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.'"
many write cycles? (Score:2, Interesting)
life time? (Score:2, Interesting)
Have they solved the longevity issue? (Score:2, Interesting)
Best,
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:many write cycles? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Have they solved the longevity issue? (Score:1, Interesting)
So maximum, absolute maximum on a busy day, I write 10GB to it, or 60GB worth of writes in an entire week.
Given firmware that spreads writes out over cells, that means in one week, I would write to every single cell in the flash drive less than once. That's in a hypothetical SUPER busy week, something I've never done.
With 100,000 writes maximum before the flash dies, that gives me about 100,000 weeks time until the flash runs out and dies, or a bit under 2,000 years.
that's at the absolute, positively, busiest use I've noticed myself doing on my desktop's drive.
Now, given I'm closer to the 2GB mark instead of 10GB worth of writes, I could probably keep going for 10,000 years with normal use, except for my own death.
Re:Have they solved the longevity issue? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a reasonably well-known hack, and I used this powerbook with flash-based VM storage from 2001 to 2003 as one of my main internet machines, browsing and image editing, and it had a real workout in that time. It's been resting for a few years, but still fires up OK. I've seen perhaps a dozen other people who've done this, and NEVER known of a flash VM card to die.
In short, the longevity issue doesn't need solving, as it isn't an issue for anything but running something like eBay's database server on.
Dell offers 128GB on XPS M1730 notebook (Score:3, Interesting)
They offer a 128GB solid state drive option on their XPS M1730 notebook.
I don't know how long they've offered that but it seems that Dell does have that option.
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:4, Interesting)
Flash drives have had wear-leveling as standard for several years.
Now, back to your utra-scuzzy crap kickers.
Re:No problem! -- It was in my experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:5, Interesting)
All in all, I have no doubt that within a year, flash will be the rage.
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:many write cycles? (Score:1, Interesting)
W...T...F... Okay, let's walk through this with a candle. Say a candle is expected to burn for 10-15 hours, 10 under a strong wind, 15 if it's a bit oxygen-starved (making this up).
So, if you replace a 10-15 hour candle every eight hours (ie your words "before they are expected to die"), THOSE are the conditions under which you can start counting MTBF???
So, if I go:
Time (hrs) - ten hour candle #
0 - #1
8 - #2
16 - #3
24 - #4
32 - #5
40 - #6
48 - #8
in a controlled environment (inside instead of outside, etc), then, since I can go on forever that way as far as the candle is concerned, a candle has a MTBF in the trillions of years+ ???
(if they simply don't go out on their own).
Re:No problem! -- It was in my experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Better Data Security? (Score:2, Interesting)
Since it's so easy to get "old" data off of a hard drive once it's written, have the ultra-security experts looked at RAM based drives for storing data that should never be recovered at a later time? If you just used a regular disk to boot your OS fully configured into a RAM-based drive, then run the machine from there you could theoretically have a non-recoverable data storage unit. Long-term files would be written to a USB FLASH drive. No "ghost image" to be read back off a magnetic device and looked at, just pull the plug and BAM, your "history" IS really history (inside the computer, anyway).
Does flash technology leave a phantom image after it's erased like magnetic storage does?
Re:No problem! -- It was in my experience (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:many write cycles? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite. If you don't experience any failures, then you can't calculate the MTBF because there are no failures to calculate the mean time between. That does not imply infinite reliability, just that not enough data has been collected.
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
People often use MTBF to mean life expectancy, and even within engineering disciplines this is a common misconception. The concept of MTBF is only relevant to certain theoretical models of wear-out anyway, and even though it is quoted for a lot of products it is often a meaningless quantity. The numbers and testing conditions can (as your example shows) be modified to produce just about any MTBF that the tester wants to prove. For most products with a wear-out failure mechanism, Weibull [wikipedia.org] analysis provides a much more accurate estimation of the life span of the product.
Reliability engineering and analysis is hard. It is decidedly counterintuitive sometimes, and most engineers have never been trained in it. It is a massive subject and anyone who has worked in warranty analysis or design for reliability will agree with me, it creates a hell of a lot of work for everyone involved. A lot of it only makes sense when you start looking at large volume production (I design electronics for household appliances - BIG volume - reliability is extremely important). I have been on several training courses about this stuff, and I use it all the time in my daily job, and I still barely understand half of it. That's not because I'm dumb (although this is
Actually, (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows is a frighteningly bloated beast. But I'm pretty much preaching to the choir here I suspect.
The way to deal with the swap file is a ramdisk. 3 gigs for Windows(assuming you're NOT stupid enough to be running Vista) and the remaining 1 gig windows doesn't usually access is the swap file. Problem solved. You just tricked Windows into using real ram instead of the hard drive.(as it should have been)
It nearly quadruples speed in XP, btw.
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:3, Interesting)
Instead let's talk about how your 3 year old U320 drive will kick the crap out of bla bla bla.
In raw transfer speed probably. SSDD do fall behind by varying degrees in raw transfer. However, raw transfer is rarely the most important aspect of a hard drive.
Far more important is seek time. That's why your fancy SCSI drives spin at 10k or 15k RPM. The 4mS average seek gives them a bid advantage over the 7-10mS in standard desktop hard drives. What's the seek time on SSDDs? Generally around 100uS or 0.1mS. So if you sacrifice 2/3 of your drive capacity (1TB vs 150-300GB for 15k) to halve your seek time what would you sacrifice to improve it by at least an order of magnitude?
Random seek is critically important for most servers and also for many home uses. In testing with SSDDs windows boot time improved by about 20-30% depending on the situation. App load times also showed substantial improvements. Try throwing a sizable DB on a SSDD and you'll be amazed at the performance even without caching.
So yes. For raw backup, very high data rate streaming, etc. Your SCSI drives might win out. For the majority of applications SSDD > U320 15K SCSI.