Alienware Puts 64GB Solid-State Drives In Desktops

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?

[MancunianMaskMan]

can s/o comment on the durability of these (presumabily flash-based) devices? What if the OS decides to write stuff to certain sectors all the time?

Re:many write cycles?

[AKAImBatman]

What if the OS decides to write stuff to certain sectors all the time?

Most flash controllers remap the sectors on the fly to ensure that the memory is not worn down prematurely. So if you rewrite the same logical sector 5 times over, a chance exists that you'll get 5 different physical sectors.

Re:

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Most flash controllers remap the sectors on the fly to ensure that the memory is not worn down prematurely.

Do you have a source for that? Preferably a white paper from a manufacturer of one of these "drives"?

When I tried to look for such information, I couldn't find it. I've seen other Slashdotters say that it's the OS that does the remapping.

Re:many write cycles?

[AKAImBatman]

The term is "Wear Leveling", and it's built into standards like SD Cards. Doing a quick Google search produces white papers like this one:

http://www.stec-inc.com/downloads/AN-0702_STEC_SMALL_CARDS_WEAR_LEVELING_LIFETIME_CALCULATOR.pdf [stec-inc.com]

Re:

[AKAImBatman]

WTF are you talking about? Wear leveling is usually paired with ECC to prevent exactly the types of issues you're talking about. The technology is almost exactly the same as ECC hard drive technology. Detect a bad sector, mark it as bad, remap the sector, rewrite data to new sector. Rinse and repeat.

Naive storage devices like you describe haven't been common for quite a few years now.

Re:many write cycles?

[tygerstripes]

This is an old /. topic, really. Key points:

1. Flash used to have a limit of about 500,000 read/writes. That limit has since been surpassed. I gather it can exceed 1 million now, though Wikipedia still says the former.
2. Although it wasn't addressed in the article (dammit), it has often been suggested that some on-disk monitoring and allocation mechanism will prevent areas from burning-out, or from being used if they do burn out. (This will be a particular issue for page/swap/scratch-files)
3. Given that hard drives usually have a MTBF of something like 3-5 years, the technology only has to be good enough to meet that standard before it becomes as technically viable as HDDs.
4. Given its other advantages over existing HDDs (even hybrids), I imagine that it will be considered viable - especially in laptops - long before it reaches that level of robustness.

Can I just say, it's about time they brought out a version that could compare with existing low-end laptop drives in terms of capacity. If you ask me, that's what was really holding back the big-spenders from buying into this tech.

Re:many write cycles?

[glwtta]

Given that hard drives usually have a MTBF of something like 3-5 years

Pet peeve: MTBF is not life expectancy, it's the average time between failures if you replace the drives before they are expected to die. Common MTBF are currently anywhere between 50 and 150 years (mostly made up numbers), whereas life expectancy is in the 3-5 years range (at best).

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN]

Err, yeah? I would think the MTBF of a single harddisk would still be 3-5 years. Perhaps the MTBF of the system that _uses_ the harddisks (and gets them replaced) is in the 50 to 150 years range, but that isn't about the disk anymore.

Re:

[afroborg]

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+ ???

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]:

MTBF and life expectancy

MTBF is not to be confused with life expectanc

Re:

[Midnight Thunder]

Flash used to have a limit of about 500,000 read/writes. That limit has since been surpassed. I gather it can exceed 1 million now, though Wikipedia still says the former.

What is the read/write limit of an average hard-drive, to put things into perspective?

Re:

[smallfries]

5. Current performance really sucks.

I'd like to see some performance numbers for the new drive in the Alienware, but after digging around I could only find these numbers [techreport.com].

The short summary is read performance isn't fantastic, and write performance really sucks. Although the final benchmark shows a writespeed of 40MB/s, all of the "real-world" tests shows a sustained write speed of 5-10MB/s.

Basically dreadful, given that performance, prize and size are normally a pick two out of three choice for storage, find

Re:many write cycles?

[CastrTroy]

The OS has no power to decide which sectors are written to. The drive contains it's own map of the sectors, and does the write-leveling itself. The OS may think it's writing to sector X, but it's really only a logical sector. It could actually be writing to sector A,B, or C. At least that's how I understand it. Of course this only makes sense with solid state drives, because they don't have variable seek times depending on which sector you put the data at.

