Intel Confirms It Will Ship 160GB Flash Drives 228
Lucas123 writes "Intel has confirmed plans to ship a new line of solid-state drives for laptop and notebook PCs with storage capacities of 80GB to 160GB. While it did not lock in a ship date, Intel told Computerworld that the drives would be available in the second quarter. From the story: 'An aggressive move into the laptop and PC notebook flash disk drive business would catapult Intel into direct competition with hard drive manufacturers such as Toshiba Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. that are trying to spark demand before their SATA-based offerings are released in the coming months.'"
Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm an idiot (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Proof (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure the limit on write cycles will be a major concern at those sizes, especially if you keep the drive maybe 50-75% full.
Re:Proof (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html [storagesearch.com] http://www.bitmicro.com/press_resources_debunking.php [bitmicro.com]
Re:Logical move (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Could we see an end to Magnetic Media? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Partition Filesystems (Score:4, Informative)
I think there is definitely room for a Linux filesystem that is optimized for dealing with flash devices and limits the number of times data must be written. Furthermore, don't pad with 0's but with 1's (erased flash has all the bits as 1's).
I would love to see a simple universal flash filesystem which could be used by portable devices and PCs without all the limitations of FAT32 (i.e. 4GB file limit) which seems to be the current fs of choice for consumer devices.
JFFS2 is not suitable for regular flash drives (SD/MMC/CF/etc.) since it has its own wear leveling support and is optimized for devices without hardware wear leveling.
For non-flash devices I have switched to XFS due to the higher performance and better tools compared to EXT3.
-Aaron
Re:Logical move (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Reason for using solid-state drives (Score:3, Informative)
Reads faster (ie boots quickly, apps open faster)
Writes slower (ie files saves slower, page file churns sluggishly)
Re:Partition Filesystems (Score:4, Informative)
I just found this [storagesearch.com]:
Unlike DRAM, flash memory chips have a limited lifespan. Further, different flash chips have a different number of write cycles before errors start to occur. Flash chips with 300,000 write cycles are common, and currently the best flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block (with 8,000 blocks per chip). Now, just because a flash chip has a given write cycle rating, it doesn't mean that the chip will self-destruct as soon as that threshold is reached. It means that a flash chip with a 1 million Erase/Write endurance threshold limit will have only 0.02 percent of the sample population turn into a bad block when the write threshold is reached for that block. The better flash SSD manufacturers have two ways to increase the longevity of the drives: First, a "balancing" algorithm is used. This monitors how many times each disk block has been written. This will greatly extend the life of the drive. The better manufacturers have "wear-leveling" algorithms that balance the data intelligently, avoiding both exacerbating the wearing of the blocks and "thrashing" of the disk: When a given block has been written above a certain percentage threshold, the SSD will (in the background, avoiding performance decreases) swap the data in that block with the data in a block that has exhibited a "read-only-like" characteristic. Second, should bad blocks occur, they are mapped out as they would be on a rotating disk. With usage patterns of writing gigabytes per day, each flash-based SSD should last hundreds of years, depending on capacity. If it has a DRAM cache, it'll last even longer.
Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Partition Filesystems (Score:3, Informative)
It's been a while since I've looked into how it works, but I'm speculating that it attempts to spread out write operations over the entire disk by giving file fragments fairly dynamic addresses. I believe it also has an ECC scheme and uses a reserved storage area for marking bad blocks. Since the SSD almost definitely does the last two in its controller hardware, JFFS2 would be a good option if you can make use of its distributed write operations only.
Re:Partition Filesystems (Score:5, Informative)
The ONLY way you can defragment a file is to copy the fragmented file to another partition, remove it and copy it back. If you want to defragment a complete ext2/3 filesystem, make a backup of the filesystem using tar, delete the original and restore the backup.
No, this is not something you want to do while other software may be looking for the file.
Of the common filesystems available for Linux (ext2/3, xfs, jfs, reiserfs) the only one that supports online defragmentation is xfs (using the xfs_fsr utility) and this has to be scheduled manually.
Fragmentation in ext2/3 files is a huge problem when appending to files over long periods of time. You can check the fragmentation of any file on ext2/3 using the filefrag utility. Make a copy of a highly fragmented file (even to the same partition) and you will see the number of fragments go down dramatically, unless you don't have much free space left on the partition and the space you have free is also highly fragmented.
Re:Partition Filesystems (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I think the earth probably is the center of the universe. 'course, both of our statements are unsupported by anything but guesswork, so why should either statement be believed over the people actually working in the industry on wear-leveling technology in modern flash drives?
Especially if you have less than 10% free space.
a) 10% of a 160GB flash drive is still 16GB... plenty of space, even if you are concerned.
b) Most people don't run their hard disks anywhere near 10% of their storage capacity, so it's a minor issue.
c) Wear leveling drives may very well contain addition free storage space just so that the algorithm can perform optimally.
d) Using a log-structured filesystem, it doesn't really matter how much free space there is, as the free space region always moves through the disk... hence the "leveling" part of wear leveling.
That said, I haven't found a decently detailed write-up on exactly how wear-leveling accomplishes its task
Well, you could just start with Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], rather than blindly speculating.
Re:Partition Filesystems (Score:5, Informative)
However, your defrag method IS NOT SAFE and WILL RESULT IN DATA LOSS on a live system (sorry to yell, but I don't want anyone trying it on a live system - it should be OK if you can guarantee that no-one else will modify the data on the partition)
There is a lot of opportunity in your script for data loss:
1. During the copy. If someone modifies part of the original that has already been copied, your
2. During the rm. Deleting files takes time, so there is more room for a file to try to write to the original. This step is actually completely unnecessary, just overwrite the original with your mv command.
3. After the mv. If a process has the original file open, it will continue writing to that original file, even after it's been deleted and "overwritten". It is very legal to continue file operations on an open file descriptor.
I suggest you actually try your defragmentation trick on a live filesystem which is actively in use. If you don't lose data, you're lucky.
So I'll say it again. The only filesystem which allows you do perform LIVE defragmentation is xfs using it's xfs_fsr utility.
Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they (Score:5, Informative)
That said, flash does have a bunch of advantages for music players. It's far more shock resistant (for running!), requires less power, and doesn't have to constantly be put to sleep and woken up like spinning magnetic media.
Re:But can I afford them yet? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:year 2015 the end of the consumer hard disk? (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Logical move (Score:4, Informative)
NAND flash is really a block device. There's no getting around it. Some assumptions we make today will have to be thrown out (such as assuming there's an advantage to writing blocks close together or trying to reorder reads so the drive head sweeps in the most efficient manner), but in general access to NAND memory makes sense only through the same block serialization stack we use today for disks.