Flash Drives in Future Apple Laptops? 353
danscript writes "Samsung hopes that falling prices for flash-memory chips will mean solid-state memory can eventually replace hard-disk drives in Apple PowerBooks and iBooks as well as other devices, Macworld UK is reporting. The benefits? - silent; less power; reliable and faster."
Flash (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Flash (Score:5, Interesting)
IIRC the numbers are good enough that they would probably live as long if not longer than your average laptop HDDs
Re:Flash (Score:5, Funny)
the only people who might possibly run into the write limit would be Gentoo users...
the number of writes is 10,000... (Score:5, Informative)
You must wear level, so the real life of the drive is basically 10,000*num sectors writes. A sector is 128KB or so, depending on the flash type.
This seems like a lot until you realize that often you write sectors over and over. Also, due to the large sector/page size of flash, you end up doing multiple writes when you think you are doing a single one. For example, if you write to a file in 4 chunks, 32K at a time, it uses up 4 of your writes. It might be possible to remove this with intelligent caching, but you're gonna need a lot of RAM for the caching.
Honestly, this is just an idea that isn't ready yet. Flash is too slow to write right now. The life is decent. Reads work well.
Re:the number of writes is 10,000... (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought flash was slow, too, but then I reconsidered. Since I only ever use flash over a USB connection, I assumed it was the flash that was slow, when it might have been the connection.
Anyone used flash on anything but USB? Not sure what native speed would be...
Re:the number of writes is 10,000... (Score:4, Interesting)
That is interesting. I know modern CF cards employ wear levelling within the cards themselves, but I was previously leaning on BSD's soft-updates and noatime to prolong to life of the CF cards in a few servers and firewalls. Maybe some slices should also have FFS file systems with a 128kb block size to limit any block to no more than one file. I'm off to see if FFS in OpenBSD can use a block size of 128kb. Assuming this would actually cause 128kb block sized writes?
Honestly, this is just an idea that isn't ready yet. Flash is too slow to write right now. The life is decent. Reads work well.
Yes I must say that I find the high speed flash cards I use, which are directly plugged into my motherboards IDE controllers via passive IDE-CF converters (no electronics, just different connectors at either ends of the converters), are slow to write.
I have Lexar Pro series 80X CF's and San Disk Ultra II CF's. The Lexar's are WAY faster than the San Disk's BTW. But still they're pretty slow. I use them in Sun Ultra 10's and 5's, which have really slow IDE interfaces, but the CF's are slower than these and are also slow in various PC's I've tried them in.
Here I have written 64Mb to a San Disk Ultra II, first with 64kb chunks and then with 128kb. I did this because I usually use 64kb chunks and thought that 128kb would be faster for CF. Turned out to not be so, unless dd is writing 128kb chunks but the writes are being committed to the file system at no greater than the filesystems block size at a time.
The two last dd's are the same thing but being written to a 120GB Seagate 7200 RPM PATA drive. Both the CF and HDD are directly connected to the on board IDE controllers of a Sun Ultra 10, each seperately as masters without slaves.
The IDE controllers on Sun Ultra 5/10 motherboards are garbage BTW. They can get the best out of the CF cards I have, but certainly not the Seagate HDD, which does about 2-3 times better transfer rates in some of my PC's.
I feel compelled now to do these tests again but to raw devices instead of to files within a filesystem. If the results were that 128kb block size filesystem is likely to be many times faster than a filesystem with much smaller blocks, I might be inclined to build filesystems with 128kb blocks on my CF based machines. But I think I would be limited to 1024 files on a 128Mb slice. Which might not be workable.
Re:the number of writes is 10,000... (Score:5, Interesting)
Flash can be *very* fast. Remember, you can interleave many flash chips using RAID-like techniques without the cost of having multiple disk assemblies.
Re:the number of writes is 10,000... (Score:3, Informative)
Note that they use the same memory chips inside the cards, just as SCSI and IDE hard drives are often the same inside but having a good interface can make all the difference.
