Dell Releases Flash-Based Laptops 230
joetheprogrammer writes "Dell has announced that they are going to offer a special configuration option with its Latitude D420 laptop that will allow users to swap clunky old HDs in favor of a 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drive. The only hitch comes with the price tag, which is set at a rather expensive price of $549. This will definitely ensure the laptop is set for a very high-profile consumer. 'The 1.8-inch 32GB SanDisk SSD, which SanDisk announced in January, increases performance by as much as 23 percent and is three and a half times less likely to fail when compared with HDDs currently available for the Latitude line, Dell said. The drive, currently available in North and South America, costs $549 -- on par with the 32GB drive Sony is offering exclusively in Japan for the Type-G Vaio. SanDisk will expand SSD availability to Europe and Asia in the near future.'"
I for one... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Interesting)
What is rather more interesting is what eliminating the hard drive will allow in terms of laptop design. A compact flash card is much smaller than a hard drive, the volume saved will be significant on compact format laptops.
Another interesting difference is that it will be easier to make the drive easily removable on compact laptops. Today this tends to be a feature of the larger models which means that corporate IT depts are less willing to offer compact units.
Re:I for one... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Battery and monitor are the limits. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:I for one... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope. I have a full fledged keyboard on my Psion5. It measures about 3x7" and 100WPM+ typing on it is no problem.
Frankly, it looks like notebook manufacturers couldn't design a DECENT keyboard if they had several feet of space to work with... Things can get much smaller, and be EASIER to type on than current notebook keyboards.
The screen size may be a bit of a limit, but only because people have been convinced they need 17" screens by existing displays. Make a smaller screen, with a higher DPI, and widescreen aspect, and it would be just as easily usable.
The only notebook size limit I care about is the CD/DVD... So long as my notebook is large enough to fit a DVD burner, I'm happy with the size of it. How crappy the keyboard is, may be another matter.
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Nope. I have a full fledged keyboard on my Psion5. It measures about 3x7" and 100WPM+ typing on it is no problem.
For you. I have fat fingers. I've tried using those keyboards, and it's nearly impossible for me to type with any accuracy because my fingers have a tendency to hit the neighboring keys. And no, I'm not incredibly fat.
The screen size may be a bit of a limit, but only because people have been convinced they need 17" screens by existing displays. Make a smaller screen, with a higher DPI, and widescreen aspect, and it would be just as easily usable.
The only notebook size limit I care about is the CD/DVD... So long as my notebook is large enough to fit a DVD burner, I'm happy with the size of it. How crappy the keyboard is, may be another matter.
I couldn't disagree more. I don't care if the screen has a billion pixels per inch, if the screen is 5" wide I am going to have trouble reading it while it's sitting on my lap. I don't necessarily need a 15" or 17" screen, but I do need it to be a certain proportion of my field of view
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Actually, what the article is talking about is a 1.8 inch drive - the smaller form factor for laptop hard drives, just with no moving parts. The news here is that the flash-based device has the same bus as a hard drive and has enough capacity to replace, rather than complement, the hard drive.
While 1.8 inch drives are already in laptops, this may further push towards smaller drives as flash technology shrinks.
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The form factor is not relevant here since the flash drive is merely an option on an existing chasis. We won't see any size reduction in the machine until there is a chasis purposed designed for a flash drive.
64Gb compact flash drives are already available - at a price! So there is no difficulty fitting the memory into the machine. And several makers already offer
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That being said, compact format laptops have been using these for a while, and they didn't get that much smaller, just a millimeter thinner or so.
I don't really see how this makes drives easier or harder to remove. The big jump in that respect was SATA connectors which have fewer pins and less insertion force. Making a removable drive architectur
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I hope the Sony drives ... (Score:5, Funny)
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How would I know if the HDD failed... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How would I know if the HDD failed... (Score:5, Informative)
That said, ive had flash drives go from working fine to dead in a few short static induced moments. As these drives will be inside the PC and far less likely to be treated like a portable drive, hopefully it won't have those over handling issues.
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We former owners of Deathstar/Deskstar drives affectionately call that the "Death Rattle".
yussss (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok... now seriously, how reliable are the normal hard drives to begin with? 2 days x 3.5 = a week. yay!
What's the power advantage? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What's the power advantage? (Score:5, Informative)
SSD IDE is 37 ma @ 5v.
source [memorydepot.com]
2.5" 7200rpm IDE on full seek 460 ma @ 5v
2.5" 5400rpm SATA on full seek 420 ma @ 5v
source [logicsupply.com](I think my calculations are correct)
With the increased seek speed of SSD I'd rather go with the IDE SSD because of the huge power savings.
