Flash Memory and Apple iPods and Laptops

[MrCrowbar]

Excellent idea, what is the space requierment again for Tiger, as I do have a 2GB flashdrive laying around....

Standard fresh install is around 5 GB, then you need some space for swapping (say 2 GB), so the 7,4GB of the black nano are a good start.

2GB won't get you far, you need some free space to keep it fast enough. Use a USB hub, connect all your flash drives to it, and use OSX's disk utility (it's also on the OSX install disk, so you can do this when installing) to make a striped RAID. They've done a RAID 5 with the original Shuffle, which was kinda cool as a system drive.

 

[localoid]

Standard fresh install is around 5 GB, then you need some space for swapping (say 2 GB), so the 7,4GB of the black nano are a good start.

2GB won't get you far, you need some free space to keep it fast enough. Use a USB hub, connect all your flash drives to it, and use OSX's disk utility (it's also on the OSX install disk, so you can do this when installing) to make a striped RAID. They've done a RAID 5 with the original Shuffle, which was kinda cool as a system drive.

Read the article I posted earlier, which explains how to use Pacifist to reduce the size to <1Gb.

 

[iMikeT]

But can't flash only be written a finite number of times? Or is that just fear-mongering? Other than that though, it's much better than HD...(apart from the cost...for now...).

From what I remember, flash memory has a write cycle of 1010,000 (10 to the 10,000 power).

 

[MrCrowbar]

Read the article I posted earlier, which explains how to use Pacifist to reduce the size to <1Gb.

I know, but that gives you a really stripped down OS you can't really work with. The full package with iLife, fonts, languages etc. is just below 5 Gigs. What is OSX without iLife? :-D
Ok, I only really use iTunes and iPhoto. All the others are great for people that have absolutely no clue what they are doing. Personally, I don't use any of the other ones, but it's good to know they are there for when some family member asks you to put a video on a DVD that his player can read.

 

[notsofatjames]

if we can get non-volatile flash drives, won't we be able to do away with RAM. The OS would be constantly loaded into "RAM", never needing to restart. I practically never restart my iMac, but i assume those with portables shut down and start up regularly to save battery.

I'm probably being really naïve about the technology. Is RAM access faster than what future flash drives could be? or is RAM so completely different and i just looked like a fool? I always assumed that the computer used ram, because access speeds on a HDD are way too slow for the processor to do something useful every cycle.

 

[syklee26]

i thought installing OS in iPods are never recommended because it does not have cooling system inside.

 

[gnasher729]

But can't flash only be written a finite number of times? Or is that just fear-mongering? Other than that though, it's much better than HD...(apart from the cost...for now...).

True, but it doesn't matter much. If you have a 32 GB flash hard disk, and each bit can be written only 100,000 times, then at 45 MB/sec sustained write speed it takes 27 months of continuous writing to reach that limit. That is 27 months, doing nothing but writes at maximum possible speed 24 hours a day.

 

[scrambledwonder]

This problem existed with earlier Flash technology, but has long been solved. Current Flash memory cells can be rewritten so many times that it isn't really an issue anymore, plus the Flash memory controllers use a technology called "wear leveling". Basically, if you have a particular memory location that gets changed a lot, it keeps on moving it around.

In an earlier thread, somebody calculates that it takes like 100 years of constant writing to such a drive to wear it out.

Even five years would be fantastic. I've had two laptop drives die on me in less than two years. Tons of tiny moving parts=unreliable. Bring on the flash drives!

 

[fblack]

Q: Potential bottlenecks?

"Performance wise, SanDisk's new 2.5-inch SSD can move data to and from the SSD more than 100 times faster than a traditional drive, according to the company. It also will have a sustained read rate of 67 megabytes/sec and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer"

I'm just curious if you have a few of these "100 times faster" hard drives could there be a bottleneck at say something like a southbridge chip? I'm not familiar with current mobos so that's why I'm asking. On my old pc box the southbridge chip handles the sata drives, pci stuff and more.

 

[MacSamurai]

flash memory is awesome,no need to worry about the hdd problems anymore:no noise,not too mention being more energy efficient keeping our lappies on for longer woot flash memory for all

 

[frank781]

Flash + 1.8''HDD in laptops = 2 lb 12" MBP!

With the cost of flash going down everyday (I just got a 4GB flash drive for $40 at Best Buy). Apple can certain a novel idea in the laptop arena:

4-8GB flash RAM & 100 1.8" GB HDD. You can carry the OS i(and some aps) in flash, and have the iPod HDD for storage of files and less critical apps. Get the benefits of both technologies right now (low cost per GB from the HDD and fast data access for the OS with flash.

