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Flash Memory and Apple iPods and Laptops
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SactoGuy18
macrumors 603
I think the most likely thing is that we'll see a 16 GB iPod nano by late Spring 2007. Apple phasing out using hard drives on their higher-end iPods could still be a couple of years away to wait for higher-capacity flash memory.
In my opinion, I don't think it's that expensive considering all the advantages over HDDs. Also, flash memory in the figures of many, many gygabites hasn't been around for that long... just wait about a year, see how the prices drop. Hopefully by then they'll also develop external "flash HDDs" with a capacity of hundreds of GBs.
Anonymous Freak
macrumors 603
Responding to two posts in one...
Not true. The big point of flash is that it is exactly the same speed no matter where on the drive you are requesting the data. A flash drive, with all hardware and software properly implemented, should have the EXACT same speed wether doing burst random reads or sustained continuous reads. (In reality, it doesn't, but that's largely due to OS issues.) Flash media tops out at somewhere around 30 MB/s right now, as far as I can tell. That means 30 MB/s streaming video, or writing 10,000 32-byte temp files.
SATA is up to 300 MB/s. Read my above, there is no flash that gets anywhere near that. USB 2.0 is 60 MB/s, still twice what current flash gets. USB 1.1 is a whopping 1.5 MB/s, and no, I am *NOT* using a USB 1.1 drive. (Nobody makes them anymore, and there never were any 4 GB USB 1.1 flash drives.)
There is no such thing as a 16,000 RPM drive, but there are 15,000 RPM. They're all SCSI, and I haven't seen any FireWire-to-SCSI cases. Ever. The best you can do currently is SATA-to-FireWire, where you could run the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor. FireWire 800 tops out at 100 MB/s compared to USB 2.0's 60 MB/s. Yes, the Raptor can push data faster than 60 MB/s, so you do see improvement. (In fact, just using FireWire 400, with it's theoretically slower 50 MB/s is faster, mostly because FireWire handles streaming high-bandwidth data better than USB.)
I would imagine that moving flash to a SATA system, they would do some improvement, which is why I gave them an 80% speed boost in my estimate. I wouldn't say USB 2.0 is significantly worse on Mac. Make sure your external drives are formatted HFS+ not FAT, and you'll get a major speed boost. And, yes. One company does make a FireWire Flash Drive, but multiple reviews say it's slower than the latest USB models. (It came out before USB 2.0, so it was lightning fast compared to USB 1.1, but it's pretty worthless right now.) It also costs significantly more than a USB drive, with a 1 GB model costing $100!! (I recently bought a 4 GB USB 2.0 flash drive for $40.)
Yeah, laptop drives are not meant for (and not covered under warranty when used) 24/7. Most specifically say they are meant for 8/5 operation. (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, aka business use.) They should last more than 18 months, though. Although if you're using them in a server, it is probably good to rotate them out well before they start having problems.
Not true. The big point of flash is that it is exactly the same speed no matter where on the drive you are requesting the data. A flash drive, with all hardware and software properly implemented, should have the EXACT same speed wether doing burst random reads or sustained continuous reads. (In reality, it doesn't, but that's largely due to OS issues.) Flash media tops out at somewhere around 30 MB/s right now, as far as I can tell. That means 30 MB/s streaming video, or writing 10,000 32-byte temp files.
digitalbiker said:
SATA is up to 300 MB/s. Read my above, there is no flash that gets anywhere near that. USB 2.0 is 60 MB/s, still twice what current flash gets. USB 1.1 is a whopping 1.5 MB/s, and no, I am *NOT* using a USB 1.1 drive. (Nobody makes them anymore, and there never were any 4 GB USB 1.1 flash drives.)
There is no such thing as a 16,000 RPM drive, but there are 15,000 RPM. They're all SCSI, and I haven't seen any FireWire-to-SCSI cases. Ever. The best you can do currently is SATA-to-FireWire, where you could run the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor. FireWire 800 tops out at 100 MB/s compared to USB 2.0's 60 MB/s. Yes, the Raptor can push data faster than 60 MB/s, so you do see improvement. (In fact, just using FireWire 400, with it's theoretically slower 50 MB/s is faster, mostly because FireWire handles streaming high-bandwidth data better than USB.)