Re:No problem! -- It was in my experience

[SlashdotOgre]

A couple years ago (Fall 2005) I did my senior engineering project in college using embedded Linux devices which utilized 512MB flash drives (CF) as the only storage mechanism. The devices were basically Soekris boards with Debian and some highly custom WiFi drivers/software designed for mesh networking research. After my project, I was hired on by the research institute which funded the project, so I got to play with these things for a while. Nearly every mesh node that used flash ran into "hard drive" issues within a year (we suspected the failure frequency was directly related to how often we used the devices). Most of the time it was simply the MBR becoming corrupt which you could fix by mounting the card on a Linux computer, chroot'ing and re-running LILO; but in a few cases we had to replace the entire card due to corruption. These devices had fairly typical usage patterns of a normal desktop/laptop (booted daily), and we were no where near the 3-5 year estimates most people give flash drives.

Re:

[WillAdams]

Interesting datapoint --- however, how full were the 512 MB cards?

Did you compare their lifetime w/ 1 GB cards w/ the same data (but much more empty space)?

William

Re:No problem! -- It was in my experience

[SlashdotOgre]

Unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to investigate it much further (and I no longer work for that research institute). From what I recall, we partition the cards into two volumes. The first volume was set to read-only and contained static OS files (eg. /etc, /lib, /[s]bin...) and we had a second partition for logging (which obviously could and did fill up). I believe the read-only volume was larger than the space actually used so we never filled the cards completely; it's probably fair to estimate we hovered around 60-85% most of the time. All the CF cards were off-the-shelf components bought in one big purchase (so it may have been related to that batch); they were typical cards you'd throw into a camera and I'm unsure what speed they were. When I was hired on, I was actually developing embedded devices which would work over the mesh network provided by the mesh nodes mentioned above, so I didn't get to try larger cards, etc. (but that's an interesting theory and would have been good to test). I would also have been curious to just leave one node on for the whole time (not rebooted like the other nodes) and see if it failed around the same time.

shock

[Verte]

How often were you writing the MBR? That's a very strange place to get a failure like this.

Re:

[midicase]

Our company manufactures embedded devices that run off CF cards (typically the cheapest 512M we can source). In five years the only failures have been attributed to bad CF cards themselves. Now, each time we receive a difference batch of cards, we scrutinize them under many days of stress testing.

life time?

[revisionz]

how long are solid state drives suppose to last? Compared to the hard drive?

Re:

[superpulpsicle]

That notion of not ever having to deal with a faulty drive seems way too good to turn down.

Have they solved the longevity issue?

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

I would pay the extra price for solid state disks on my computer tomorrow, but I can't help but be a bit nervous about the limits of flash memory in terms of the number of times a cell can be written to. On a well exercised machine, how do they pro-actively monitor this and/or avoid corrupting data when one of those cells can't reliably flip bits anymore? I'm not too stressed about it if I get a corrupt picture on my digital camera because of that, but I use my computer for real work.

Best,

Re:Have they solved the longevity issue?

[Amiga Lover]

I have an old mac laptop, a Powerbook 1400, which was sadly limited to 64MB RAM from the factory. Combined with a slow internal HD, the use of VM to get more use out of it slows it down like a dog. The solution to its limited RAM? Add a flashram PC card, make the VM page to it, and you have a pretty quick workaround.

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.

Re:

[Just Some Guy]

I have an old mac laptop, a Powerbook 1400

Wow! I was given one of those this morning and I'm still trying to get it networked.

Amiga Lover

Those were the days.

Re:

[apodyopsis]

Yes. I think they have

I'll let somebody else find the links on the 'net but I remember reading an article on this subject, I also once wrote a Flash based filing system for a job I was working on (albiet a simple one).

The solution is to allow read and write in any section of the disk, but to create a new entry in the FAT for any changes to a block. In this respect if you wanted to change then you created a new block with a change copied from the old. The thing to remember is that there is no seek time

Re:

[WillAdams]

How much of the 60GB HD is empty and hence writeable?

