The Joy of the Flash Drive

An anonymous reader writes "A post to the C|Net site covers the numerous benefits of flash drives, such as speed, temperature, and battery consumption. The perk author Michael Kanellos is most fond of? The distinct lack of noise. 'The notebook I'm testing--a Dell Latitude D830 with a 64GB flash hard drive from Samsung--hasn't emitted a sound in three days. Flash drives, which store data in NAND flash memory, don't require motors or spinning platters. Thus, there are no whirring mechanical noises. Compare that with my T42 ThinkPad. It sounds like a guinea pig got trapped inside, particularly during the start-up phase. Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee. '"

I like it.

[Wellington Grey]

It sounds like a guinea pig got trapped inside, particularly during the start-up phase. Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee

I like the hard drive noises. Lets be honest here, they are soft clicks and chirps, not chainsaw noises. It gives me a non-visual feel of what the computer's up to.

-Grey [silverclipboard.com]

Re:I like it.

[ChameleonDave]

like the hard drive noises.

Me too. But we have to admit that the same function could be fulfilled by an LED or something else that could be activated or disabled, instead of constant noise pollution regardless of the user's wishes.

Re:

[Stormwatch]

Back on the "Classic MacOS" days, I recall that Norton Utilities had a little app that would do precisely that -- two tiny colored icons on the menubar to show disk reading or writing. Pretty much pointless, but somehow cute.

Re:I like it.

[Keeper Of Keys]

My laptop has a little green light beside the keyboard which flashes when the disk is being accessed, there's even a small red LED on the back of my Archos 605 for the same purpose, in fact - gosh darn it - I think every device I've ever owned that includes a hard disk has had a disk activity light. It's one of the steps when you build a PC: heatsink on top of processor - check; graphics card in its slot - check; and, oh, don't forget to connect the little dangly lead coming from the disk activity light to the correct pins on the motherboard.

You're right they are rarely useful, but they are ubiquitous - why reproduce one in software? I suppose now that we have silent hard drives, you can get a program that makes whirring and clanking noises come out of your speaker whenever you're reading or writing to disk?

Re:

[mollymoo]

My last three Macs haven't had disk access lights, I don't think any of them do. I do find it mildly annoying not having them, particularly as they've all had virtually silent drives.

Re:I like it.

[Fweeky]

You're right they are rarely useful, but they are ubiquitous - why reproduce one in software?

It can tell the difference between multiple drives, and reading or writing. It can even give a good idea of the level of activity.

Re:I like it.

[phoenix321]

HDD activity indicators are great when logging into a machine you're not directly in front of, be it a remote desktop or KVM switched. Especially swap trashing or scheduled virus scans can slow down the entire system with barely visible symptoms in cpu utilization in taskmgr or top. They leave a remote operator with only faint clues on why the machine is so damn slow right now, as the CPU load is negligible and caused only by processes that run all the time anyway.

It's a boon when you do support on a client machine of unknown horsepower, a rotting Windows installation or fragmented filesystem. You remotely started a program, say Outlook, a typical offender, five minutes ago and you don't see any operational window yet. System load for OUTLOOK.EXE is almost nil. How do you tell if it has crashed or is just starving for HD access without looing at the HDD light?

Re:

[Cheeze]

MCSE will tell you to open perfmon and go through a lengthy process selecting items to watch.

Of course then, you're running another program and just adding to the disk activity.

Re:I like it.

[Rolo Tomasi]

man vmstat
man iostat

Re:

[Cyberax]

Simple.

Open "Task Manager", open "View"->"Select columns". Then choose the columns "Bytes written"/"Bytes read".

You'll be able to spot the offending process without any difficulties.

Re:I like it.

[OSXCPA]

Apple sells a line of Western Digital external HDDs in their retail stores, and while they are pricier than roll your owns, they are really nice in their lighting scheme. They have a long LED on the front - imagine a 'Cylon style' white LED, but vertical. The light changes intensity, position, etc depending on what the HD is doing. File access - light cycles with access. HD noise itself is pretty minimal, and the fan is virtually silent. Best part, when Time Machine hoses my system and freezes the external HD (which it occasionally does), the light goes full-on and stays on, so I know there is a problem. I think this kind of feedback is great, and it eats up zero system resources.

Re:

[CAIMLAS]

The problem is that LEDs are visual, whereas the sound the disk makes is, well, auditory. This poses several problems:

1) Auditory sampling rate is hundreds of times faster than visual sampling rate in humans (if you could make such a comparison to recording mediums).
2) Auditory signals can be picked up imperceptibly/subconsciously, without conscious effort. A LED has to be actively looked at to be alerted to any possible problems.
3) Most disk activity LEDs do not appear to flicker at the same frequency as t

Re:

[doti]

Not pointless at all. It's also good to have feedback of what the machine is doing.