I would imagine that moving flash to a SATA system, they would do some improvement, which is why I gave them an 80% speed boost in my estimate. I wouldn't say USB 2.0 is significantly worse on Mac. Make sure your external drives are formatted HFS+ not FAT, and you'll get a major speed boost. And, yes. One company does make a FireWire Flash Drive, but multiple reviews say it's slower than the latest USB models. (It came out before USB 2.0, so it was lightning fast compared to USB 1.1, but it's pretty worthless right now.) It also costs significantly more than a USB drive, with a 1 GB model costing $100!! (I recently bought a 4 GB USB 2.0 flash drive for $40.)
MrCrowbar said:
Yeah, laptop drives are not meant for (and not covered under warranty when used) 24/7. Most specifically say they are meant for 8/5 operation. (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, aka business use.) They should last more than 18 months, though. Although if you're using them in a server, it is probably good to rotate them out well before they start having problems.
MrCrowbar
macrumors 68020
Thanks, but WHOAAAA those are expensive. I'll stick with my 8GB $250 thingy that also happens to be an outstanding and good looking mp3 player 🙂
MrCrowbar
macrumors 68020
I know, even most 3.5" drives are not made for 24/7 according to the manufacturers. There are always the business drives with similar specs that cost a lot more but are business proof, they usually look sturdier too. I had to change a lot of those Seagate Cheetah at work, they're only 72GB, but 10.000 rpm SCSI.
I know I shouldn't keep the Macbook running 24/7, but it's my sole computer right now and it's usually compressing video, bouncing audio projects which then have to be shared with the band vie bittorrent, etc... The iMac's hard drive was kinda loud and the table it was standing on seemed to resonate at 7.2 kHz so I got rid of it (and the Macbook was faster by 0.17 GHz...). Think I'll get an iMac after the next update, either a 20" or a 24", depending on the GPU options.
It's interesting though that a TIVO runs 24/7 absolutely non stop writing video at all times. Never pauses a second. Spins as long as it's plugged in, and always writing and possibly erasing too. Ours is over a year old, and I know lots of people that have had them for 3 or 4 years and no problems.
My question is..
If you have a flash based HD why do you still need RAM?
Removing RAM from the PC and using the flash drive instead would even out the costs of moving to this technology and would eventually lead to cheaper PCs/laptops than we have today.
If you have a flash based HD why do you still need RAM?
Removing RAM from the PC and using the flash drive instead would even out the costs of moving to this technology and would eventually lead to cheaper PCs/laptops than we have today.
A company called Kanguru has a Firewire thumb drive, with storage up to 8 GB. I don't think I'd want to boot off it, but it sounds like a great way to store one's photo collection. You could keep different libraries on different drives and have really fast load times.
Erasmus
macrumors 68030
This question has been answered before, but anyway:
Comparing flash drive speeds to RAM speeds is laughable. The speed of RAM is absolutely huge compared to flash drives, hard drives, etc.
The purpose of flash drives and hard drives is to hold lots of data at low cost.
The purpose of RAM is to hold small amounts of data that the processor needs immediate, super fast access to.
Removing RAM from a computer, and using solely virtual RAM would have an absolutely massive impact on the speed of the computer. Think maybe 100-1000th of the speed (that's just a guess, btw, I don't actually have a clue as to the difference in speed between Flash memory and say 800Mhz RAM, other than it's huge).
Erasmus
macrumors 68030
I don't think that was his point. The point was that Hard Drives really suffer when they are made to pick out small pieces of information in different places, due to the fact the reading head has to move each time. This could of course cause huge delays in reading speeds. A hard drive can however read a continuous strip of data very quickly, as the reader can stay in the same spot.
So it is feasible that Flash memory could read random bursts 100 times faster than a HDD, but large chunks with only a 20% or so increase.