Will the system actually relocate data which is typically only read so as to make that space available for writing to?

Things don't look so rosy if one has say a 4GB CF and ~3.25GB of that is fairly persistent data (say an install of Windows 2000 and applications and data and music) --- one then has .75GB to soak up all the usage --- which I'm going to try anyway since I got a CF-> IDE adapter for my pen slate, but I'm still waffling on whether or no I'

Re:

[plague3106]

You have a flaw in your theory though; a portion of the drive won't be changing much, because OS and program files don't change too much. So there's a part of the disk that is only written to rarely, and other parts of the disk that will be written to more often, because a chunk of the drive won't change.

So while the drive would still last a long, long time, you do need to keep in mind the above.

Re:

[Sleepy]

>So there's a part of the disk that is only written to rarely, and other parts of the disk that will be written to more often, because a chunk of the drive won't change.

Wrong wrong wrong. You are factually incorrect, I'm sorry.

Both you (and the moderator who modded you Informative) should read all the posts about "wear leveling", or research elsewhere then rejoin the topic so that misinformation is not spread.

I think the basis for your comment is the ASSUMPTION that data on ANY drive is contiguous, or th

Re:

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Except, unless you're always writing to an empty drive, you're not writing to different cells every time. If your drive is 75% full, you only get ... 500 years.

OK, point made, just make sure you don't do a lot of writing for a two years straight when it's 99% full.

obsolete?

[orionop]

'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'

Call me when either the capacity or price of solid state drives comes close with those obsolete drives, then we will compare...

Re:obsolete?

[morgan_greywolf]

And it won't. 'Economies of scale' don't happen here. Flash memory production already outstrips HDDs. The fact is that the process of manufacturing memory, including flash memory, is expensive.

Why does your computer have a relatively small amount of RAM and huge storage? It's the same economic question we've been facing since the introduction of computing. You need some fast, temporary storage and some slower permanent storage. And the reason has nothing to do with technological barriers -- it boils down to economics. Memory is expensive, hard drives are cheap. That's it. No matter what happens, nothing is going to change that equation anytime soon. SSDs will remain a niche technology for gamers with deep pockets and maybe a few other high-end uses like scientific computing. It will take at least a decade or more before this filters down to the point that the average PC is using SSDs.

Re:

[MMC Monster]

The only time it will trickle down is when the average user will have so much storage that they can never fill it up.

For normal users, we may be at that point already. For people that store mp3s, we're probably at that now, as well. (Do you have more than a couple hundred gigabytes of music on your computer? If so, what the heck for?) 10 years from now we may be at that point for standard definition video.

When (storage) space no longer matters, the time to access will start to matter.

Re:

[peragrin]

current storage amounts are good until one starts to store videos, like they store MP3's. Of course bandwidth is still keeping video from being common place, but that gap is narrowing.

Actually

[samael]

Flash costs seem to be halving each year at the moment, while hard drive capacity is going up by a smaller amount.

Flash may eventually max out, still more expensive than hard drive space, or it may eventually overtake it. I'm not convinced that there's anything inherently more expensive about flash construction techniques in the long term.

Re:obsolete?

[vagabond_gr]

Memory is expensive, hard drives are cheap. That's it. No matter what happens, nothing is going to change that equation anytime soon.

You mean *per gigabyte* and that's true. But tape drives are even cheaper, yet few people are using them because 1) access is ridiculously slow 2) nobody needs so much space. Hard drives are taking the same path. I don't need more than 64GB on my laptop, and soon I'll have much more than that. What I do need is to replace my 4200 rpm slug with something faster, without draining my battery. If I can get a 64gb flash disk at the price of a 500gb hdd, I'll do it today.

Re:

[rubycodez]

and some of us would do just fine with a 8gb storage device in our laptops.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

You mean *per gigabyte* and that's true. But tape drives are even cheaper

No, they aren't. Go look on Pricewatch for an LTO Ultrium drive. LTO4 drives are about $1100, with the older, lower capacity LTO2s being about half that. The tapes themselves might be lower than HDDs in terms price/GB, but then they don't last nearly as long as an HDD, either.

Anyway, the biggest problem with tapes is that they aren't a random-access media. That's why they aren't used as a means of primary storage.

