Alienware Puts 64GB Solid-State Drives In Desktops 235
Lucas123 writes "In the face of Seagate's announcement this week of a new hybrid drive, Dell subsidiary Alienware just upped the ante by doubling the capacity of its desktop solid-state disk drives to 64 GB. Dell has remained silent on the solid-state disk front since announcing a 32-GB solid-state option for its Latitude D420 and D629 ATG notebook computers earlier this year. Now, Alienware seems to be telling users to bypass hybrid drives altogether. 'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana, Alienware's product marketing manager 'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'"
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:many write cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
Most flash controllers remap the sectors on the fly to ensure that the memory is not worn down prematurely. So if you rewrite the same logical sector 5 times over, a chance exists that you'll get 5 different physical sectors.
Re:many write cycles? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Eventually (Score:2, Informative)
Re:many write cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.stec-inc.com/downloads/AN-0702_STEC_SMALL_CARDS_WEAR_LEVELING_LIFETIME_CALCULATOR.pdf [stec-inc.com]
Re:many write cycles? (Score:4, Informative)
Pet peeve: MTBF is not life expectancy, it's the average time between failures if you replace the drives before they are expected to die. Common MTBF are currently anywhere between 50 and 150 years (mostly made up numbers), whereas life expectancy is in the 3-5 years range (at best).
Great on Battery life (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Have they solved the longevity issue? (Score:2, Informative)
So while the drive would still last a long, long time, you do need to keep in mind the above.
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:3, Informative)
After you move to bytes and remove overhead you get 150 MBps.
Re:Great on Battery life (Score:2, Informative)
Can we let the old "write limits" go now? (Score:5, Informative)
And at this point, your drive will be through 50% of it's theoretical write-cycle life. And about 1/1000 the capacity of the drive you would be able to buy for $100 to replace it.
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:5, Informative)
These days (well, since YEARS ago now) we have this thing called Wear Leveling which means you can't wear out NAND flash by simply writing over the same portion over and over again. The writes get spread around other areas instead.
It hasn't been possible to kill a (decent) solid state drive like this in a very long time now. Please don't misinform people.
Re:Can we let the old "write limits" go now? (Score:5, Informative)
Strangely enough, modern flash is about 100k write cycles for high density SLC NAND and 10k writes for MLC NAND. Newer flash actually gets worse as the densities get better.
Even so, with proper wear leveling and sufficient redundancy you can achieve failure rates better than a spinning media. In fact, you can pick the numbers to achieve any arbitrary failure rate.
As for speed - you're correct, no single flash chip is 50MB/sec, but you can stack many of them in parallel and get that. That's a common way of doing it.
I think you're being overly harsh and pessimistic with your figures. There are some workloads you obviously shouldn't pair with a NAND flash, but quite frankly gaming isn't going to stress these things.
Re:obsolete? (Score:2, Informative)
Anyway, the biggest problem with tapes is that they aren't a random-access media. That's why they aren't used as a means of primary storage.
Re:Dell offers 128GB on XPS M1730 notebook (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Can we let the old "write limits" go now? (Score:4, Informative)
which is a whitepaper which shows a 64GB NAND device with a 100MB/s write speed can go for 20 years continuously, with error correction, before hitting the write limit. They didn't use the same numbers, but for a device with a likely lifetime of less than 5-6 years, they certainly seem to be up to practically any task.
Re:many write cycles? (Score:3, Informative)
Naive storage devices like you describe haven't been common for quite a few years now.
Re:Better Data Security? (Score:2, Informative)
Almost certainly yes. Lots of people have been asking about the number of write(erase) cycles that a flash drive can perform, and many others have been answering "wear levelling". This means that when you re-write block 100000, the flash controller will actually write the data to some other physical block and just internally renumber that new block as 100000. This of course means that the data you "overwrote" is still in the original location.
Because you have no control over the wear levelling algorithm, even writing to the whole drive may not remove all traces of old data. The drive may internally have a larger than rated capacity with plenty of spare blocks to use as replacements for ones that reach their wear level limit.
-Tony