There is a reason the solid state video cameras use SD cards over C
Re:the number of writes is 10,000... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Flash (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Flash (Score:2)
But i think the numbers are for complete write
Re:Flash (Score:3, Informative)
The wear leveling works by keeping a table of what physical flash is mapped to what address. The trouble comes when power is yanked whilst the table is in the middle of an update.
Brett
Re:Flash (Score:3, Informative)
Brett
Re:Flash (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Flash (Score:5, Informative)
The flash is broken up into Erase Units, which as the name suggests is the smallest block you can erase at any one time. IDE hard disks have a small fixed sectorsize of 512 bytes, smaller than one EU.
Imagine a 12KB flash with a 2KB Erase Unit and 6 units. One of these is bad - this can seen by the absence of a metadata signature for example.
You could use this as an IDE disk with 6KB capacity, since some of the erase units needs to be spare at all times.
Each EU can hold 3 IDE sectors, some metadata including the signature, and then 3 integers saying which logical block the physical block holds.
The EU starts off erased, all ones. Let's write a fileystem,Now imagine we need to update sector 1. We can use one of the spare blocks to store the data. The old copy can be left, but marked as unused by setting its lookup table entry to 0 - programming all the remaining bits.Now imagine that you need to write the next two blocks, 2 and 3. That way all the blocks in the first EU will be obsolete, and you can erase it.If you're not lucky enough to get all the blocks written at any one time, you need to compact by copying the block with the most obsolete blocks into one of the spare EU's. Obvously you can skip the obsolete blocks - you just copy the ones that are used and mark the rest as spare.
So far I've talked about one lookup table, the one in the flash which gives you the logical block which each physical block contains. This is the inverse of the lookup table you want for reading an arbitrary block, but this inverseness gives it the useful property that it only needs to be updated only once per erase cycle - some of the bits in an entry are programmed when the block is written, and the rest are programmed when the data becomes obsolete.
If you want to read logical block N, it's useful to have another lookup table which gives you the mapping logical block to physical block. This will need to be updated a lot - once for each write of a block. But it can be generated from the lookup table in the flash at insertion time, and kept in Ram.
There are some corner cases obviously - like the bad bits in the metadata area or whole EU's going bad, but there's usually a fair bit of space in an EU for metadata, and a reasonable number of spare EUs. Plus, if the flash has always been used like this, the bits should all wear out at the same time, which is obviously not something you can work around. But the trick to avoiding the problem you mention is to store an _inverted_ lookup table on the flash.
Re:Flash (Score:2)
Seriously, that was the first thing that came to mind. TFA claims that flash memory is "more robust" than hard drives -- that may be true in the sense that a flash chip can take more physical shock than a hard drive and still keep its data, but it definitely wasn't true in terms of capacity for repeated use, last time I checked. Has this changed recently? I mean, I'd absolutely love it if HD's could be replaced by flash memory with similar durability, but I'll take some convincing before I believe i
Re:Flash (Score:3, Interesting)
My impression is that the speed of USB thumb drives and hard drives is about equiva
Re:Flash (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Flash (Score:2)
Re:Flash (Score:5, Insightful)
...at sequential reading. Wanna run the same test with bonnie++ or another benchmark that slams the drive with random accesses? I'll bet the near-zero seek penalty on solid state media makes up for quite a bit of its currently mediocre sequential access.
Imagine a database where you're writing millions of tiny blocks of data all over the place. Within reason, fast seeks are about as important as fast IO.
Re:Flash (Score:3, Informative)
depends on your flash drive (Score:3, Informative)
i guess if you have the buffer of internal memory in your camera, you will not notice. so the cheaper, slower flash cards are effectively the same.
Re:Flash (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article: The SSD's performance rate exceeds that of a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 percent. The storage disk reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps.
A reliable drive, at 40+ GB sizes, with that kind of performance would be great for laptops.. Silent operation, low power usage, potentially more resiliant (no head
Re:Flash (Score:2)
Most users just don't need to write local files that often. They email, chat, and browse the web. Sometimes they install a free game or a whole lot of m
Re:Flash (Score:2)
Re:Flash (Score:2)
It's not USB that's the problem (although, that IS with a different chipset on the drive end. The FAIR comparison would be to use a CF to IDE adaptor, and benchmark a high-speed CF card versus an IDE HDD in a USB HDD enclosure.