Re:

[Bearhouse]

Right! I've buy cheap laptops for work, (I travel a lot, so destroy them regularly). With the money I save on fast processors and video cards that you just don't need, (and I do statistical modelling & analysis!), I add plenty of fast main memory and a decent 7200 drive. My 'cheap' PCs then typically outpace all my client's expensive stuff in 'real world' testing, (application & data loading). Many PCs spend most of their time (and battery power) swapping stuff into & out of memory, so lots

Or performance

[Sycraft-fu]

Last I checked, while solid state drives had excellent random performance, their transfer rate was way below that of normal drives. Now random access is all well and good, I'm glad we are improving on it, hard disks are really weak at that, but it isn't the only concern, and maybe not even the primary concern in most setups. If you have a well maintained system with a defragmented drive, and that system is a single user desktop, it's a good bet that your disk access is often fairly sequential. You go and la

Re:

[antifoidulus]

You are overlooking a huge benefit of flash drives, namely that they consume less power. Maybe not a huge concern on the desktop, but if flash drives can improve notebook battery life significantly there will be a lot of people clamoring for them.

Crash recovery

[monk.e.boy]

Damn this is going to make crash recovery a nightmare. When my hard drive crashed I was able to read the data off by opening it up and using a magnifying glass, pen and paper. Using my notes and a typewriter I soon had my old drive data mirrored onto my new drive.

Is it possible to do this with a solid state drive?

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[CastrTroy]

Well, from what I know, the write speeds are abysmal, but the read speeds are actually quite fast, especially when you're accessing lots of little files, because you cut down on seek times. So a flash drive would be optimal for putting static data like the OS, and Programs, which change very rarely, and contain lots of little files that need to be read very quickly. Your computer would boot a lot faster, and programs would start much quicker. I don't think these would operate well as a swap partition, but t

Re:

[richlv]

what about using raid10 to improve both ?
let's say, 6x32GB ssd, with three raid1 used in one raid0.
both read and write speeds should improve quite noticeably, total space would be ~90GB.

i don't know how large these things are, how much power 6 of those would consume and how much heat would they produce, so any of these could kill the solution.
if all three stay at the normal hdd range (single hdd :) ), that would be a killer laptop. well, maybe a killer because of the price, but we all hope the prices will d

Re:

[CastrTroy]

How much space do these samples take up? It it too much to be loaded into memory? Seems to me that if you're re-reading the sample every time you need it, then there's something wrong with the way the program accesses the samples.

Re:

[owlstead]

Software raid (using RAID 0) 4 Sandisk firewire readers. Now take 4 40MB/sec read time, 8 GB flash disks from same company. RAID is fun if you don't have big seek times, and you'll have 32 GB of storage for far less money than you are trying to spend. Use RAID 5 for less performance, but bigger reliability. Actually, I'm still waiting on someone to perform this experiment, it's still too costly for me. Anyway, I just had to wait for my drive to spinup in my fanless computer, so I'll probably but a single 8

Re:

[llZENll]

That may be true with a homebrew SSD, but when you are controlling each chip directly without having to go through a RAID or USB interface, you can simply multiplex the reads and writes over 10s or 100s of memory chips, increasing throughput speeds to whatever you want, 1MB/s to 1GB/s, you name it.

The School of Hard Knocks

[User 956]

'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'

Yes, well, as a graduate of Solid State, I'm really getting a kick out of his reply.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[TubeSteak]

Yes, well, as a graduate of Solid State, I'm really getting a kick out of his reply.

As a graduate of Quantum State, I may or may not be getting a kick out of your reply.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[thegnu]

Yes, well, as a graduate of Solid State, I'm really getting a kick out of his reply.

As a graduate of Quantum State, I may or may not be getting a kick out of your reply.

And I, as a graduate of String State, am inventing 7 new dimensions to account for humor.

Re:

[pragma_x]

Yes, well, as a graduate of Solid State, I'm really getting a kick out of his reply.

As a graduate of Quantum State, I may or may not be getting a kick out of your reply.

And I, as a graduate of String State, am inventing 7 new dimensions to account for humor.