For Linux, check wmhdplop [hules.free.fr].
(check the animation at the bottom right of the page)

Also available as a gkrellm [gkrellm.net] plugin.

Re:I like it.

[dattaway]

Hard drive clicks and whirring are always gentle. The only thing worse than noise pollution is light pollution. Leave it to companies like Western Digital to put BLINDINGLY bright blue or white LED's on their external hard drives. They don't flicker with activity, they have a steady blink as if there was a problem. And they stay ON when there is no activity. Completely counterintuitive and designed to annoy. Its worse than the epileptic television news graphics these days. Back in the old days, LEDs had a soft glow. Why do we need freakin laser beams filling up a room when the server is running? Are computer manufacturers in business to punish their users?

Re:I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why do we need freakin laser beams filling up a room when the server is running?

The water-cooled model features sharks which swim around according to the drive activity....

Re:I like it.

[WaltBusterkeys]

Blindingly bright blue lights are no match for the depths of black provided by a Sharpie (tm) brand fine-tip permanent marker. One swipe across and you go from "blindingly bright" to "pretty gosh darn dim." If you're not sure if you want a permanent solution, use a permanent marker on a piece of Scotch (tm) tape and slap that on the LED. Instant dark, but you can still tell when it's glowing.

Re:

[ozmanjusri]

If you're not sure if you want a permanent solution, use a permanent marker on a piece of Scotch (tm) tape and slap that on the LED.

Duct tape.

Re:I like it.

[phoenix321]

What if I don't want to paint all my LED-bearing indicators with an ugly black stripe? That may be great at night but an abomination by nasty by daylight. And then again, even laptop manufacturers well-known for not following the abominable blue-lights-and-phony-silver design craze (Lenovo...) is going for blue lit power buttons right now. I can't tell you how disappointed I am, but the sharpie/masking tape solution obviously won't work on a power button.

And there are equipment manufactures out there that put a diode of epic blue-laser-proportions beneath every damn button. I certainly remember an offensive DVD player at a friend's house that severely distracted from watching the TV screen with no less than five bright blue lights, one of them strobing all the time. Each movie looked like the "Battling Seizure Robots" unless someone put a DVD case in front of it. And even then the whole cabinet was flashing wildly by scattered light from these diodes...

The design of this DVD player made me believe there are manufacturers in East Asia that really try to take over the West, literally, I swear. The design of this unit was hideously perfect, second only to a nuclear blast in underlying brainpower and evil beauty:

- all important buttons were glassy transparent with the laser diode beneath, shining directly into your eyes when the DVD player is placed below the TV
- the currently active function BLINKS incessantly. And yes, STOP is considered a function :)
- all function symbols were printed ON the button and the buttons were otherwise identical. The printing was done from behind and they were not arranged in a logical manner, so you would have no tactile or logical clue after covering them with a Sharpie.
- the front plate was recessed at each button's location with each button having a T-shaped cross section, making it next to impossible to paint all light emitting plastic.
- covering them with masking tape was prevented because these buttons were also sticking out a few millimetres from the unit, emitting light to their sides.
- putting a DVD case in front was prevented by knobs and design "features" sticking out from the front plate, so a gap one centimeter wide was always there, allowing the Seizure Robot's lasers to emanate from the sides. Even when placed *behind* the couch *and* blocked by a DVD case it was enough to light up the room in seizure-friendly blue strobes.

A thick dark woolen blanket finally put an end to the Blofeld's plans for world domination and his Seizure Robot when the unit thankfully died from a sudden case of severe overheating some months later.

Re:I like it.

[Andrzej Sawicki]

Hard drive clicks and whirring are always gentle.

Ever tried building a PC that doesn't produce any sound? After a while, you'll find that the only noise you just can't seem to get rid of, is the humming of the hard drive (while idle). "Soft" as in "nearly silent". As in "driving you nuts".

Re:I like it.

[Andrzej Sawicki]

Where are you setting up this PC? In the middle of Antarctica? I only wish the level of ambient noise was low enough that I could detect my hard disk access.

Very funny, but my point stands. At night, I do hear the hard drive, and it's pretty much the only sound in the room not made by me. And since I work at home, it can get annoying even during the day. I'd switch to an SSD right now, but the semi-affordable kind is too small for comfort. Looks like not much longer now. :)

Re:

[Andrzej Sawicki]

Never heard of people working or playing at night, have you?

Re:

[CrackedButter]

Yeah but it makes you look cool and clearly that is what is most important here.