Great for students (Score:4, Insightful)
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Neat to see (Score:3, Interesting)
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Yes, but massively increasing the price of storage, and reducing the maximum capasity, will help fight other bloat too.
Devils Advocate (Score:2, Interesting)
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two questions (Score:5, Interesting)
2- Must the users permenantly use the solid state drive, or can it be replaced/hotswapped with a normal hard drive when storage capacity is needed more than speed?
Re:two questions (Score:5, Informative)
CAN have lower latency (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash-based drives have MUCH lower latency than spindle-based disks.
That should read "CAN have much lower latency." I've seen USB flash drives tested that had +100ms seek times, and it's not always the 5-6MB/sec class drives; some of the 10-20MB/sec flash drives were this bad. The fastest USB keys are around half a ms or so, which is perhaps a 8x improvement over the fastest magnetic drives.
Flash memory can be glacially slow, have limited number of write cycles and poor reliability, and controllers can be slow as well- and as this stuff gets more into the mainstream, I guarantee some companies will use cheap components to boost profit margins or undercut competitors. We're already seen it in the USB flash drive market; I've witnessed at least a couple of these things get corrupted or stop working after daily use in an office environment, and they were all pretty much no-name brands or freebies.
This competition isn't entirely a bad thing, as the cheap junk will put some pressure on the "good guys" pricing-wise, but the tradeoff is that we'll have to look before we leap with the credit card.
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=)
As for the limitted write-cycled, yes... but it's worlds different than it was in the old days, when flash got its bad rep - which was, at the time, deserved.
steve
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The main reason is probably just that Flash is slow. If you had sticks of DDR400 in there, instead of Flash, it would probably scream along.
The HDD is considered to be the bottleneck these days, but it's not significantly behind the CPU... If there was a sudden jump in HDD speed, the CPU would be the biggest concern once again. And, in fact, the bottleneck depends on your workload... When I want to encode a video,
What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation? (Score:5, Interesting)
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More like 10 million writes.
I would certainly hope and expect that the flash drive has some kind of wear averaging so that repetitively writing to the swap file moves the hot bits around the harddrive.
Wear levelling (Score:2)
I researched flash file systems for a project at work, and they all incorporate wear levelling. I ended up designing my own, since we needed a flat, numbered, record-oriented file system, something JFFS2 [sourceware.org] (for example) couldn't meet.
Many devices (digital cameras, MP3 players, etc.) use FAT, more-or-less unmodified. This limits them to a few million erase/write cycles on important sectors, but I don't think the average digital camera will last that long.
A flash-based hard drive will have different require
Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation? (Score:4, Informative)
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The way that SSD oems deal with the management of write endurance internally within their products varies but they all have the common theme of scoring how many times a block of memory has been written to, and then reallocating physical blocks to logical blocks dynamically and transparently to spread the laod across the whole disk. In a well designed flash SSD you would have to write to the whole disk the endurance number of cycles to be in danger.
For this illustrative calculation I'm
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IIRC, there is often firmware logic in the better flash devices to do that sort of load-levelling in hardware, so you don't have to rely on the computer's OS to do it. Of course, it may be that flash has gotten enough more reliable that that sort of firmware magic isn't even necessary anymore, I don't know.
a step in the right direction (Score:2, Insightful)
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The REAL use: Ruggidized laptops... (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, I'd assume this would help on the power budget, and really speed random-access workloads.
Is the flash removable? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I wonder.... (Score:2)
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Mod parent informative (Score:2)
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Works like a charm (Score:3, Interesting)
Though the CF converter or CF card I have doesn't support UDMA, which still makes things slow, but it's ok.
Current setup:
X40 + 1GB DRAM + 4GB CF
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those seem like pretty crappy specs (Score:2)
Also with no moving parts they should be about 100-10000 times less likely to fail. And should use about 100x or less power than HDDs. Who is designing these things
What is special about the hdd versions? (Score:3, Informative)
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There have been some indications that the problem is that DMA isn't working, and someone mentioned there's a non-dma mode for linux that I haven't had a chance to try
$540 hd with $15 POS gma 950 video (Score:2)
Effect on battery life? (Score:3, Insightful)
High-profile customer? (Score:2)
The only hitch comes with the price tag, which is set at a rather expensive price of $549.