As a graduate of Quaker State, I found your comment rather slick.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[Hoi Polloi]

As a current student at Drunken State I have no idea what any of you are talking about but PARTY ON!

Re:

[MillionthMonkey]

This overextended joke is in a sad state.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[jetpack]

As a graduate of Over State, I happen to appreciate the length of this joke.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[CopaceticOpus]

The graduate of Solid State is getting a kick out the original reply, and the Quantum State grad may or may not be getting a kick out of that. The String State guy is theorizing about humor, which the graduate from Quaker State thinks is quite slick. The Drunken State grad doesn't quite follow all this but seems happy enough. Some might say this has all reached a sad state of affairs, but the gentleman from Over State begs to differ.

Me? I'm a Re State graduate, but you probably already guessed that.

Re:

[Misch]

You could look at his transcripts, but when you observe them, you might change them.

Eventually

[iknownuttin]

FTFA: ...the flash-based technology's steep price point continues to hamper adoption, analysts say.

Yeah, but as the first adopters and the die hard gamers looking for every advantage they can get buy more of these, we'll see the price drop eventually.

It also means that the extra speed and reliability really isn't worth the high price for most business folks who would be, I guess, the ones to really drive the market in the beginning stages after the first adopters.

Re:

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Are "die hard" gamers really going to want such a small drive though? I see this being useful in notebooks, but even the, I'd still want to wait until 128GB is affordable in the notebook form factor. Either way, I see it not being that viable for either market for a year until capacity doubles.

Re:

[IndustrialComplex]

64gb is more than enough for a 'die hard' gamer. Flash is pretty much ideal with respect to gaming. Like the OS, there aren't that many writes that are made after the install and configuration. You will have your occasional patch, or settings tweaks, but even at an absurd 1 patch a day, this drive would not burn out on writes for hundreds of years. (obviously something else would be a cause of failure before then).

The fast seek times would be very nice in reducing load times (as long as it isn't the un

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, but as the first adopters and the die hard gamers looking for every advantage they can get buy more of these, we'll see the price drop eventually.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but eventually >= 10 years. Flash memory is expensive to produce, and production of flash memory already outstrips HDDs (think of all those USB thumb drives).

Re:

[IndustrialComplex]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but eventually >= 10 years. Flash memory is expensive to produce, and production of flash memory already outstrips HDDs (think of all those USB thumb drives).

I'd say 10 years or less. My thumb drive is larger and cheaper than my HDD from 10 years ago was.

Hybrid is a band-aid?

[AKAImBatman]

'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana

Now there's a misleading quote if I ever heard one. Magnetic drives currently allow for storage of 250GB and up for a cost of $0.50/GB or less. In comparison, Flash Drives are are still measured in dollars per GB. The hybrid drive allows a bit of a tradeoff. A fast storage cache combined with massive space in exchange for a slight increase in price. Thus it's possible to have 1TB or more of storage, but with the performance characteristics of Flash memory under most circumstances.

Not too impressive...

[evilviper]

Okay, for some $1,700+ you get two 64GB SSD drives.

And what do you get for that ridiculous amount of cash? According to Alienware's best PR spin:

"speed up operating system boot and application launch/runtime by up to 2 times." ...and:

"consume up to 50 percent less power than rotating HDDs."

Those specs aren't exactly thrilling, particularly since "up to" tends to mean you'll never get close to either spec.

Seems like a complete joke to me, which oddly fits in quite well with the rest of the Alienware line-up.

Re:

[couchslug]

Hush! Those early adopters are funding cool stuff the rest of us can use after the price drops.

We should be encouraging them to buy as much of that stuff as possible. To reduce load on their gaming box, every Alienware owner needs a at least a 6TB SSD SAN. :)

Re:

[Rolgar]

If the price continues at its current 50% drop per year, we'll be looking at 2TB drives below $200 in 8 years or so. You might be able to get a 5-8TB magnetic drive for the same money in that time frame.

Right now, few people will be able to afford this, but there do exist people with too much money who will over spend for the slightest gain in performance, namely battery life, now. For business travelers, some companies might see it as justified for their employee to be able to work on his laptop on the p

Re:

[Rolgar]

Went back and did my math again. It looks like I was wrong. If the chip capacity doubles every year as it has, it will be 256*8 GB in 8 years, and these drives have 8 chips in them. That is, we should have SD cards that can hold 2TB for about the same as our current cost, and a 16TB flash drive for under a thousand.