Re:

[freedom_india]

It looks great to most people in the display,

which is exactly how i got hooked in BestBuy while buying my WD 250GB External Drive.
Now that the blue ring of light is cool at times, and annoying, i still can't return the same to BestBuy for this reason as i would be laughed out of the store.
And blast WD, the drive is as robust as can be, with no manufacturer faults, etc.

Re:I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too. But we have to admit that the same function could be fulfilled by an LED or something else that could be activated or disabled, instead of constant noise pollution regardless of the user's wishes.

Use the actual read/write line (heh, on a PATA interface, but you get my drift -- the Flash chips each have read/write lines, and an OR of those lines will work in the context of SATA) to activate the LED, and emphatically not something controllable by drivers or client-side software, and you've got my buy-in.

Funny story about blinkenlights... or crunchensoundz, as the case may be.

One of the things I initially disliked when migrating my gaming rig to XP (versus 98SE, yeah, I held out that long. The 98SE system listened on no ports, so I completely slept through the whole string of uPNP and DCOM/RPC exploits without so much as a scratch) was that the OS was always fucking around with the disk, even if not swapping. My rigs have always had enough RAM such that 9x would rarely, if ever, swap under normal usage, and I'd been used to years of total quiescence when reading long Slashdot threads. The machine's totally idle, right? Anyways, when I started migrating, it annoyed me that the XP box was always poking around WBEM\wherever, $MFT (by definition!), and so on. I'm looking at how much swap you're using, and it's not changing, so stop that. This box doesn't need to be writing anywhere. What if the power goes out at the exact moment that... journaling or not, this is just a silly design. (I'd never lost data on 9x/FAT32 due to power failures or crashes, but that's because the system was either quiescent on powerfailure, or I waited until the system reached quiescence before hard-booting, and I manually ran Scandisk from DOS mode to make sure I'd cleaned up the cruft... so with a track record like that, can you blame me for not trusting NTFS? Ironically, in the years since migration, I've lost data under XP/NTFS once, which is still one more time than I lost data under 9x.)

Which is a long way of saying that I like hearing the hard drive crunching away in the background. If my drive starts crunching when I'm browsing the web, and it's not about the same time of day that Windows Update typically phones home, the first thing I'm doing is sliding to the nearest open window and running Russinovich's old FILEMON.EXE to see WTF's going on this time. 99.99% of the time it's just been some other Windows process, or some phone-home crap from Adobe or Steam. But once, the 0.001% case paid off. I got bit by one of the "virus via ad banners on reputable sites" events (serves me right for not blocking the provider on sight) a couple of years ago, and the only reason I found out about it was because the hard drive makes a noise when it seeks.

Re:

[ta bu shi da yu]

You know, Windows XP is far more reliable that Windows 98 SE. I'd be interested to see what process was causing the problems. Most likely something to do with WMI, which I agree is a bit silly on personal desktops.

Re:I like it.

[MrNaz]

IMHO "peace and quiet pollution" doesn't have the same ring to it.

Re:

[dotancohen]

The consistent noise you are referring to is called white noise. That's what the fan makes, which is why "the fan is loud" does not mean "the fan is distracting". There are those who deliberately turn on white noise devices as a sleep aid, in fact.

Re:

[CTalkobt]

>> I like the hard drive noises. Lets be honest here, they are soft clicks and chirps, not chainsaw noises. It gives me a non-visual feel of what the computer's up to.

I can see it now - someone will come out with a driver for people like yourselves that insist on having more noise in their environment. I'll then be tortured by sounds of car engines taking off, "That's my hard drive sound driver - cool huh?", birds tweating and for the joker in the crowd, a huge burp or fart sound as the drive spins up

Re:

[Wellington Grey]

I can see it now - someone will come out with a driver for people like yourselves that insist on having more noise in their environment. I'll then be tortured by sounds of car engines taking off, "That's my hard drive sound driver - cool huh?", birds tweating and for the joker in the crowd, a huge burp or fart sound as the drive spins up.

Calm down, dude. How did you jump from my appreciation of slight clicking noises on my computer to 'insisting' on noise to torture you?

-Grey [silverclipboard.com]

Re:I like it.

[MrNaz]

Oh Slashdot, unfounded conclusions and ridiculous extrapolation of benign ideas into cultish plans to consume the still warm corpses of children get you a +5.

Re:

[rcw-home]

I can see it now - someone will come out with a driver for people like yourselves that insist on having more noise in their environment.

Well, if you're trying to fall asleep, pink noise isn't bad (it sounds just like a waterfall):

sox -t nul /dev/zero -t ossdsp /dev/dsp synth whitenoise lowpass 100

("-t alsa default" if you're using ALSA)

Re:I like it.

