Intel Confirms It Will Ship 160GB Flash Drives

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.'"

Proof

[Slashidiot]

More proof that competing companies are good for consumers. I just hope that toshiba and samsung have enough strength to come up with something that takes the lead from intel.

But can I afford them yet?

[onefriedrice]

The price needs to drop a lot for me to consider one above the tried-and-true magnetic hard drive.

Logical move

[crow]

It's very difficult to move into an established market, like disk drives. There's tons of technical expertise to acquire, and without your share of patents to negotiate a sharing deal, you're going to be paying through the nose in royalties. You just don't see new disk drive companies popping up. The only way to enter the market is to buy or partner with an existing player.

The shift to flash drives changes all this.

This is Intel's one chance to become a major player in a component that they haven't been involved in until now.

Re:Could we see an end to Magnetic Media?

[brunes69]

Because drive size has began starting to exceed our data storage needs (at least on a personal computer Level)

Er.... I have several 30 GB HD rips that would tend to disagree with you.

Multimedia content is still huge. Your standard from-the-factory PC can only hold 3-4 high quality movies. I know people who have multi-TB RAID arrays to archive their media content and are already feeling storage crunches.

Re:Partition Filesystems

[von_rick]

Why would you need defragmentation when there's no read head to consider? The whole idea behind defragmenting programs is to gather a file at one place so that the head doesn't have to jump to different addresses on the cylinder.

Re:But can I afford them yet?

[timeOday]

3x the sustained read/write at 3x the price of a winchester drive is too good to be true. Keep in mind the access time for SSD destroys a hard drive. When you consider the value of data on a drive, and what it costs to have a tech replace one, I'd think winchester drives will quickly be obsolete in PCs for business users.

Re:Reason for using solid-state drives

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not now but with the trend of chip manufacturing getting smaller, perhaps the physical size of your normal system will eventually be a nice little handheld, not bound by clunky cases and heat dissipation issues.

Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they

[iamhassi]

"The average seek time for a hard disk is measured in milliseconds, but for continued transfers, they can have a much higher data throughput than a flash based device."

True, but PCs don't store data in consecutive order. Data is just placed haphazardly around, and it's up to the file allocation table to keep track of it all. So that 5 gigabyte game you're installing isn't all in one giant line of bits, it's shoved everywhere all over the drive, and it's constantly seeking to find where the rest of the files are to load the next level. That's why people periodically defragmenting their hard drives, to put the files all next to each other and save those precious milliseconds, which quickly turn into seconds when the PC's loading a ton of files into RAM.

Because of fragmentation it's rare to have 60 megabytes of data for one application all next to each other, so that's why hard drives rarely read at there top speeds, they read a couple hundred kilobytes, seek 10ms, read some more, seek, etc.

That's why people spend big $$$ to go from 7200rpm hard drives to 10k or 15k rpm SCSI drives, because just going from 8ms down to 3ms makes a very noticeable difference. So the jump from milliseconds down to nanoseconds would make a tremendous difference. RAM is measured in nanoseconds [wikipedia.org], so to have a 160gb drive only 5-10x slower than ram would be much better than the 1,000,000 times slower speed of hard drives accessing in milliseconds [google.com].

Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they

[torkus]

Good points, bad maths.

Skipping that, the sustained transfer rate on SSD's has been going up A LOT recently. From SanDisk:

SanDisk SSD SATA 5000 2.5" achieves a sustained read rate of 67-megabyte (MB)*/sec and a random read rate of over 7000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer3 ... SanDisk SSD achieves an average file access rate of 0.11 milliseconds

Sustained read might be less than the top end desktop hard drives but the extremely low avg file access time you will see a VERY significant increase in performance in virtually all applications.

And the best part about a SS:, is it's multiple parallel chips. There's a finite number of parallel data streams you can combine but it sill easily compensates for the lower individual data rate per chip. It's more a function of the controller chip and chip-to-chip wiring complexity. If you custom designed it, you could easily get a flash drive an order (or two) of magnitude faster in sustained read/write than a mechanical one.

Keeping in mind that SSD's have been main-stream (though in the far upper tier) for what, about a year? I'm predicting (magic ball) that performance on SSD's will soon be able to greatly exceed classic hard drive technology. Mfgs will then use that advantage to offer other features that were impossible previously.

Oh, and immagine if swap file wasn't a curse word?