Of course, we should hit a physical limit at some point, in which case the cost of flash memory will eventually drop to the price dollars per chip at whatever the maximum size per chip ends up

Great on Battery life

[Poppageorgio]

I have a Latitude D430 for work with a 32GB SSD, and while it isn't noticeably faster than the guy next to me that has a standard HDD in the same machine, my battery life is WAY better. I'm getting 10+ hours with the extended battery out of the thing. And, I'm not as scared about losing data due to a dropped laptop. (Networking = frequently dropped laptops!)

Re:

[btSeaPig]

Well, I have a Latitude D630, with the 32GB SSD, running Ubuntu 7.10. OpenOffice opens in right at one second. Very impressive if you ask me.

Re:

[ColdWetDog]

(Networking = frequently dropped laptops!)

Hint: Don't pick up your laptop by the network cord. The RJ-45 jack is not designed to hold any significant weight. Pick the laptop up by the case.

Problem solved. Now you can use those cheapo old fashioned hard drives.

Re:

[cerberusss]

According to Intel [intel.com], a laptop its harddisk plus DVD uses about 10% of the total power usage, so I'm having a hard time believing that your battery life is so much better thanks to the SSD storage. I'd more readily attribute the long battery life to a good bunch of batteries. Besides a 9 cell battery pack, the Dell D430 [dell.com] can pack an additional 6 cell as well.

Benchmarks?

[tknd]

Would you mind running and sharing a few quick benchmarks like hdparm -Tt?

Funny.

[trudyscousin]

"Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state."

Coming from a company that has positioned itself as the rice boys of computer hardware, that remark sounds rather appropriate.

Dell offers 128GB on XPS M1730 notebook

[The Incredible Mr. L]

funny, I was checking out the Dell choices the other day since finding out my company has a discount.

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:

[JPEWdev]

The 128 GB Drive in the XPS M1730 is a 2x64 GB Raid, so it is not really more advanced technology.

Slow write performance

[Silvers]

A lot of flash-based drives I have taken a look at have very poor write performance. Why anyone would choose to use this in a high-performance desktop is strange.

Wot you say?

[sootman]

100 comments so far and no one has commented on the built-in pun "Dell has remained silent on the solid-state disk front..."? :-) One of the things I love about my Mac mini is how quiet it is. Bring on the silent drives!

In other news, I still want a small laptop (preferably Mac) with a 10" screen, no optical or hard drive, and ~10 GB of solid-state storage. Maybe a low-power wireless card that only does 802.11b. Should weigh 2-3 pounds and run for 12-16 hours on a charge.

Better Data Security?

[cliff45]

OK, don't kill this BEFORE you read it....

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 rea

Hybrid drives . . .

[geniusj]

Hybrid drives sound like a much easier solution for most people. Let's say we had a hybrid drive with 4GB of solid-state storage (can't be that far off, can it?), the benefit here is that the drivers or hardware handles the tiering of your storage/data for you. If you're looking for performance and you have much more than 64GB of data, for example, the hybrid drive I think will do better than the solid-state/separate hard drive combo in the long run. I know I'd much rather have an LRU cache handled for m

Re:what does it do to load times?

[evol262]

No idea who modded this 'underrated,' but those buses have nothing to do with this. The AGP bus never had any effect on storage performance (isolated), the PCIe bus is much faster than storage, etc. The IDE controller is on the Southbridge, and it's not bottlenecking. Storage is the bottleneck more often than not (seek times and raw speed). Will this cut down on seek times? Yes. Solid-state storage has nigh-instantaneous seek times, since there aren't any heads seeking.

Can we let the old "write limits" go now?