[Aeternitas827]

You mean, it's not supposed to sound like a chainsaw? Might could be my problem... Either way, nothing compares to modem noise. It's the only reason I miss dialup.

Re:I like it.

[eyrieowl]

you have apparently forgotten the joys of the dot matrix printer [theuser.org].

Re:

[Peet42]

What about the "unihammer" printer, such as the Seikosha GP80-A? It's the only printer I've owned where my downstairs neighbour knocked on the door and asked me to stop printing...

Re:

[faragon]

[fucking possible patent by prior act: on]

No problem, let's go program "hard disk comfort noise" as done in crystal-clear audio communications!!

Re:

[jgrahn]

I like the hard drive noises. Lets be honest here, they are soft clicks and chirps, not chainsaw noises.

Older hard drives were often noisy, and probably some models still are. I had one where R/W sounded like someone trampling broken glass and metal. IIRC, the Seagate Barracuda was my first drive which I couldn't easily hear working.

Re:I like it.

[Gordonjcp]

I've got a circa-1986 DEC PDP11/73 with a couple of 40M hard disks that are surprisingly quiet - in fact, thanks to the proliferation of tiny high-speed fans (as opposed to the 4" low-revving fans the PDP11 has) my PC is louder than the whole PDP11 rack. Except, of course, when you fire up the RL02s.

Oh yes. Here we have a 10M removable disk pack about the size of a kitchen bin lid, driven by something the size of a washing machine motor, with the heads mounted on a pint glass-sized voice coil positioner. The drives aren't that noisy when spinning up (well, one is but that's because a motor bearing is a bit dry - some servicing needed). When you actually get them going, they make a satisfyingly chunky "gweep thock gweep gweep thock gweeeeeep ka-thunk" noise. If you don't have the sound-deadening rubber feet screwed down, but just leave the rack standing on its solid castors, the noise is conducted into the floor and is loud enough to upset the downstairs neighbours.

Re:

[arivanov]

Depends on your hard drive settings. While most laptops BIOS-es and OS-es in laptop mode enable APM and spindown, but they do not touch the acoustic management settings.

On some drives this makes a hell of a difference. For example my home server from sounding like a machine gun fight went to barely audible. OK, granted it also got much slower, but you can now work in its immediate vicinity. Before it was practically impossible. Too distracting. Similarly, the acoustic management settings made a considerabl

Re:I like it.

[wfberg]

You really notice the lack of noises when you're logged on to some system remotely using a GUI. Double click something, and if there's no immediate reaction (or hourglass..) the system seems unresponsive. If you were sitting at the machine, you'd hear buzzing and whirring as *something* happens in the background. If I were marketing nifty thinnish-client solutions, I'd make sure there's always some sort of activity indicator (CPU, disk, ..) on the screen, so the system seems as responsive as a local client.

Re:

[LinuxDon]

In my experience, the system actually feels more responsive when there isn't a rattling noise of a harddisk filling up to wait times.

Re:

[doti]

I also like the sound of the disk activity, but not the constant sound of the spinning.

Re:

[catwh0re]

I used to have a system with a hdd activity led. It was useful in the old days of DOS or Windows 3.1 when a sudden freeze could be attributed to either HD activity or a crash. Overtime I got used to not having that LED to diagnose if there was a system fault, but instead by hearing the noise of the HDD activity (which in a way is similar to how I change gears in a car.)

Not having either of these anymore doesn't really discourage me, because HDDs seem to be constantly buzzing these days between caching, pre-

Re:

[MttJocy]

Human beings are invariably tactile beings, who rely very heavily on our senses so that when we take some action in our environment our brain relies on sensory data to mediate that action, something our technology also needs to replicate in order to suit the beings whom it is intended to be used by.

This is one of the reasons why a completely flat keyboard like some of those roll up models tend to be a pain to type on when using a normal keyboard you get both the physical sensation of the key depression itse

Flash drive longevity?

[mlts]

With this shift to Flash drives for data storage, I wonder if this is good or bad for data archival. With magnetic media, if there is a head crash, at least some data can be recovered. With flash, even though it has no moving parts, if something happens to make a large amount of blocks unreadable, there isn't any real way to recover the lost data.

Re:Flash drive longevity?

[gradedcheese]

Technically, they don't really become unreadable, there's just an uncorrectable bit flip or two (out of say, 128KB) and that block gets marked "bad" and then it's not used anymore. Whatever data it contained is still there though, and you could read it if you wanted to. That said, on an SSD there is an onboard controller that abstracts away the Flash itself, so I suppose that it might not provide any interface to reading "bad" blocks, other than that there's really nothing stopping you.

