dropping. Does not happen. In my experience, flash drives just keep on working - even in intensive use - but then just somtimes fail suddenly and totally, with no warning.

Re:Warranty?

[Dan Ost]

Somewhere on the order of 1 million erase-write cycles per bit. That should be more than enough even for swapping purposes.

Re:Warranty?

[Nikker]

Will partitioning the media be physical? For example if I have a 20Gb drive, unpartitioned it will last (2x10^6)(10^6) erase-writes balanced across the whole disk. By partitioning won't you physically circumvent the whole wear leveling idea? Maybe not completely circumvent but you would kill erase-write potiential by a factor of 20 in this case, and since a swap partition can get pretty intense you might run out faster then you think.

Re:Warranty?

[Xichekolas]

Every time a story comes up on /. about SSD, this is invariably the first question in the comments. Seriously, I've seen like seven of these now. Yes, the writes are limited... but with efficient algorithms to spread the writes correctly, and operating systems that are aware of the media, we are talking 10-20 years before it becomes an issue.

No company would want the nightmare of releasing a product that is going to fall apart in 2 years. It would tarnish their reputation forever. Think of the notorious IBM Deathstars (now Hitachi). Those were even on warranty and many will never buy them again because of the hassle of returning so many.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[the Plums in us]

Flash based memory is limited in the number of writes it has. It might very well be possible to develop a filesystem that takes this into account.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[skrolle2]

You are only the five billionth reader that points out that "flash drives have limited writes". This is true, but, as five billion other readers have responded already, this is not an issue. The SSD drives that are being sold have have an integrated controller that spreads out the writes evenly over the disk. That way, the expected lifespan of a SSD drive is 10-20 years at least, which is about the same as regular hard drives.

So please stop spreading the myth that SSD drives should somehow be inferior to regular hard drives in this area. The REAL disadvantages of SSD drives is that the sequential read time is lower, maybe a tenth of a regular hard drive. On the other hand, it is possible to improve this, so it will of course not always be so. In all other areas, power consumption, seek time, random reads, heat, and noise, the SSD drives completely outclasses regular hard drives. The only disadvantage that will last is that of cost, but given the superiority of the technology, demand will be crazy, and prices will go down a lot.

This will be pretty similar to how flat screens took over the market from CRT monitors.

Re:Warranty?

[ACMENEWSLLC]

>>How long of a warranty will these have? Doesn't flash memory break down after a good number of rewrites?

But it's better than having to park my hard drive heads every time before I shut down. Sometimes I forget, and then that data is corrupt. Maybe one day Hard Drives will park themselves at shutdown.

Reference;
http://groups.google.com/group/net.micro.pc/browse _frm/thread/136aad9133d01bb7/9c5bce4697be4e1f?lnk= st&q=&rnum=8#9c5bce4697be4e1f [google.com]

(Tone:Sarcastic/Funny)

Re:Warranty?

[HardCase]

That's not what I meant. The form factor problem is the one of being able to fit enough chips, passives and PCB into a 1.8" or 2.5" enclosure and still be able to have a decent amount of storage (and not burn up).

In your example, yes, CF will get the job done for now, but flash transfer rates are increasing rapidly, latencies are decreasing rapidly and we should be seeing SSDs by the end of next year that contain purpose-built components designed for high speed, low parasitic loading and low latencies. Even now a 32GB or 64GB SATA SSD is a much more elegant solution than a bunch of CF cards plugged into adapters. And in the case of a notebook, a 64GB drive can easily be the only mass storage device you need.