I hope Shaw Wu doesn't read your comment. He'll probably get![]()
On the contrary. I hope he does. His ass needs to be humbled.
-Clive
I hope Shaw Wu doesn't read your comment. He'll probably get![]()
With the cost of flash memory, couldn't they put 8GB flash in there for OS and Apps and a 1.8" or 2.5" drive for data. Quick boot, less power draw for OS and Apps, accesses drive only for other data, swaps open docs, files, etc to flash while in use, writes to drive upon save/close.
ok so I don't exactly understand how flash based laptops work. Can someone either give me a crash course or lead me to something that explains it. Would the laptop still have ram and flash memory? Would the ram be removed and flash memory is placed in the laptops instead? I have no clue how it would boot faster and save battery life...someone please help![]()
On the contrary. I hope he does. His ass needs to be humbled.
-Clive
ok so I don't exactly understand how flash based laptops work. Can someone either give me a crash course or lead me to something that explains it. Would the laptop still have ram and flash memory? Would the ram be removed and flash memory is placed in the laptops instead? I have no clue how it would boot faster and save battery life...someone please help![]()
I wonder what percent of the flash market Apple buys.
Sounds like you know more than I do on this so no challenge here. But I do want to emphasize your last point which I left inside the quotation box.What others have said, however, are right: solid-state reliability wears down over time, much like a recharable battery. Improvements have been made, but greater strides must be taken, still, before we convert solely to flash. There are millions of tiny read/writes that occur when we use our PCs, and flash memory can't quite handle that yet.
Hope this helps!
Anyone else, please correct me where I may have misspoken.
-Clive
Sounds like you know more than I do on this so no challenge here. But I do want to emphasize your last point which I left inside the quotation box.
I think this is one of the main reasons why an all solid-state flash drive laptop will not occur for another 2-3 years. Price for solid state is going down fast, but it's this limiting read/write cycles that sounds problematic.
Roland.g has half of the picture right.
"Flash" (NAND Flash, Flash drives, etc) can be considered cousins of RAM, both of which reside in the solid-state storage family. Solid-state is fast because, as others have said, it does not require spinning up to speed and searching for bits of data on a platter. With a solid-state chip one applies voltages on certain leads of the chip, and, accordingly, a bit associated with that conbination of input leads is "released" on output leads. So, basically, to run a solid-state chip, you apply a bunch of different combinations of voltages on the input leads. The speed of accessing these bits is limited only by the clock speed of your processor and the "slew rate" (time it takes to change voltage from 'on' to 'off' or vice versa) of the components used.
Of course, that is the very simplistic view of solid-state chips. As increasing capacity and other factors become involved, the equation becomes much more complicated, and things slow down. I don't know much about that. I only took entry-level circuits.
How this applies to how your computer runs:
Your computer's HD has a boot-sector. That is the information used by the computer required to start up and launch an OS. Since this is typically stored on a regular HD, it takes time to spin through and read all the necessary bits of info. If the boot sector was located on a solid-state chip, boot times *could* be near instantaneous - limiting factors would be the internal bus speeds and crap like that.
What others have said, however, is right: solid-state reliability wears down over time, much like a recharable battery. Improvements have been made, but greater strides must be taken, still, before we convert solely to flash. There are millions of tiny read/writes that occur when we use our PCs, and flash memory can't quite handle that yet.
Hope this helps!
Anyone else, please correct me where I may have misspoken.
-Clive
With the cost of flash memory, couldn't they put 8GB flash in there for OS and Apps and a 1.8" or 2.5" drive for data. Quick boot, less power draw for OS and Apps, accesses drive only for other data, swaps open docs, files, etc to flash while in use, writes to drive upon save/close.
This I didn't know. What does that say about the life span of a Nano as well as an iPhone?
Flash is just now starting to ship at 16gb which means it will take MONTHS to experience its first price drop from bleeding edge user price to premium application price. Apple typically comes in shortly after that point and does a supply agreement with a huge cash deposit and "averages down" its cost and the contract allows Apple to immediately capture any unexpected price drops. They cited that in 1Q07 results in January.
The problem with most OSs is that they are incredibly disk intensive. Especially Unix-based OSs. The problem gets worse with journalling, etc, going on (which you'd turn off with Flash memory) but there would still be a lot of on-off states for the flash memory to handle. It would be interesting, though, to learn of Apple putting any effort into optimizing some of the OS functions that are more disk intensive to work a little differently.
I can't speak for the iPhone, because I don't know how complex it is, but I would assume that, with the exception of loading web-pages and e-mails, I can't think of anything that will cause an overabundance of R/Ws. All other data; tunes, contacts, photos, so on; will either be primarily read data, and not written.
USB Flash Drives are for sale at Amazon.co.uk for <£10 for 2GB, <£20 for 4GB, so 32GB would cost £160 at that rate.
Simple maths: There are 8GB in the iPhone. Flash can handle at least 100,000 writes, that is a total of 800,000 GB written (the OS needs to be clever to make sure that all areas of memory are written equally often). If you plan to use the iPhone for ten years = 3600 days, that's 222 GB that you can write every day. That's an awful lot. Check with Activity Monitor if your Mac comes anywhere near that; for most people, it won't. At 10 MB per second, writing 222GB would take 22,000 seconds or more than six hours.
In other words, if you write 10 MB per second, six hours per day, for ten years, that's when the iPhone's memory will start wearing out.
No, it's not a linear progression for premium items. 32GB would cost at least $500 if they shipped it. They have to wait and let 16GB chips saturate the market first.
-Clive
With the cost of flash memory, couldn't they put 8GB flash in there for OS and Apps and a 1.8" or 2.5" drive for data. Quick boot, less power draw for OS and Apps, accesses drive only for other data, swaps open docs, files, etc to flash while in use, writes to drive upon save/close.