Re:Flash (Score:3, Funny)
Gordon's alive!!!
Won't Happen (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Won't Happen (Score:2)
Yeah. Because that's exactly how it worked with the leak of the PowerMac G5, Tiger, the switch to Intel chips.
Retard.
Re:Won't Happen (Score:2)
Yeah. Because that's exactly how it worked with the leak of the PowerMac G5, Tiger, the switch to Intel chips.
No No you misuderstood. Someone leaked that they were NOT going to swich to intel so they had to
Re:Won't Happen (Score:3, Funny)
Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasn't new then and it isn't new now. Is it time? Sure. It's long overdue and I'd love to see solid state drives suddenly become financially feasable.
I doubt it's going to happen though because it seems like the cost of the magnetic materials used in disc platters will always be low and a solid state memory cell (flash, ram, eeprom, whatever) takes a couple transistors. The price of both drops, but hard drive price per GB (or MB, TB, whatever) always drops faster because of the lower transistor count.
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
LPT ports are still used for printers , serial ports still come as standard on most motherboards
I think the principle advantage is in the power consumption for laptops, Batteries are really expensive , if you use your Laptop on the road a lot then it has two principle advantages , lower power consumption and its far far more robust to damage due to things like dropping
In this field of the ultra compact laptops i would say that the Power consumption and durability will outweigh the per GB cost
If the write/erase cycles are now within the realms that samsung is considering offering these drives for commercial sale then i would defiantly want one in my laptop , i could easily cope with 15GB on a portable device for work.
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:3, Informative)
I deal with so much equipment that has a life cycle in the 30+ years that it's just amazing by comparison. So in another 10 years when more long lived technology has died off we might see the end of serial, but there is simply too much non-pc equipment in the world to do away with it.
Nearly every electronic requires a serial port or some form there of.
It's slow, clunky and definatelynot the newest thing, but it's a good standard and far too many things in this worl
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:2)
Most people have no use for the ports these days i would imagine, in several fields they are useful because of legacy equipment( i have a couple of ruggedised network test handhelds which require serial)
So i agree it is not dead , but it certainly is becoming less relevant (iirc you can pick up fairly good Serial to USB converters fairly cheaply as well) but its defiantly a niche
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, you might be thinking of bubble memory... which was going to be the next big thing in the early 80's. Still waiting on that one.
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:3, Funny)
Still keeps me up some nights.
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:5, Informative)
With all the advances that IDE has taken, it is still a simple interface, not a disk controller.
Hard cards didn't last long, but they're an important mutation in the evolution of the modern PC.
-Peter
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:3, Interesting)
Around the same time I also fell into a computer that used bubble memory. It was a GRiD Compass. I remember being amazed that I could unplug it and it would remember my word processing documents for months and months with no power. Back then, this was a big deal.
As an aside, the GRiD also had a label silk screened on the bottom of it listing the nine
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:2)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1161463,00.a
I believe Quantum purchased them.
blakespot
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:2)
I O I E T U A
H S R N I B R
T T W W BLE
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't to say that solid state drives won't become popular. If I can get a 80GB solid state drive for the price of a standard 400GB HD, I'd go for it. I think this is exactly what'll happen. As capacity grows, it becomes less and less important for people to have the largest HD on the market. Sure, many people have the need for large drives (video editing, pr0n, etc.), but most can do just fine with tenth th
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:3, Insightful)
Samsung to release 16GB IDE flash drive in august [betanews.com].
I want them in my servers.
Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets (Score:2)
The "hard cards" available at Radio Shack were ISA cards that had standard magnetic media on them. They were basically an integrated RLL (or MFM, I don't recall) and hard drive all in one clean upgrade kit.
faster writes? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:faster writes? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:faster writes? (Score:5, Informative)
Flash memory has to be erased before it can be written and has an inherent minimum erase block size. This has made designers put some write buffering in the card (at least in the older PC Card devices, which afaik are just bigger versions of CF cards). That write buffering is one layer of caching, then there can be additional layers of read and write caching in the driver.