Also, just thinking a bit more,. you will probably see some akin to when teh MBP's were introduced with Intel inside: By the time they came out, the original CPU's were swapped for faster ones. What does this mean?

iPhones of 8-12 GB instead of 4-8Gb as originally unveiled. January to June is a long leadtime and I don't think that adding more memory now would affect FCC approval

 

[Anonymous Freak]

How is 67 MB/s a 100 fold (which means 10000%) improvement over the 55MB/s my MBP's hard drive gets? More like 20%.

As for booting from flash, I have a fast 4 GB USB flash drive, and stripped OS X down to the bare essentials, and off my 7200 RPM hard drive, I boot in 19 seconds. Off my flash drive, it's 50 seconds. (I have since replaced the hard drive install with a 'full' install, since the only purpose for making the stripped install was to see if I could fit a functioning copy of OS X onto a flash drive. It's got Terminal and Camino, and that's it.)

edit: Yes, adding flash to a hard drive can help, because you can put the 'random access' stuff on the flash, and the 'linear access' stuff on the HD, to make the best out of both.

Oh, and as for the 'limited lifetime' of flash, that's mostly a thing of the past. Even the earliest USB flash drives use complex algorithms to make sure that the entire memory is used as evenly as possible, it's not like a hard drive where it fills up linearly. And modern flash memory can take 1 million or so cycles. It was early flash memory that could only take 10,000 or so.

If I tell my computer to 'secure erase' my 4 GB flash drive (35 passes,) it takes over three hours. To do one million writes would take 13 years of continuous writing.

 

[Rocketman]

In reading folks looking forward to the features of flash (robson) and micro HDD's and increased memory, I can't help but recall the two most important utterances of Steve Jobs inn the last 10 years.

"We make CONSUMER products."

"We will release products now based on when they are ready."

No more insanely great. Merely great and available.

Rocketman

 

[digitalbiker]

How is 67 MB/s a 100 fold (which means 10000%) improvement over the 55MB/s my MBP's hard drive gets? More like 20%.

It's 100 times faster for burst read, write, and random access. It is only 20% to 50% faster for sustained continuous read or writes. So for reading in large video files it would only be a marginal improvement.

Also a lot probably will depend on the bus capability. I'm not sure what the maximum speed capacity is for SATA but the flash drive probably exceedes this rate in burst mode. Hard to tell why you are seeing such poor performance through USB. Is it a USB 1.0 falsh drive? How old is the flash drive, possibly it isn't as high a performer as these new drives? Also maybe booting through the USB port slows access as well. I know FW800 16,000 RPM drives way out perform the USB 2.0 drives.

 

[MrCrowbar]

if we can get non-volatile flash drives, won't we be able to do away with RAM. The OS would be constantly loaded into "RAM", never needing to restart. I practically never restart my iMac, but i assume those with portables shut down and start up regularly to save battery.

Nope, I don't shut down my Macbook to save battery. Sleep mode does not really eat up power, maybe 1% of battery a day.

I'm probably being really naïve about the technology. Is RAM access faster than what future flash drives could be? or is RAM so completely different and i just looked like a fool? I always assumed that the computer used ram, because access speeds on a HDD are way too slow for the processor to do something useful every cycle.

RAM ist way faster than Hard drives, I think about a thousand times if I remember right. It's still way too slow for the CPU, that's why there are some levels of Memory that are faster and smaller the closer you get to the CPU.

Flash Memory is totally different than RAM in every aspect. You can't ditch RAM to replace it with Flash. Even if Flash gets faster in the near future, so will RAM.

 

[MrCrowbar]

As for booting from flash, I have a fast 4 GB USB flash drive, and stripped OS X down to the bare essentials, and off my 7200 RPM hard drive, I boot in 19 seconds. Off my flash drive, it's 50 seconds.to make the best out of both.

[...]

And modern flash memory can take 1 million or so cycles. It was early flash memory that could only take 10,000 or so.

If I tell my computer to 'secure erase' my 4 GB flash drive (35 passes,) it takes over three hours. To do one million writes would take 13 years of continuous writing.

First, USB 2.0 is slower than SATA. USB thumb drives are different, some are nice and fast (and expensive), the low end crap is slow ass hell (and cheap). Also, the USB 2.0 implementation on OSX sucks big time compared to Windows. Firewire is awesome on the Mac (terrible on Windows), the best would be a Firewire thumb drive, but I don't think they make those.