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.
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.
AidenShaw
macrumors P6
an extreme example - that's not quite right
In fact, the flash drive would have a big advantage on the last point, since all those different pieces can be read and written without any head movement.
Your point is probably fairly close if you want to claim 32 KB files, but for 32 byte files there are other issues to consider.
There's a lot of overhead to both I/O and filesystem operations - it's not realistic to divide large file bandwidth by a small number and claim that one could do that many small files per second.
- Each I/O has significant CPU overhead - the OS has to create a "message" to send to the disk, set up buffers, send the message, handle the message coming back from the disk that says "done", deal with cleaning up the buffers and the message, and then let the application know that the data is ready.
This overhead is more-or-less the same for any size I/O, so as the transfer sizes shrink you spend proportionally more time waiting for the CPU, and less for the disk.
For example, one of my 3GHz Woodies with 15K SAS drives does:
- 128 KiB I/O: 60 MB/sec, 450 ops/sec
- 32 KiB I/O: 53 MB/sec, 1650 ops/sec
- 8 KiB I/O: 50 MB/sec, 6250 ops/sec
- 2 KiB I/O: 43 MB/sec, 21427 ops/sec
- 512 B I/O: 16 MB/sec, 31500 ops/sec
A laptop with a 7K drive does:
- 128 KiB I/O: 47 MB/sec, 360 ops/sec
- 512 B I/O: 3 MB/sec, 6100 ops/sec - Small writes to a flash drive take more work - the typical flash drive has about 2 KiB "pages" on the flash. To write a partial page, the drive has to read the whole page, replace the part that changes, then write the modified page.
- Creating a 32-byte file requires far more than simply writing 32-bytes to the drive. The filesystem has to allocate space on the drive (read and write the allocation structures), create the directory entry (read and write the directory), create the file descriptor or catalog entry (something that describes the file, and points to where the resource and data forks reside on the disk), and then actually write the data to the forks. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS+#Design ) (I'm ignoring the additional step of writing the log here 😉 )
In fact, the flash drive would have a big advantage on the last point, since all those different pieces can be read and written without any head movement.
Your point is probably fairly close if you want to claim 32 KB files, but for 32 byte files there are other issues to consider.
SPUY767
macrumors 68020
Well, you'd have no seek time to wait for the RW head to reach the proper spot on the platter.
They still develop those insanely great products though - as they did with the iPhone. They only wait to release them until the time is there. Still they will be the first one with a working solutions this way. This sounds like a good approach to innovation for me.
pale9
macrumors regular
8 core, leopard, ilife, iwork 07....the scilence is deafening
i am slowly getting p.o.'d with the lack of new software and hardware. seems like apple is betting the whole freakin farm on the iphone which, cool or not, is not the number one priority of his loyal customers...
... and guess what? out of frustration for waiting for new s/w i started playing around with ubunto linux.... to my total surprise the new ubuntu 6.10 together with automatix2 is a system which is not only a real replacement for windows (for the first time everything i wanted like multimedia, video, printing worked out of the box), but also offers about 70+% of everything that makes OSX so great! and for the price of nothing, zippo, free, nada.
so, dear apple, dont take us all for granted...
i am slowly getting p.o.'d with the lack of new software and hardware. seems like apple is betting the whole freakin farm on the iphone which, cool or not, is not the number one priority of his loyal customers...
... and guess what? out of frustration for waiting for new s/w i started playing around with ubunto linux.... to my total surprise the new ubuntu 6.10 together with automatix2 is a system which is not only a real replacement for windows (for the first time everything i wanted like multimedia, video, printing worked out of the box), but also offers about 70+% of everything that makes OSX so great! and for the price of nothing, zippo, free, nada.
so, dear apple, dont take us all for granted...
