flash drives in powerbooks

[Don't panic]

With the increasing size of flash drives, how long will it be before hard drives are completely bypassed in laptops?

would it be possible (and/or would it make any sense) to replace the hardrive with a (series) of high-capacity flash-drives? wouldn't it result in a faster computer with a longer battery life? Is it just a cost issue?

 

[grapes911]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/134331/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/134243/

 

[Don't panic]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/134331/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/134243/

thanks

 

[SiliconAddict]

Not for a while. For a couple of reasons. The biggest being data transfer rates and simple reliability. Flash drives sectors WILL give out over time. However some of the solid state drives used in ruggedized PC’s and PC’s used by the military get around this by having sectors to spare. So if one goes bad the system uses the other. If Apple wanted too they could create such laptops right now. The drives are out there NOW. They are just expensive as hell. What will happen first though is high speed solid state storage to augment the cache already found on harddrives

WinHEC: Samsung to Show "Flash" Laptop Hard Drives

So instead of only 2, 4, or 8MB of cache the system may have 128MB enough to avoid spinning up the hard drive and when you avoid accessing the hard drive you extend laptop batteries, prolong the life of a hard drive, and generally speed things up. I think the fact that in the above article that they are only talking 128MB means they are probably using something special to augment the drive. Probably something with faster I/O.

 

[CanadaRAM]

With the increasing size of flash drives, how long will it be before hard drives are completely bypassed in laptops?

would it be possible (and/or would it make any sense) to replace the hardrive with a (series) of high-capacity flash-drives? wouldn't it result in a faster computer with a longer battery life? Is it just a cost issue?

Flash memory is still many times slower than a hard drive. (6 to 12 MB/Sec Flash vs 40 to 80 MB/sec hard drive)

The Samsung article mentions power savings but not speed.