Re:Flash drive longevity?

[TheRaven64]

With a hard disk, a lot of bad sectors typically means that a bit of dust or similar has got inside, or the disk head is slightly damaged. Both of these will cause the rest of the drive to fail quite quickly, so once you get a few bad sectors it's worth replacing. With a flash drive, the cells are basically independent. With perfect wear levelling (which doesn't exist), then one cell failing means that the rest will all fail soon (assuming all were manufactured to exactly the same tolerances, which is also not true). In real-world usage, a flash drive will wear out quite gradually (over a period of a hundred years for half-decent modern flash). The only user-visible change will be that the capacity gradually diminishes.

Re:

[TClevenger]

Depending on how the drive is used. If you have a flash drive 95% full and unchanging, won't the other 1% get killed pretty quickly, even with wear levelling?

Re:

[TheRaven64]

No. Good wear levelling will copy some infrequently modified data to the frequently modified cells and change the mapping. If you have 100 cells and modify logical address 99 frequently then after, say, 10 modifications of cell 99 it will swap logical addresses 1 (for example) and 99 around. You will then be repeatedly updating physical cell 1. After a bit, it will swap this with physical cell 2 and so on.

Expert on Trapped Guinea Pigs?

[az1324]

I wonder what sound he makes...

Umm....

[d474]

"Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee."

That's the pr0n your watching, not your hard drive dude.

Re:Umm....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee"

In my native country of Kazhakistan, this offend my mother and my sister. Please to not refer to their private parts with disrespect. I do not disrespect your Cmdr Taco parts. It is golden rule for information technology.

Re:

[LordVader717]

Brainstorm - Show pr0n while computer boots up to pass the time.

Re:

[kvezach]

That's the pr0n your watching, not your hard drive dude.

Sounds like this article should be called The Joy of the Flesh Drive.

One Major Disadvantage, however...

[MBC1977]

However, unless I'm wrong a distinctive disadvantage of a solid state drive (i.e. flash drives are slower (at least currently) than their magnetic disk counterparts). Granted for some that won't be a big deal, but if your working with audio / video applications or playing games, it defintely will suck big time.

Re:

[MrNaz]

SSDs are *not* slower than mag platter drives. Get one and try it before firing your mouth off, private!

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[asuffield]

Flash media is considerably slower than hard drive media at the same price point. This is mainly due to economies of scale: there is a huge demand for low cost, moderately high performance desktop and laptop hard drives, while the demand for flash is for dirt cheap, low performance usb fobs. This is likely to change over time, but it will take years. Production methods for low unit-cost, high performance flash chips have to be developed, fab plants have to be built, all the usual problems.

Flash media (NAND-gate type) is fundamentally slower than hard drives for sustained serial write behaviour, where the seek penalty does not apply. This is not likely to change, since performance for both technologies should increase at roughly the same rate; so long as NAND-gate technology is the best we have, hard drives are still going to be around for those workloads that need that kind of thing (various forms of audio/video work, some database stuff, scientific applications). It's faster for the other major operating modes (all read modes, random-access-write, latency, etcetera), so is likely to give overall better performance for desktop computing workloads. There are experimental technologies in the labs that can outperform hard drives in the sustained serial write mode, but those aren't on the market yet, and may never be. They've been promising us MRAM for twenty years now, and still haven't come up with a product.

Limitations in current flash products mean that everything on the market is also slower than hard drives in the random-access-write mode. That's a problem with a known solution, there just isn't anything on the market that does it yet. This should change in the next generation or two.

Re:

[Fweeky]

Flash media (NAND-gate type) is fundamentally slower than hard drives for sustained serial write behaviour

And, er, random writes. You're lucky to get 20/sec because every little write ends up in a read-modify-write of a 4MB block or so.

The upcoming solution to this seems to be to turn random writes into serial ones; presumably buffering up writes in battery backed up memory.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[asuffield]

The problem is actually erase time - writing data to an erased block is fast (although not as fast as writing to a hard drive sector that is already under the write head), but erasing it ready for writing is extremely slow. The upcoming solution is to maintain a buffer of pre-erased blocks ahead of time; this is somewhat tricky to implement because it means data has to keep moving around the chip (a series of random writes to the same logical address has to be remapped so that it actually writes to a different physical block each time). There is no difficulty with erasing blocks in parallel, so it is merely a problem of managing all this, not a performance limitation of the underlying technology.

Also, the block sizes in the current generation of technology are too large. This is merely a production problem, which should go away in a generation or two.

Simply put: writing to a hard drive sector is faster than writing to a flash block, which is much faster than seeking to a hard drive sector, which is much faster than erasing a flash block. This part is unlikely to change. The other flaws in current flash products are likely to change.