Secondly, thanks for the math. "13 years of continuous writing" sounds good to me, even taking into account the low data rate of your thumb drive. I label my 3.5" HDDs with an expiration date that is 18 months after first service. Yep, those drives are basically on 24/7 and work a lot. Once they are past this date, they are degraded and used as redundancy drives where it's not too tragic if they die. 2.5" laptop drives are usually replaced once a year with a bigger (and quieter) one and the old one becomes the "bitch drive", that gets formated a lot to be OSX native, Linux, Windows or FAT32 to exchange foles with Windows and Linux.

 

[obesecat55]

Hybrid Drive Computers

Hybrids and dual drives would be a good start.

OS on 4 or 8 GB of flash with a real HDD available as well.

Superquick boot times, key programs almost instantly available, whilst bulk data like movies, music etc sits on the larger spinning hdd.

Excellent Idea!!

Also, for video editing and such, there should be space available on the flash drive for temporary storage of files you're currently working on.

 

[localoid]

I know, but that gives you a really stripped down OS you can't really work with. The full package with iLife, fonts, languages etc. is just below 5 Gigs. What is OSX without iLife? :-D

The "speed via $10 flash stick" concept is to put the (stripped down) OS on the flash; most everything else on a (fast as you can afford, conventional) hard drive. Flash via USB is only going to give you about 12Mb/sec transfers when it comes to reading very-large chunks of data (i.e., iLife, Garageband, et al.) while most any SATA drive (even a 5400 rpm 2.5") will give you >60Mb/sec. Swap would also be on a non-flash drive (or if you have RAM to burn, in RAM, etc.)

 

[macintel4me]

my prediction = tablet

Seems to me that this "flash based notebook" is going to be essentially an overgrown iPod. In other words, it's not meant to live by itself, but rather be mobile and then hook back up to a more usable piece of hardware. I could easily see Apple coming out with a multi-touch tablet with a docking station that had a big hard drive, a DVD player and lots of ports. The tablet flash drive would be used just to sync needed files. Now I would use that at work as to keep all my notes in and then plug into a real computer.

 

[Rocketman]

Firewire is awesome on the Mac (terrible on Windows), the best would be a Firewire thumb drive, but I don't think they make those.

http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/d... Palm Sized Storage-Portable/Removable Drives

OIC

http://www.kanguru.com/flashdrive_max.html

Rocketman

 

[polishmacuser]

would us macbook users be able too use these 32gb flash drives

 

[Cult Follower]

This really isn't a prediction, anyone could say that and be right, its too general.

 

[digitalbiker]

In reading folks looking forward to the features of flash (robson) and micro HDD's and increased memory, I can't help but recall the two most important utterances of Steve Jobs inn the last 10 years.

"We make CONSUMER products."

"We will release products now based on when they are ready."

No more insanely great. Merely great and available.

Rocketman

Did Stevey boy actually say the last part of your post, "No more insanely great. Merely great and available." or was that just added by you later as an inference from the previous two lines. I couldn't tell but I noticed that it wasn't in quotes.

I have a hard time believing that SJ would say "No more insanely great. Merely great and available." because isanely great is exactly what Apple always shoots for wheither they hit the mark or not.

CONSUMER products can still be insanely great!
Just because one waits to release a product until it is ready does not proclude it from also being insanely great!

 

[TheBobcat]

Another flash notebooks article? Well I think that its-

OH MY GOD! THAT HORSE....SOMEONE HELP IT, MR IS BEATING IT!

Too late...it's already dead.

 

[GNUMatrix]

Why package this as a drive?

Here's a question....

Why bother using the "drive" infrastructure to implement this? Sure, it makes sense for people adding these to their existing systems, and in PC-land there is more of a need for this. And for drive manufacturers, it kinda makes some sense as it provides them an easy path towards flash from their existing technology.

But Apple only has likely less than a dozen current offerings. Why not just design in a "flash socket" much like a RAM socket directly into the motherboard? And interface it via something that is as fast as possible, rather than routing through all the layers (southbridge, blah, blah) that SATA must require? No significant space required, no need for cabling, that kind of thing. More like a Nano I would guess. These should not need replacing any more often than say a RAM module (which gets replaced more often because of a need for increased capacity than due to failure these days).

Seems some further streamlining would reduce costs and increase the performance and likely the reliability to boot, no? They must have all the pieces to do this already I'm sure... And that would be a bit of a competitive advantage over PCs as I can't imagine the PC vendors would come to an agreement over any kind of equivalent standard very quickly...