The Joy of the Flash Drive 332
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I like it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Re:I like it. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I like it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Of course then, you're running another program and just adding to the disk activity.
Re:I like it. (Score:5, Informative)
man iostat
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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. (Score:4, Informative)
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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
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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. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I like it. (Score:5, Funny)
The water-cooled model features sharks which swim around according to the drive activity....
Re:I like it. (Score:5, Informative)
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Duct tape.
Re:I like it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I like it. (Score:4, Insightful)
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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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:I like it. (Score:4, Funny)
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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
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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. (Score:5, Funny)
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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. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I like it. (Score:5, Funny)
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No problem, let's go program "hard disk comfort noise" as done in crystal-clear audio communications!!
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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. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not having either of these anymore doesn't really discourage me, because HDDs seem to be constantly buzzing these days between caching, pre-
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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? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Flash drive longevity? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Flash drive longevity? (Score:4, Informative)
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Expert on Trapped Guinea Pigs? (Score:3, Funny)
Umm.... (Score:5, Funny)
That's the pr0n your watching, not your hard drive dude.
Re:Umm.... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Sounds like this article should be called The Joy of the Flesh Drive.
One Major Disadvantage, however... (Score:2)
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Re:One Major Disadvantage, however... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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...
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Re:One Major Disadvantage, however... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe... (Score:2)
Maybe some gangsta rap MP3s got on his computer...
Flash drives sure have come a long way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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.
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Those who started saving back then must have amassed a fortune by now.
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Who cares about the HD noise (Score:4, Funny)
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."
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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!
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"You must be new here."
(Somebody had to say it...)
You can make quiet laptops with conventional HDs (Score:2)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Assemble a SSD disk for less than 75 Euro
http://www.guru3d.com/article/memory/506 [guru3d.com]
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
DIY Compact flash in RAID good for 133MB/s (Score:3, Interesting)
As a T42 owner... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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... (Score:2)
Bad Experiences with Flash (Score:2)
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
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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.
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I am thinking of trying that, too. It works reliably, right?
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Some tips... (Score:2)
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 (Score:2, Funny)
Didn't catch that. (Score:2)
How's that go again?
My wierd setup - mp3 player attached to laptop (Score:3, Interesting)
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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-
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