Flash Drives replacing hard drives

[pZ|fox]

We all knew it was a matter of time before this would happen. This will definitely make quiet PC lovers extremely happy but there's more to it than that. It makes so much more sense in a mobile environment. It's quite possible that we will all have two drives in the future: a flash drive running our essential data and a traditional drive for storage purposes. In fact, we don't even need a 32 gb drive to do this.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/

 

[Eva_Unit_0]

wow, very cool. It's nice to finally see a REAL solid state hard drive that one could actually just pop into their computer and use. Performance is impressive too...those seek times are crazy, and the I/O performance is absolutely ridiculous.

 

[LstBrunnenG]

Remind me never to buy one from Sandisk should they come out with one. I sent a 128 MB SD card back to them two or three times, and it kept dying on my anyway. I'd hate to have that happen to an entire Windows install .

 

[darkeen]

Hmmmm I can see this taking the laptop market by storm in the next few years with desktops following close by. The average user does not need the terabytes that magnetic media can give you. Saddly I also see rising magnetic drive costs and a shift from mainstream to business/backup use

 

[drizzt81]

Hmmmm I can see this taking the laptop market by storm in the next few years with desktops following close by. The average user does not need the terabytes that magnetic media can give you. Saddly I also see rising magnetic drive costs and a shift from mainstream to business/backup use

The average user will not be willing to spend 4x the money on 1/10th of the space. Most likely the desktop version will be HHDs, i.e. regular harddrives with some flash for non-volatile cache.

BTW.: I think that tom's review is interesting, especially if you look at the variety in his drive selection when you look at the charts. It's hard to find any consistency.

 

[PCduster]

Newegg has an SSD IDE setup made by Transcend that is 8GB and sells for ~320USD(40USD per GB).. A size that you can load XP on... Pretty nifty if you ask me, and I personally would love to have all of my storage in this format, but it would be crazy expensive..

Clicky

Oddly enough, I just created a thread over at EOC about it. I would love to find out more on the performance aspects of it. I could see using one, or two for an OS.

 

[BillParrish]

but it would be crazy expensive..

give it a few more years, I bought 40MB (not GB) hard drives for $199 and was amazed compared to the full height 5MB IBM drive that cost $499 not too awfull long ago. Weelllll guess it was a long time ago but anyway, point is the same. Hang in there its constantly getting er.

Oh and buy stock in the flash memory powerhouses. Every IT manager in the world will migrate to this stuff as soon as the price gets right just for the maintence/repair and lifetime/reliability savings alone.

 

[darkeen]

The average user will not be willing to spend 4x the money on 1/10th of the space. Most likely the desktop version will be HHDs, i.e. regular harddrives with some flash for non-volatile cache.

BTW.: I think that tom's review is interesting, especially if you look at the variety in his drive selection when you look at the charts. It's hard to find any consistency.

Oh of course not... yet. Once the scale of production (a few years is my guess) kicks in the price of these things will fall to compete with regular hard drives. I think most people will give up 300gb laptop drives for smaller 80ish gb drives that use less power and are faster. All just my projection of course.

 

[Diablo2K]

Only problem as useing one of these to replace a hard drive is that it is limited in the number of times you can write data to the chips. I remember a while back the [H] did a review useing USB flashdrives to run a computer in place of hard drives, the performance was outstanding, but there was mention that these drives will have a short life. If I remember correctly the memory can only be rewritten about 100,000 times before you start to have falures. If this is still the case you will still need a hard drive for swap files and anything that gets rewritten often. You got to remember, some software keeps log files, these are rewritten over and over for diagnoses after a crash, these files will quickly wear out flash memory, as will your swap file.

 

[BillParrish]

hmm the write cycle life is a very good point, I think that too has improved lately but is still a valid concern, hmm off to the samsung data sheets..... ohh

If a man says something out in the woods, and no woman is around to hear him, is he still wrong?

If he is married, you betcha.

 

[Frank4d]

hmm the write cycle life is a very good point, I think that too has improved lately but is still a valid concern, hmm off to the samsung data sheets..... ohh If he is married, you betcha.

The datasheet for the chips shown on thae card linked above shows they can handle 100K program/erase cycles. That's probably not good enough for ordinary use hard drive replacement.

 

[pZ|fox]

The datasheet for the chips shown on thae card linked above shows they can handle 100K program/erase cycles. That's probably not good enough for ordinary use hard drive replacement.

Thanks for looking that up, I'm going to e-mail the reviewer about that if you don't mind.

 

[drizzt81]

Oh of course not... yet. Once the scale of production (a few years is my guess) kicks in the price of these things will fall to compete with regular hard drives. I think most people will give up 300gb laptop drives for smaller 80ish gb drives that use less power and are faster. All just my projection of course.

I understand your projection and I believe that for mobile computing this will be true, but given people's ability to increase data consumption just about in line with drive space increases, I do not think that SSDs will be commonplace anytime soon (next decade or two).

 

[budec]

The datasheet for the chips shown on thae card linked above shows they can handle 100K program/erase cycles. That's probably not good enough for ordinary use hard drive replacement.

What exactly is a program/erase?

If you write a file does that count?
Deleting a file?
Overwriting a file (ie. saving a file).
Writing 1 line to a file?

100,000 seems like a lot - but a busy workstation could hit that in a week or so if every write is counted.

Just look in your evenlog for example, each event is recorded to a file - which is a lot of writes over time.

EDIT:

also these are going to be limited by the interface before they are limited by themselves... a normal IDE 66 controller is going to be a bottleneck... even a SCSI 320UW might be a bottleneck to flash memory (these things are fast). If these things take off "mainstream" we're going to need a new type of interface that connects directly into the bus.... something FAST

 

[drizzt81]

What exactly is a program/erase?

If you write a file does that count? yes
Deleting a file? yes
Overwriting a file (ie. saving a file). yes
Writing 1 line to a file? yes

see above. however each 'cell' or 'location' of the flash has 100k cycles. and wirting only a few bytes that will flip a few cells will only wear out these cells.

 

[budec]

see above. however each 'cell' or 'location' of the flash has 100k cycles. and wirting only a few bytes that will flip a few cells will only wear out these cells.

Dam.

If you just have windows on it, you could move over your temp directory, temp internet files, swap file and all that crap. A program like eraser or ccleaner would destory this drive in a matter of days.

 

[Eva_Unit_0]

also these are going to be limited by the interface before they are limited by themselves... a normal IDE 66 controller is going to be a bottleneck... even a SCSI 320UW might be a bottleneck to flash memory (these things are fast). If these things take off "mainstream" we're going to need a new type of interface that connects directly into the bus.... something FAST

the best part about these flash drives isn't the raw bandwidth, though...it's the latency. We all know that in general the system is not bandwidth limited on the disk subsystem (hence why Raid 0 doesn't really give any benefit), it is usually I/O limited. and that is where this really shines...it is orders of magnitude faster with access times, and check out those graphs of I/O performance. That's what really provides the speed up.