While I've seen many people saddled with low-end laptops I have never spent less than $2K for a personal laptop or had an employer pay less for hardware with which I was expected to do my job. Breaking $2K for a laptop is easy; just spec enough resolution and RAM for the desktop replacement role and you're there. I have also spent >$500 on good disks for both personal and professional use.
I predict Dell will be surprised by the number of customers that opt for this. Disks are slow, vulnerable power s
In the past.... (Score:2)
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Business (Score:2)
Not really; Dell markets the Latitudes to enterprises. Even with a $549 drive a Latitude is still cheaper than many Thinkpads.
why all or nothing? (Score:2)
Or is there a patent on this?
Not a classic SSD, Flash is much slower (Score:2)
System Architecture Change? (Score:2, Insightful)
We have the "pure" SSD devices:
If we have a solid state storage, why do we need to force it into the same protocol actions as a traditional disk? All HDD protocols are based on only being able to read one thing at a time. It strikes me a much simpler transport similar to a "low speed" direct memory management system is the next logical step. Would this remove more of the latency from SSD devices? How many parall
Mmmm, Karma (Score:2)
Advantages of solid state - Lighter, low access time, lower power, no heat.
Disadvantage - Expensive.
Tweaktown solid state 16GB 2.5 HD Review [tweaktown.com]
_retail_ value of memory $240 (Score:2)
http://www.pricewatch.com/flash_card_memory/usb_f
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If you're using an SSD in a laptop, you've got a pretty reliable way of powering a huge on-drive write cache. Even a "drained" laptop battery will have no trouble powering a solid state drive for a few seconds after the power-hungry CPU and display have shut down.
Re:Read/Write speed? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if we in the near future will see hybrid systems with flash-based drives for applications and swap space, and hard disk drives for data storage.
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Re:Read/Write speed? (Score:5, Interesting)
At first I thought that you were correct about it being better to use more RAM, but the numbers just don't add up...
DRAM is just a capacitor and a transistor per cell. Any sort of flash memory is more complicated, as you have to provide programming voltages, floating gates, etc.
So, why is it that 1GB of DDR ram will cost about $40 and up, while you can easily get a 1GB USB drive for $10 or less.
Why the price difference? I thought that since DRAM is the densest possible memory, that it would also be cheaper per bit, but the prices on Newegg tell me differently.
I do realize that flash memory is a LOT slower and will wear out after a few years, but using flash for swap space seems like a very cost-effective way of doing things. As first I scoffed as Vista for doing this, but now I am not so sure.
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Re:Read/Write speed? (Score:4, Interesting)
* Raw silicon area (die size)
* Geometry (smaller features = more money)
* Process yield
* Wafer size
* Number of metal layers
Speed is more like a side-effect of the geometry, and the geometry affects the silicon area and yield.
It is just confusing to me how 1GB of SDRAM is a lot more expensive that 1GB of flash memory, when SDRAM should be smaller and cheaper to make.
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Maybe in some cases, but definitely not in all. If you check Intel press releases, you'll notice that when they reduce the process size, the first thing they make is flash memory.
Re:Read/Write speed? (Score:5, Informative)
Flash memory, on the other hand, is block-addressable, meaning that it is erased and written in blocks (usually anywhere between 32K and 256K). As a consequence, reading flash memory is quick, but writing can be very slow.
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Supply and Demand (Score:2)
Forget supply, did you? (Score:2)
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Most likely. It's just one more layer
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I sure as hell hope not.
Slow "Data" is just as bad as slow "Applications". The Applications have to be doing something, and it's likely they're accessing large volumes of user data, like images, videos, music, etc. Even if you only access a fraction of it at a time, the much slower speed is going to make your flash-based storage system seem quite pointles
You're "write" (Score:2)
Internal transfer read rate: 62MB/s
Internal transfer write rate: 36MB/s
Whereas, for example, the Maxtor MobileMax [seagate.com] 40GB drive (for comparison) says:
Sustained Internal (MB/s) 42
Maybe it averages out?
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Re:This could be useful (Score:4, Funny)
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Is it just me or are there others out there who are bothered by statements like "three and a half times less likely to fail?" From a statistical standpoint, would it not be better to say "less than one-third as likely to fail?"
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Take a closer look at that statement: 3.5 times (x) less (-) likely
n - 3.5n = -2.5n
What the heck does it mean to say something occurs with a negative frequency?
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You don't realize how loud these things can be until you turn them off.
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