Flash Memory and Apple iPods and Laptops

[GNUMatrix]

Flash speed

Another question...

Hard drives are limited to a degree by their physical implementation, primarily with only one mechanism for moving heads. Having more heads helps, of course, as does greater density so an equivalent head movement can access more data, but at a higher cost.

With flash though, wouldn't it be possible to "think different" and be able to access a larger amount of data at one time? I'm thinking of something equivalent to dual-channel RAM, where you have more than one path feeding data to the computer. Or something akin to having one physical flash drive, but it is actually configured as two separate "drives", internally striped. I'm sure the cost would be higher, but if you could get two SATA drives each transferring at 60MB/s and use software to do the striping, you'd be further ahead?

This kinda gets back to my previous question about why this has to be thought of as a "drive" in the typical sense?

 

[Timo_Existencia]

Bringing this discussion back to the immediate future...

All I really care about at this point (barring some very cool announcement of a Newton-type device) is that the announced storage limits of the iPhone get bumped to twice what they told us they'd be.

If I'm going to spend that money on the iPhone (and believe me, I am), I'm hopeful that they were just being conservative when they said the larger will only be 8 gb. Given all the news about flash memory, I expect it to be 16 gb when it ships later this year.

 

[digitalbiker]

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.

oops! Sorry my mistake. I could have swore these were 16K drives but when I double checked the specs they are indeed 15K.

The model I am using is the XTA-3310 Sun Drive.

There was a company called ADS, Applied Digital Systems that used to build custom enclosures compatible for SUN systems and they would build any type of conversion box that you might want. Unfortunately I think they are now out of business. They would build both FW and USB2.0 conversion boxes to fit Hot-swapable SCSI drives.

 

[Roller]

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'd be happy with that kind of consumption. My G4 PowerBook loses way more than 1% a day when asleep. Typically, it goes from a full charge to almost empty after a few days in sleep mode.

I wonder if flash drives could help with this.

 

[ganjagecko]

defrag

If I'm not mistaken about the way flash memory works, you wouldn't need to defragment your drive to increase performance, because it takes the same time to get info from one place or the other on that kind of memory.

That would be a pretty good advantage as well I think, especially if flash memory is only capable of being written to a number of times. The way I see it, most of your HD's contents don't really change dramatically over time, you usually just add more stuff. When you delete something, then another piece of information can take it's place without a performance hit like on regular HDs.

 

[4np]

Here's an image of the drive:

 

[pale9]

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.

what you are saying is not based on facts, just wishful thinking! my gripe is that steve has said nothing in january and silence since about the stuff we are waitiing for. and yes, apple is not beyond critizism.

 

[Rocketman]

what you are saying is not based on facts, just wishful thinking! my gripe is that steve has said nothing in january and silence since about the stuff we are waitiing for. and yes, apple is not beyond critizism.

Intel flash products and plans (roadmap, 4GB mid-07, 8GB late-07) can be relied on for speculating on Apple plans:

http://developer.intel.com/design/flash/nand/z-u130.htm

Mac hardare lines are nearing a refresh based on historic product line lifetimes. Last year all lines were updated in rapid succession. That meant there were no updates needed early this year.

The time is near for refreshes in all primary Apple Mac product lines. The time is near for a major OS upgrade. It makes sense to synchronize these to some degree so new products are synchronized both in hardware and software. Expect that.

Consider the good news. If they are released togeher, you will not have to spend $129 for an OS upgrade a month or 3 after buying a new CPU. For those who have bought recently, they have the features they need and want, and an upgrade of an OS is an option they have based on perceived value for the changes. It's only $129 (retail) after all.

Rocketman

 

[Maccus Aurelius]

Good thing OS X is so cheap compared to Vista. Approx $200 so I can update both my and my siblings' computers is a great deal if you ask me.

I'll be glad to purchase a newly refreshed mac preloaded with Leopard. It's gonna be sweet.

 

[GanleyBurger]

Does anyone else feel uneasy about having all of their projects and programs on an internal flash drive...

Well at least with TIME MACHINE, and a good external-drive to do back-ups, my comfort level would go up...

I hope that the point of all of this is that we could eventually buy like a 300gig flash drive from Mac to replace an MBP's internal 100gig 7200 rpm drive?

 

[tilman]

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.

As noted earlier in this thread, the "100 times faster" refers only to random access times (i.e. how long do you have to *wait* until you can read a randomly selected sector on the drive). The actual data transfer speed once you have located the sector is less than that of a good hard disk.

 

[epardilla]

wow

wow, i got censored on this forum for my bad "no news poem" --but then again, really though I'd like to know: why is there no news today on apple??

 

[BigPrince]

lol, lets not fight amongst ourselves. We are all getting the impatient jitters.

 

[shigzeo]

Going through the Sandisk website the ($350) 2.5" device uses SATA (like a MacBook) and at 32gb is a step down from current common HD sizes, even on the low end. Same form factor as a HD and more expensive. Many times faster, half the power consumption and not g-force or temperature sensitive.

The ($550) 1.8" also 32gb indicating it uses later generation memory, and uses UATA not SATA. It could after the cost issue is resolved, replace the lower capacity top line iPod and solve the handling issues some users experience by crashing HD's. iPods do not need the speed, but the battery savings would be substantial.