Rocketman
macrumors 603
Given the cost of flash and the ever decreasing cost of RAM a better question is, when will RAM at the minimal required capacity (say 8GB) cost similar to or less than flash. Similar to might be 2-4x the cost since it is faster.
http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?imodule=CT25664AC667
Rocketman
digitalbiker
macrumors 65816
Not true! I am running a dozen 16,000 RPM scsii drives raided together on my Sun Solaris system right now. I have one of the drives built with a FW800 to SCSI conversion case. I have tried both USB 2.0 and FW800. The FW800 is significantly faster.
While I agree that flash drives read, write, etc at the same speed, what I meant was that the Flash drive was billed as 100 times faster for small data chunks read/write in a random find.
Whereas your HDD has a high read/write speed for sustained large continuous data blocks, it will slow significantly for random seek read and writes.
AidenShaw
macrumors P6
*sure* that it's 16K ?
Is it possible to tell us the make and model number of those drives?
I think the previous poster assumed that your 16K was a typo - that you meant 15K.
I haven't seen any 16K drives (and I've spent about $600K on disk arrays in the last year), but 15K are quite common.
Is it possible to tell us the make and model number of those drives?
I think the previous poster assumed that your 16K was a typo - that you meant 15K.
I haven't seen any 16K drives (and I've spent about $600K on disk arrays in the last year), but 15K are quite common.
Why don't you learn to use some of the Apple software already out instead of being p.o.'d. I'm sure Apple has good reasons for what they are doing. Or you could start using Linux instead.
Anonymous Freak
macrumors 603
As Aiden said, I'd also like to know the model of your 16k RPM drives. I'm assuming you're just remembering the number wrong, and that they're 15k RPM. Nobody makes 16,000 RPM drives. Try a quick search, and you will find only one article that mentions "16,000 RPM" and "hard drive" in the same sentence. And it's an erroneous article written in 2002 on Epinions. Just to confirm, since I haven't personally had to deal with server-grade drives on a day-to-day basis in about 5 years, I asked a friend who works in a big datacenter (over 10,000 computers,) and he has never heard of 16,000 RPM drives, either. (And he already has the Hitachi 1 TB drives in for testing!)
And when FireWire first came out, there were FireWire (400) to SCSI adaptors and cases (after all, FireWire is technically derived from SCSI,) I haven't seen any in years, and no FW800 ones at all. And I have *NEVER* Seen a SCSI to USB case. SCSI to USB *cables*, yes. But they're all ultra-slow USB 1.1. They basically became obsolete when FireWire went mainstream, and external peripherals that needed to be fast went FireWire. I have one on my original iMac right now, so I can connect my old SCSI ZIP drive to it.
And I hadn't really thought about it that way. Yeah, flash would be 100x faster in small random reads and writes. I even alluded to that in my own posts, yet the math didn't dawn on me! That doesn't mean that the flash media will be transferring faster than USB 2.0 is capable of, just that it is faster than a physical hard drive can handle the small random transfers. It's not that the flash media is getting faster, indeed, it is likely getting slower doing small random transfers; it's just that the hard drive slows down *MORE*.
I don't understand. 5 months ago the MacPro was released. Now the iPhone is announced. The 8 core is coming. The iPod will probably follow the iPhone but be all flash memory, etc. iWork will probably have a database/spreadsheet. iLife will come with Leopard in a matter of weeks. FCP Extreme is coming at NAB. What do you want man? Apple's got so much cool stuff in the pipe and it's looking more and more like it's all coming at once practically.
Anonymous Freak
macrumors 603
Well, you can already buy SDRAM-based 'solid state storage' devices. (Please not that flash still qualifies as "RAM", since it is, indeed, "Random Access Memory".) These offer true fully random access along with insane read and write speeds. (Limited only by the PCI limit of 132 MB/s, since the onboard SDRAM is faster. They really need to update it for 64-bit and/or 66 MHz PCI, or PCI-e.) Of course, you have to fill it with RAM, and that gets to be expensive. (4 GB for HOW much!?!?!)
It's called impatience. It just seems like a long time to wait. Especially if you are a mac-addict. And announcing something (i.e. iphone/appletv) is NOT the same thing as releasing it...it just means we have to keep WAITING... 🙁