Re:

[jamesh]

Maybe he meant overall performance (read and write)? Or does an SSD have better write times than a mag disk these days (assuming an equivalently priced disk eg 15K)?

The thing I'll miss when mag drives are obsolete is being able to listen to the head movement pattern and being able to tell people that their computer is running slow because the disk is failing...

Re:

[Keeper]

You do realize that the speed of the drive isn't limited to the speed of a single chip, right? You know, they can wire the things up in parallel...

Re:

[catch23]

Well new tech is always paid at premium. When LCD monitors first came out, even the largest 22" CRT monitors were cheaper than the smallest sized LCDs. I'm sure when SSD manufacturing scales to the level of platter-based HDDs, the cost won't be prohibitively expensive. BTW, typical "fast" CF cards are now 266x, which is around 20Mb/s. SSDs are around 70Mb/s.

Re:

[TheRaven64]

It depends on the workload. With a 512-byte block size and a 9ms seek time then a hard drive will get 56KB/s for a seek-intensive workload. A good drive with a 4.5ms seek time will get a whooping 112KB/s, or around 222 I/O operations per second. Even a cheap flash drive can get significantly more than this. In terms of sustained linear read speed, expensive flash drives are now around the same speed as cheap hard drives (better than the cheapest ones, but not much). Most workloads consist of a mixture

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[Daniel Phillips]

There are only two advantages spinning disks have over flash drives at the moment:

    1) Density (disk about 4 times more capacity in same form factor)
    2) Cost (disk more than 10 times cheaper for same capacity)

I expect flash to close the gap on density, but not necessarily on cost. However the cost of flash will ramp down low enough that if capacity is not your main objective then goodbye rotating media. In about 3 years more flash drives than disks will ship in laptops. For bulk storage, expect disk to stay cheaper per gig than flash for the next long time.

64 gig

[sleeponthemic]

Ought to be enough for anybody

Maybe...

[Perseid]

"Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee."

Maybe some gangsta rap MP3s got on his computer...

Flash drives sure have come a long way

[tsa]

I remember when I had a Commodore 64, about 24 years ago, and solid state drives were 'just around the corner'. They have been lurking there for a VERY long time, but finally they arrived! I can't wait to get my hands on one. The next thing to emerge is Linux for the masses, which has been around the corner for about 12 years, if not longer. I'm very optimistic about that since the Eee PC turned out to be such a huge success last year. The future looks bright!

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[MichaelSmith]

I remember when I had a Commodore 64, about 24 years ago, and solid state drives were 'just around the corner'. They have been lurking there for a VERY long time, but finally they arrived! I can't wait to get my hands on one. The next thing to emerge is Linux for the masses, which has been around the corner for about 12 years, if not longer. I'm very optimistic about that since the Eee PC turned out to be such a huge success last year. The future looks bright!

Because it is quiet, my eee feels like a return to my very first 6502 basic-in-rom system. Until I started using an SSD I didn't realise how much time I spent waiting for my application to get a turn at the disk. The lack of a bottleneck is amazing.

Re:

[Gazzonyx]

Just wondering, are you using the SSD for swap space?

I imagine that's where it really starts to shine; when you're already in trouble and start paging (or swapping - I never know which is correct anymore. I always thought you paged out to swap, but everyone seems to be calling it swapping now) out to swap, you don't incur the extra several ms delay for rotational latency and perhaps a seek, as well. My only concern would be the number of write cycles if you start thrashing fairly hard.

I just realized y

Re:

[MichaelSmith]

Just wondering, are you using the SSD for swap space?

No idea. For once in my life I am running a 100% stock linux system, totally out of the box (which I still have). Everybody I show it to wants one.

I don't know about the disk scheduler. If you can tell me how to check I will take a look when I am back home later in the week and post the results.

Re:

[Gazzonyx]

If you know which drive it is (sda or sdb most likely... fill in for X below) you can find out from the command line:

cat /sys/block/sdX/queue/scheduler

Re:

[Gazzonyx]

Well, I think that the noop scheduler/elevator should yield the best performance. It has the least overhead, and the scheduling overhead for deadline and cfq are trade offs for optimizing a read head. The anticipatory scheduler adds a 1ms delay, but very little in the way of processing overhead. I'm just wondering how much performance could be yielded if all the various disk scheduling (read ahead, write behind, delays for queues, read and write starving, etc.) code is going to go the way of the... erm,

Re:

[Fred_A]

I remember when I had a Commodore 64, about 24 years ago, and solid state drives were 'just around the corner'.