Generally those caches improve normal use of the device, but in cases like yours you blow right through all those caches since you're rewriting the whole card.
btw, that caching is why you have to tell Windows to eject the device before you pull it out. Your write might not have actually finished even though you can do other things to the drive in Explorer.
Re:faster writes? (Score:2)
i doubt hard disk will be able to cope with the speed of electronic components. Look at the progress of the speed of the PC components: CPUs have double their speed lots of times, but hard disk speed has not been increased a lot, which is THE major slowdown you can find in today's PCs.
This is because the hard disk is the one "mechanical" component remaining on today's computers, and some day it'll have to go away. har disks are not that fast, my UDMA 133 disk can do 40 MB/s in sequential reads,
More like instant boot (Score:2)
It's been something I've wanted for years. Flash is now cheap enough to use as a secondary storage/boot drive. So why not?
Re:faster writes? (Score:2)
Reliable? Don't think so. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Reliable? Don't think so. (Score:3, Informative)
>5,000,000 Write/Erase cycles, unlimited Read
http://www.m-systems.com/content/Products/product
Server for Showgirls (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Reliable? Don't think so. (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, its possible for a hard drive to have a lot of writes. Log files, swap space, patches, virus patch updates, etc. A lot of writes happen on modern computers. I've even read articles about people booting computers with flash memory as routers but they had to make sure
Re:Reliable? Don't think so. (Score:5, Informative)
What are you doing on
but seriously, prior to wear leveling (ie: antique 32MB cards, early controllers/drivers etc..) this was a valid statement, however cards back then only had 10k or fewer rewrite cycles. the rewrite cycles have gone up 10 fold, and wear leveling makes sure that data that is 'rewritten' is actually written on a portion of the disc that was previously determined to be a low write, freely alloctabale block, and they always keep spare low write sectors available. it's even possible for a hard drive such as this to Warn users of impending drive failure. BTW when a block on a 'flash' based drive 'fails' it falls back into read only mode. only the data it attempted to write must now be written somewhere else.
Also, to get back on track the MTBF for most platter based hard drives is something along the lines of 50,0000 hours for a really top notch drive, reading/writing the entire disc will on average take ~2 hours, requardless of capacity, because that's how long it takes the data heads to travel the entire platter surface area... so statistically, you have 25k write cycles before failure on a conventional hard drive. so how is that inferior to flash memory? and remember, this is APPLE Macintosh running of a FreeBSD derived kernel. put the right amount of ram in the laptop, and it will _never_ use swap space.
Data recovery? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Data recovery? (Score:2)
Re:Data recovery? (Score:2, Informative)
extra bonus (Score:4, Funny)
Re:extra bonus (Score:5, Funny)
you're obviously a Windows user.
Re:extra bonus (Score:2)
Re:extra bonus (Score:3, Funny)
Has MRAM finally arrived?!? (Score:2, Informative)
The drives are also typically lighter and can read and write data faster than conventional drives.
AFAIK, flash memory reads data faster than a hard drive, but writing is slow as hell because of the long block erase cycles,
does samsung have a new technology for flash chips? :-D
or do they eventually use MRAMs?
Flash Buffer (Score:2, Interesting)
Silence is golden, but is flash big enough? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can only hope that Samsung's technology roadmap (16 GB by 2006, 100 GB by 2008) is correct although I wonder how HD technology will have evolved over those same years.
18Gb prototype info here: (Score:5, Informative)
Flash still has lots of room to grow (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm of the opinion that laptops should be as small and energy efficent as possible. I just don't get the point of using them desktop replacements. If you want something as huge and powerful as desktop, buy a friggin' desktop. If you want something portable, buy something portable.
I mean, what's the point of a "portable" computer if you have to plug it in all the time?!
Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow (Score:3, Insightful)
what's the point of a "portable" computer if you have to plug it in all the time?!
I agree that there is always a place for small laptops, but a desktop replacement laptop has many advantages:
Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow (Score:2)
In other words, I think flash drives will succeed in laptops, just not in all of them.
Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow (Score:2)
Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow (Score:2)
Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow (Score:2)
I just don't get the point of using them desktop replacements. If you want something as huge and powerful as desktop, buy a friggin' desktop. If you want something portable, buy something portable.
Or get something that is small, light, portable and close enough to as powerful as a desktop as makes no practical difference.
Consider a laptop that weighs 5 pounds, has a 1.9GHz Pentium M, 2GB of RAM, 120GB of disk space, a DVD burner, WiFi, a 15" high-resolution screen, and runs for 6+ hours on a fully-ch
Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow (Score:2, Interesting)
You take it to work, work 8 hours straight (plugged in), take it home and you're able to continue to work. Easy. And because it's laptop, you can work during your commute as well.
Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow (Score:3, Funny)
Given the complete scarcity of electrical outlets, I'd have to agree with you!
Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow (Score:3, Insightful)
Samsung and Microsoft doing something too (Score:2)
Samsung teams with Microsoft [samsung.com]
Well, of course he wants it to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
So of course "Hwang Chang-Gyu, president and CEO of Samsung's semiconductor business" wants his company's technology to take over from hard drives. That's very different to Apple saying it will happen.
Two drives: one flash, one magnetic (Score:5, Interesting)
Regards
Re:Two drives: one flash, one magnetic (Score:2)
Regards
Flash or SFF drives... (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course. (Score:2)
whats so new about this ? (Score:4, Informative)
M-Systems has been providing fast FLASH based 2.5" laptop drives in the 1 GB to 128 GB range for a while - while they are god awful expensive, they do work very well and I have used them in several mission critical applications. My hope is that Samsung can get the price point down by an order of magnitude (or two)
I thought these were used already... (Score:2)
Uhmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Another solution from Gigabyte (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i =2431&p=5 [anandtech.com]
Basically they just use ordinary DDR and use a pack of batteries to keep the data when the computer is powered down. The batteries have a maximum life of 16 hours. So this is for enthusiasm that leave their computer always on. I wouldn't install an OS on this since in case of long power failre you would loose eveything, but I real
Hey this technology could be usefull at desktop .. (Score:2)
Put most of the filesystem except home, tmp and var to this disk, and using a normal HD for them and t. Should reduce reboot times, and application launch times by a sizable margin. This thing could be usefull for server enviroments too if reliable enough. Its main advantage would be reduction of downtime by being able to get up quicker.
(No V!46R4 jokes plz)
RAM vs Flash vs Optical (Score:2)
Flash technology gives us a chance to gain most of the advantages in that old unmarketable drive. The reusability used to be an issue, but manufacturing processes, as previously stated under this discussion, are refine
Ditch the Victorian storage! (Score:2)
Can't wait for solid state!
Interesting but unlikely... (Score:3, Interesting)
However, one thing I can see Apple doing is giving the user 8-10GB of high speed flash memory to use in tandem with a standard hard drive, in which the user can install the OS and their primary applications. The benefit to this, is that it could make the system faster, while allowing it to conserve power at the same time. (The only time the hard drive is accessed is to either write data, or read user-selected data / secondary applications.)
Flash disks that look like mag disks (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.m-systems.com/Content/Markets/Embedded
As others may have noted, there are different kinds of flash, some that have good write performance, some that have good read performance, and some that have both.
And if you want to pay, you can get an Ultra320 flash disk:
http://www.m-systems.com/Content/Products/product
Re:Flash Memory? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Flash Memory? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Flash Memory? (Score:3, Funny)
Is this something the RAF found out to the detriment of several pilots?
Re:write cycles (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How about both? (Score:2)
Works great; I have ataidle spin down the drive as soon as it boots up, and set the timeout low so that if it has to spin up for something it doesn't run very long. The thing is near silent and do
Re:Who's making 100gb flash drives? (Score:2)
Re:It could be done already (Score:2)
Anyone that has used a 'live' linux CD and been happy could easily put that on a 'current tech' flash card.. with room to spare for data...
If you wanted to run winCE, that would work too.