[Overzeetop]

I don't get it. Modern flash has 1M+ write cycles, and we might presume that there is some rudimentary write balancing in these drives. If you work 1GB of cache (not unlikely, and probably on the low side for Vista), I get 8Gb x 1M writes = 8x10^15 write operations before your 1GB area fails completely. Using load balancing, and dynamic reallocation of a 64GB disc, but taking the "limit" of useability at 50% of the write cycles before you are might start to worry, how long does it take to write 256x10^15 bits (8x10^15 x 64GB x 50%)? Well, TFA didn't give write speeds, so I'm going to presume a ludicrous write speed of 50MB/s (I'm not aware of any consumer-grade flash that writes that fast). 50x8=400Mb/s or 4x10^8 b/s. So if I've got my exponents correct, that put the 50% threshold at an even 64x10^7 seconds, or about 177,777 hours of continuous writes, or only about 20 years. That presumes you actually have your machine (a) never reading the cache, and (b) never writing anything else to the disk, since the entire bandwidth taken up by the cache writing and (c) it's doing this 24/7 (as I presume Vista attempts to do).

And at this point, your drive will be through 50% of it's theoretical write-cycle life. And about 1/1000 the capacity of the drive you would be able to buy for $100 to replace it.

Re:Can we let the old "write limits" go now?

[pslam]

I don't get it. Modern flash has 1M+ write cycles, and we might presume that there is some rudimentary write balancing in these drives.

Strangely enough, modern flash is about 100k write cycles for high density SLC NAND and 10k writes for MLC NAND. Newer flash actually gets worse as the densities get better.

Even so, with proper wear leveling and sufficient redundancy you can achieve failure rates better than a spinning media. In fact, you can pick the numbers to achieve any arbitrary failure rate.

As for speed - you're correct, no single flash chip is 50MB/sec, but you can stack many of them in parallel and get that. That's a common way of doing it.

I think you're being overly harsh and pessimistic with your figures. There are some workloads you obviously shouldn't pair with a NAND flash, but quite frankly gaming isn't going to stress these things.

Re:Can we let the old "write limits" go now?

[Overzeetop]

Well, I googled and came up with this: http://www.baydel.com/images/gallery/NAND%20flash%20resilience.pdf [baydel.com]

which is a whitepaper which shows a 64GB NAND device with a 100MB/s write speed can go for 20 years continuously, with error correction, before hitting the write limit. They didn't use the same numbers, but for a device with a likely lifetime of less than 5-6 years, they certainly seem to be up to practically any task.

Not so ludicrous

[btarval]

Sandisk recently came out with a CF that they claim as a r/w speed of 45 MBs. Here's a link:

http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Catalog(1353)-SanDisk_Extreme_Ducati_Edition_CompactFlash.aspx [sandisk.com]

I haven't benchmarked it myself, so I can't say anything to back up the marketing claims. But if true, that's in the neighborhood of the 50 MBs that you used in your calculations.

Stack 8 of the 8 GB versions together, and you've got the 64 GB that Alienware is using.

This is really cool. I'd love to replace a lot of p

Re:

[neophytepwner]

Not to mention the real problem lies with the RAM. We really need to get MRAM on the way to enable faster reboot and faster transfer of information through the motherboard. Sure increasing HDD efficiency will help run a system faster but as far as productivity RAM needs some serious advances.

Re:

[babyrat]

enable faster reboot

you must be running windows...

Re:

[roscocoltran]

and what are you trying to prove now ? That the ss drive built 6 years ago were crap ? I agree, but in 6 years, the industry has changed. So did the ss drives. It would be interesting that you redo this experiment and post your results in 3 months.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[Burz]

Earth to Lumpy:

Flash drives have had wear-leveling as standard for several years.

Now, back to your utra-scuzzy crap kickers. :-D

Re:what does it do to load times?

[pslam]

What nobody is pointing out is that a standard windows install will thrash the hell out of a Solid state drive. There is a reason you need to balance your writes and not treat a SS disk like a hard drive. I destroyed a Solid state IDE drive back 6 years ago (you have been able to buy them for over 15 years now) by installing windows on it. the swap space died within weeks.

These days (well, since YEARS ago now) we have this thing called Wear Leveling which means you can't wear out NAND flash by simply writing over the same portion over and over again. The writes get spread around other areas instead.

It hasn't been possible to kill a (decent) solid state drive like this in a very long time now. Please don't misinform people.