I also seem to remember they were supposed to use "bubble memory", whatever that was supposed to be. And for just a few thousands of dollars you could have your very own 10 meg solid state disk drive "real soon now"...
Those who started saving back then must have amassed a fortune by now.

Re:

[Sheepy]

dK'Tronics [wikipedia.org] released a silicon disc for the Amstrad CPC [wikipedia.org] which could be used as either a memory expansion [cpcwiki.com] or as a solid state drive [amstradcg.nl].

Who cares about the HD noise

[AmigaHeretic]

When you have that Intel chip that needs a fan that sounds like the Swamp Boat from the WaterBoy movie with Adam Sandler.


Every time I turn on my laptop and I hear the fan spin to life I think of that swamp boat and I can hear,

"My Mama says that alligators are ornery because they got all them teeth and no toothbrush."

"Wrong! Alligators are aggressive because of an enlarged medulla oblongata."

"No, Colonel Sanders, you're wrong. You're all wrong. Mama's right. Mama's right!"

"Somethin' wrong with his medulla oblongata."

Re:

[DigitAl56K]

I agree to an extent, but Intel does have to be given some credit for the Core 2 Duo's. Until my most recent custom-build PC all of my boxes have been powerful but noisy. Then the Core 2 Duo came along and promised up to 40% better performance than comparably clocked chips from AMD/Intel's older lines, and they also ran much cooler. I snapped up one of the cheapest models and stuck a Thermaltake Big Tyhoon on it (the original model, not the one with the speed control dial which spins up intermittently, maki

Re:

[megaditto]

Lapton in one's bed? That's a joke, right?

Re:

[CCFreak2K]

Not exactly an objective comparison, but my Dell Inspiron with a Celeron-M under the hood emits less heat and fan noise than my Averatec with an Athlon XP-M.

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN]

``When you have that Intel chip that needs a fan that sounds like the Swamp Boat from the WaterBoy movie with Adam Sandler. ''

I have an idea! Maybe the people who care about hd noise _don't_ have Intel chips that need a fan that sounds like the Swamp Boat from the WaterBoy movie with Adam Sandler!

Re:

[JamesTRexx]

Something is seriously busted.

"You must be new here."

(Somebody had to say it...)

You can make quiet laptops with conventional HDs

[93 Escort Wagon]

My old Dell Inspiron was pretty noisy - mainly the cooling fan - but so far the Macs I've owned have been very quiet. My Powerbook's fan didn't come on all that often; when it did the sound was rather high-pitched, but not loud. This Macbook Pro, though, is extremely quiet. I have to really be pushing it to hear the fans come on at all - that doesn't happen more than once every couple of days.

In any case it's hard to understand how anyone could be put out by hard drive noise on a laptop. Certainly I've hear

Building your own Solid State Drive

[badzilla]

I saw this link via The Inquirer - how to build your own from a bunch of RAIDed CF cards.

Assemble a SSD disk for less than 75 Euro
http://www.guru3d.com/article/memory/506 [guru3d.com]

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

DIY Compact flash in RAID good for 133MB/s

[distantbody]

...There is a pci card [addonics.com] available that will take four CF cards and RAID-0 'em into a single drive. I was going to get it myself, but I slightly resented the poky pci bus at 133MB/s. In the future if they made one with 8 CF slots and put it onto a pci-e bus, I could then use 8 40MB/s CF cards in RAID-0 to make a single flash drive with 320MB/s on tap. That's a sweet-sweet prospect, but as yet they haven't made such a product.

As a T42 owner...

[c.r.o.c.o]

I agree that the 40Gb 5400rpm Hitachi hdd it came with is LOUD. It clicks and grinds whenever there is any disk activity. However I upgraded to a Seagate 80Gb 5400rpm Seagate drive, and it's absolutely silent. I've also had Toshiba hdds in my other laptops, and they were silent as well.

I don't completely disagree with the reviewer. Solid state drives are faster, consume less battery, etc. But they are a LOT more expensive and are not necessarily less noisy. It's just a matter of buying a decent hdd.

FYI

[v(*_*)vvvv]

I've been looking for Flash drives for a while now, and it seems the best option at the moment perfomance wise is the Mtron Pro series at 120Mb/sec. But 32 gigs will cost you 1129 [rocketdisk.com].

Which is why I wonder how Dell and Apple and everyone else can provide 64 gig SSD options for their notebooks for less than 1000 dollars. None of the brands had any info on the specs of the drives easily locatable, and I am worried these are the low end SSDs that are much much slower... which is a shame, because performance driven users would probably prefer better drives even for an extra 500 to 1000 dollars.

Later this year Intel is suppose to release 200Mb/sec 80G drives [google.com], which is really the only reason I haven't gotten one yet, but I have yet to find any info on pricing.

