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.'"
Could we see an end to Magnetic Media? (Score:4, Interesting)
Partition Filesystems (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm an idiot (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But can I afford them yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
"In a short demonstration of an Intel solid-state drive at work in a laptop, Saleski showed that the drive could read and write 680MB of data and related storage in 24 seconds. The read and write speed of the solid state drive will be three to four times faster than that of most hard drives, and it will initially cost as much as three times as much as a hard drive, he said."
If in a year they are twice the price of a regular hard drive, that is a bargain for some of us, if for no other reason that to use it as a swap drive for the OS and scratch drive for Photoshop. It would also making loading game levels much faster, so an 80gb version could make an affordable addition to a regular drive that has the OS.
Reason for using solid-state drives (Score:5, Interesting)
The main value of an SSD in a notebook is therefore that the notebook will last longer and there is much less chance of losing data due to disk failure.
Additionally, SSDs are a bit faster, and they're silent and use less power. They are also a little lighter, I assume.
On the down side, they're really expensive and writing files is slower so I guess you want to have lots of RAM and avoid swapping.
In 3 years they'll cost 10% of what they cost today, and they'll be in more than 50% of notebooks.
I don't see the advantage of SSDs in desktops, where it's trivial and normal to have full backups, and where power consumption, noise, weight, etc. are less important.
So it's a little inaccurate to see SSDs as direct competitors to HDDs, ultimately they address two distinct markets, high capacity vs. high reliability. SSDs are always going to be for secondary computers, and portable devices. Of course it's also true that these compete with desktops.
Re:Partition Filesystems (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they (Score:5, Interesting)
why do you say that? I can buy a 16gb flash drive for $60 [google.com]. Line 10 of those up and you have a 160gb flash drive for $600 that shouldn't be much bigger than a iPhone if you remove the unnecessary plastic and USB ports from the drives.
Imagine a RAID0 array of ten 16gb flash drives! 200+ mByte/sec (ten x 20mB/sec) transfers and access times in nanoseconds vs hard drive milliseconds! No more bottlenecks.
i for one welcome our new flash memory overlords!
I asked this same question on LKML 6 months ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Could we see an end to Magnetic Media? (Score:3, Interesting)
I never stated that people will not be able to fill the drives but it is a case the demmand for space is less then the supply of space in general... Back in them olden days were drive size was in the 100s of Megabytes people were rather quickly filling up the drives with normal operations. This was true until drive size got over 40 Gigabytes. About 10 year ago... While drive size has increased we can still get by quite well with 40 Gig hard drive. Even with Vista Ultimate with Office 2003 and
Re:Could we see an end to Magnetic Media? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, it's possible. Ten years leaves you a bit of wiggle room. But I'm skeptical...I think hard drives will still be around in 20 years. Heck...I'll bet on 100 years—I won't be around to pay up.
The reason I am skeptical of announcements of the impending doom of magnetic drives is that I first heard it in...let me see...1982 or thereabouts. People were talking about the "inherent limitations" of magnetic drives, but it wasn't clear at that time what could possibly replace them. Of course, what happened is that magnetic drive technology has proven astoundingly resilient: we went from huge platters inside drive bays the size of a washing machine that collectively held maybe 2M to cheap standard-sized drives that hold half a terabyte (street price currently hovering around 100 inflated US dollars).
Don't get me wrong: I'm excited about the idea of replacing the boot drive on my PC with a super-fast flash drive—once the price for an 80G flash-based drive gets down to under $200. However, I think magnetic drives will maintain their huge price-per-MB of storage space advantage over rival technologies for a long time to come. So the drives in my PC that hold my video and movies will still be magnetic. I just want fast boot times, and quick swapping. Notebooks are another story, of course—I think it's quite likely that most notebooks will no longer have magnetic drives in ten years.
But for solid-state storage devices to make magnetic media drives completely obsolete, two things would have to happen:
These two points are related of course; they boil down to saying that it's going to have to become darn cheap to make a huge solid state "drive", where "huge" will probably be defined in tens of terabytes.
I'd love to join in with the insightful comments (Score:2, Interesting)
Damn, but I could do with a nice
OK, look, I'll try and say something worth reading: it has annoyed me quite a bit lately that, as SSD-driven audio players have mostly dominated over HDD ones in the last few years, the high-end of the capacity spectrum has become quite sparse; a few iPods that don't play
Re:Proof (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Partition Filesystems (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reason for using solid-state drives (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm here to quibble with "SSDs are always going to be for secondary computers, and portable devices."
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html [earth.org.uk]
I already use SSD (4GB SD card) as my primary Linux boot/main storage device to keep power consumption of my primary HTTP/SMTP/NTP/... Internet-facing server to under 20W. I also have a 160GB HDD, spun down as much as possible, for bulk data.
If this 160GB drive had existed in the middle of last year when I speced the machine, I'd have had bought it like a shot to simplify life no end (and save a little more power). Laptop-mode - who needs it? (Actually it still might save a little power by batching and conflating operations, but much less I imagine.)
Rgds
Damon
Re:But can I afford them yet? (Score:3, Interesting)
/not affiliated with metaram btw.
Representational Difference? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Proof (Score:-1, Interesting)
In practice, this turns out not to be the case.
During firmware development they found that the lifespan of the cards was about a week. The system's firmware wrote tiny updates to the logs at a relatively high frequency. Besides the number of writes required to support actually writing the log data, every time you append a new block onto the end of a file in FAT32 you must rewrite the FAT, its shadow copy, and some other structures, meaning that one logical write might often turn into ten or more at the disk (and then wear leveling will usually have to move blocks around in order to do its thing, blowing up the number of actual writes even more). Most SSDs just have a fixed pool of substitute blocks for leveling wear -- they cannot remap an arbitrarily large number of blocks since that's too complex for the simple controller in the device. Thus, the logfile writes rapidly exhausted the wear leveling pool in the CF card, and soon the device could no longer protect itself and would develop bad sectors.
Are the current generation of SSD disk replacements better than the CF cards my friend was using a few years ago? Probably. Just don't take it as gospel that wear leveling is automatically the perfect solution. I used to see people making the EXACT SAME ARGUMENT you're making now about CF cards of that vintage.
The real solution isn't better wear leveling, either, it's filesystems which are aware of the problem and can do their own wear leveling.
P.S. No, flash isn't good for swap. Most flash SSDs to date have horrible write performance, especially for random writes. They're usually worse than hard disks. Flash is slow at writes to begin with, and on top of that it suffers from having a block size much larger than the typical allocation block used in a computer filesystem or swap partition. The minimum block which can be erased (flash must be erased before being written) in NAND flash (the kind used in SSDs) is often 128KB or more. Writing a single 4KB block (a typical filesystem / swap allocation unit since it's 1 page in most current operating systems) in a random location requires the flash disk to read the enclosing 128KB+ erase block into an internal buffer, erase the whole block, then write back the buffered data with the new data. This extreme penalty means that while flash disks can do OK (not great) at streaming writes, they usually suck bad at random writes.
SSDs are getting better. Who knows, they may have gotten good enough for even me to trust them by now. But I'll be taking a wait and see approach, to be honest.
Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they (Score:3, Interesting)