Re:

[afidel]

You could run Windows well on flash without too much trouble, use a ramdrive and redirect TMP and TEMP to that and disable swap, set your browser to use TMP for cache or disable it altogether. Turn off timestamping on file access and it's even better. By that point if your flash has 500K writes before average failure then you have a drive that will last many years, probably longer than your average HDD.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[Plekto]

Yes, Windows memory requirements basically quadruple with virtual memory turned off(which is rally what it is - no different than using system ram for video, for instance, and just as much of a speed killer).

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:

[torkus]

Since wear leveling has been addressed (repeatedly) in reply i'll skip it.

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 har

Re:what does it do to load times?

[skulgnome]

The PCI bus isn't a bottleneck until you start getting over 120 megs a second down from a hard disk. Basic parallel PCI transfers up to 133 megs per second, theoretical, and even a single lane of PCI-e is quicker than that.

Re:

[networkBoy]

Single lane PCIe is 1.25Gbps.
After you move to bytes and remove overhead you get 150 MBps.

Re:

[TinyManCan]

99.9% of the time a user is not bottlenecked on throughput or overall bandwidth. They are hamstrung by Latency. This is where SSDs really shine. They can retrieve any piece of data from anywhere in their storage in 1/100 or 1/1000th the time it would take a standard hard drive to do the same.

It is this random access low latency performance that really improves the experience for the users.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[WindBourne]

I recently switched my home servers to using a sandisk 4G flash for / (with variable directories moved to disk; /home, /opt, and parts of /var such as /var/logs). The system now loads in about a 1/3 of the time. I have also seen that it is quieter (the regular disks sleep when not in use and the fan that ran all the time now runs infrequently ), and the temp dropped 5 degrees. I would expect that my electricity usage has dropped (as evidenced by lower heat).

All in all, I have no doubt that within a year, flash will be the rage.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[TooMuchToDo]

Now think about this. You saved some electricity by switching to flash, as well as heat output. What happens when Google does a cost benefit and sees how much power they could save across their entire cluster farm in both energy usage and heat, and swaps everything out. It's going to be a great energy conservation benefit, as well as help bring down the cost of flash (economy of scale).

Re:Solid first!

[TubeSteak]

"Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state," said Diana. "Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now."

Yes hybrid is a Band-Aid, but the wound it is trying to heal is the excessive price for solid state.

Again, for the majority of computer users, swapping to the disk is more of a problem than the ultimate speed of their HD. They'd get more bang for their buck by buying another GB of RAM... which is why I don't really see solid state prices coming down anytime soon.

There isn't a significant need for it in the general consumer market.
Maybe laptops will create enough demand for lower prices... but that remains to be see.

Re:

[poetmatt]

Remains to be seen? laptops already represent significant consumer demand for solid state for almost 2 years [laptoplogic.com] and that would indeed be on a consumer level. Hybrid has ways of long term potential but solid state has far more long term potential (less moving parts as well).

I agree ram does more for performance for the time being, if and only if you don't meet a minimum level of said performance, but at this point if you are a gamer/programmer/autocad user/etc you're going to want to look at a solid state dri

Re:

[los furtive]

Again, for the majority of computer users, swapping to the disk is more of a problem than the ultimate speed of their HD. They'd get more bang for their buck by buying another GB of RAM

You forgot notebooks!

Anyone who's trying to breath new life into a notebook that already has as much RAM as possible will get an awesome collection of performance boosts by switching to solid state:

• a speed upgrade that in some ways is more noticeable than a CPU upgrade
• savings in battery life
• cooler temperatures
• lighter

Re:

[BlueParrot]

The term comes from Solid State physics, which in some circles ( i.e my university it seems ) is sloppily used as a synonym for "quantum physics of semiconductors" (There is actually quite a bit more to solid state physics than that, but that is a different matter).

Flash memory exploits Quantum-tunneling ( i.e because particles do not have a certain position they can "tunnel" through a barrier ) in order to store information in small cells, while a traditional harddrive rearranges the magnetic domains of a

Re:

[Dragonslicer]

Dies after n thousand reads to a particular block.

Um, no, a specific block becomes unwritable after n thousand writes, where n is on the order of hundreds to thousands.