Re:

[Mike1024]

I wonder how Dell and Apple and everyone else can provide 64 gig SSD options for their notebooks for less than 1000 dollars. None of the brands had any info on the specs of the drives easily locatable, and I am worried these are the low end SSDs that are much much slower

Well, one option is economies of scale - Apple could get 1,000 SSDs at $1,000 (total $1,000,000) but it's unlikely 'Rocketdisk' has that much spare cash to spend. Rocketdisk might keep 5 in stock at $2,000 (total $10,000). Also, if SSD supplies are limited Apple and Dell and IBM might be buying up the entire supply - big contracts tend to get preferential treatment compared to small contracts, for obvious reasons.

Fortunately, you don't have to worry about not knowing the performance of these SSDs because t

First off...

[Talgrath]

How the fuck is this news? Second off: Yeah, the clicking can be annoying; but I'm pretty sure they didn't put that in there just to tell your drive is working. It's a part of accessing the drive memory.

Bad Experiences with Flash

[RAMMS+EIN]

I don't have experiences with actual flash drives, but I tried running my Linux system off flash cards. It was horrible. The system used an USB flash card reader (or two, probably), a 1 GB card for the root partition, and an 8 GB card for /home. Both of these were pretty high speed MMC cards.

I had expected the system to be snappy, because I mostly perform many reads on small files. Flash memory has low seek times, right? Well, the system was noticeably slower running from flash than it had been running from

Re:

[pembo13]

There are several optimizations that would should do when running Linux, esp. a full non slimmed down distro, on a Flash card. The easiest thing to do would be to do just check out what the OLPC guys have done.

Re:

[flux]

I've personally had good experience with a flash-based root file system, but I implemented it with a ide-CF adapter. I picked a bit too slow card for the root, though, but the point of the device is to provide the contents of 4 hard drivers software-raid5'd over the network, so it isn't such a big deal. I don't have swap in the machine.

I've earlier set up a box to boot from a ide-flash device, while the actual root file system was on LVM. It worked nicely too.

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN]

``I've personally had good experience with a flash-based root file system, but I implemented it with a ide-CF adapter.''

I am thinking of trying that, too. It works reliably, right?

Re:

[KokorHekkus]

The number of limited write cycles is not a problem on flash SSD because they've been designed to use wear levelling. There are several ways to implement this but one example would be to just keep track of the number of writes to each physical block on the drive. When a certain number of writes is reached on a block the drive swaps the that block gets swapped with one of the least used ones. This of course occurs on a drive level so the user never notices it. So you get pretty much an uniform amount of wear

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN]

This is not about wear, as far as I know. The flash cards work fine. It's just that Linux starts giving I/O errors after some time. Reboot the system and all is fine again. I think there is a software limit somewhere.

Some tips...

[woolio]

Did you put your swap partition, /tmp, /var/log, or /var/tmp areas on the flash disk? That would be a good way to kill it quickly...

Also installing/running something like Gentoo on flash wouldn't be pretty...

There is also a "noatime" option to filesystem mounts that prevents the filesystem from being modified on every *read*.

Bee bop bap

[Sobieski]

Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip.

Im the Scatman!

Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee.

Didn't catch that.

[stimpleton]

"Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee.

How's that go again?

My wierd setup - mp3 player attached to laptop

[saigon_from_europe]

My old laptop had quite typical HD, but still quite noisy if you work at night while all background house noises are gone. So if I wanted to listen mp3, instead to listen if from the HD, I would attach my mp3 player to an USB slot, and then plugged headphones to the laptop. I could use the mp3 player directly, but this way I did not have to worry about batteries. (And Winamp is a better mechanism to control your playlists than player's internal software.)

Re:

[Peet42]

Fifteen years ago, when I was a computer engineer, I could switch on a laptop with a dead screen and from the noises the hard drive made I could tell if the machine was otherwise healthy, what the OS was and whether or not it had an anti-virus installed. When you can't see the screen it becomes important to know at what point it's safe to power down the machine...

Re:

[waterbear]

Yes: I've always wondered what Windows 2000 and upwards is doing when it grinds the disk so much on startup.

On or two linux distros also seem to have much more disk access than others:

What's all this for, besides prematurely wearing out the disk?

-wb-

Re:

[vidarh]

You assume incorrectly. Back in the 80's there might've been some truth to it. The typical limit today is 1m+ erase cycles (not writes) per erase unit, and a typical large flash units will have many thousand erase units. With a reasonably sized modern unit with proper wear leveling you can write tens of MB/s sustained for more than a decade and still not start seeing failures due to wear. That's without the system keeping a reserve to remap failing units.