Intel also announced products today that are packaged differently, and given the relationship Apple has with Intel and the scale of Intel on chip production, I would predict so see Intel branded devices not Sandisk branded.

The cost vs ramp-up trends indicates Apple will adopt this technology in narrow bands at first in hopes cost reduction rates exceed adoption rates.

This confirms something I have been saying since arrival here in 2001. Ramdisk and RAID everything. Raid now being the ZFS save-to disc in this case. But due to recent news, that second drive might be addressed over a 802.11n or 802.16 wireless network and accessable through a Time Machine interface from a Mac or an iPhone or its "product line" derivitives.

Rocketman

after sandisk's anti-ipod campaign, it would quite a travesty to find theis product in the ipod... maybe not travesty, but certainly ironic and soon enough... they would renic on what they said in the past as well... typical

 

[Rocketman]

wow, i got censored on this forum...

I got censored for posting a snippet of the PUBLIC WWCD page (I am not under NDA either) which answered the question about new OS features. Hint: Apple home page, click on WWDC (on the home page for goodness sake), click on the session on OS stuff.

Rocketman

 

[fblack]

As noted earlier in this thread, the "100 times faster" refers only to random access times (i.e. how long do you have to *wait* until you can read a randomly selected sector on the drive). The actual data transfer speed once you have located the sector is less than that of a good hard disk.

Thanks for the clarification. I must have missed the previous points or misunderstood.

 

[GanleyBurger]

wow, i got censored on this forum for my bad "no news poem" --but then again, really though I'd like to know: why is there no news today on apple??

We should at least get to play a flash game when we visit the Apple site... something to do... anything!!! Speaking of games.. CHECK THIS OUT!!!

http://www.neave.com/games/ Original Asteroids, Space Invaders, Frogger, and weird stuff...

 

[MacAodh]

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, don't take us all for granted...

I'm not sure if i agree about the apple take us for granted thing (they have been releasing allot lately, were just impatient, more computer focused would be nice though) but i have to agree with Ubuntu though... Very nice indeed. I'd an old computer (~5 years) and loaded it on and it's very snappy and intuitive.

P.s. i couldn't find who ever left this link http://www.kanguru.com/flashdrive_max.html but did anyone else notice that it's loaded with pc software... would be interesting to question how many people use firewire with pc's and who with MAC's!!!!!

 

[AidenShaw]

I got censored for posting a snippet of the PUBLIC WWCD page...

A lot of posts have been disappearing lately, with no notice or explanation.

We must have a few newbie moderators who think that they're gods....

They'll get over it soon, and realize that people hit these pages for open discussions.

[Hey newbies - "page hits" == "$"]

 

[bwik]

Flash is the future.

Waiting for my 3 hard drives to spin up on my G5 is a real pain. Fo sho.

If you can keep all your apps on 64GB flash, you have a lightning fast computer. Your apps need flash to be speedy. Hard drive should be for media and rarely used files only. This way, apps launch in <1 second and your computer speeds up.

In time, hard drives will obsolete. Will it be next year, no. 2010, yes, quite possibly.

 

[MrCrowbar]

I'd be happy with that kind of consumption. My G4 PowerBook loses way more than 1% a day when asleep. Typically, it goes from a full charge to almost empty after a few days in sleep mode.

I wonder if flash drives could help with this.

In sleep mode the hard drive is off anyway (really off), only RAM gets power so it does not lose it's content. Flash memory could help it it was fast enough to pump 2 GB from the flash memory into the RAM in one second. Then the only power consumption in sleep mode would be the sleep LED.

 

[shyataroo]

why would you have a flash hard drive? why not have flash ram? I mean a 32GB flash SSD is going to be way cheaper and faster? (prolly not) than 32GB of Ram and it will take up less space.

sides, hard drives are still faster for instance the new Fujitsu

MHW2160BJ is capable of data transmission speeds at up to 300MBps, claimed to be the fastest rate in the industry. The series also features best-in-class acoustic noise level of 2.5 bels at idle, and low-power consumption, operating at 2.3W or less when reading or writing data.

source: http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20070307/128506/

thats @ 7,200 RPM I'm sure they will come out with a 10 or 12K RPM version thats even faster.

 

[Snide]

A lot of posts have been disappearing lately, with no notice or explanation.

We must have a few newbie moderators who think that they're gods....

They'll get over it soon, and realize that people hit these pages for open discussions.

[Hey newbies - "page hits" == "$"]

I noticed in the 10.4.9 update thread that no one had posted Safari Is Snappier™
by page 7, which I thought was highly unusual. So I did the unthinkable, and posted it.
My post was deleted so quickly that at first I wasn't sure it went through.
Well, I was vindicated when others reported that Safari was indeed faster.

Personally, a big part of why I read these forums is for the lack of censorship,
and if this disturbing new trend continues, i'll simply spend more time on other sites
(read: fewer hits to this site = less ad revenue).

 

[goosnarrggh]

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

I think you're confusing Flash memory with Ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM or FRAM).

FRAM is offered with an electrical interface, chip density, and read/write timing characteristics similar to conventional SRAM, but it is non-volatile. Its manufacturers specify 100-trillion erase/write cycles.

It cannot presently replace Flash because of Flash's significant advantage in terms of cost-per-bit. But Flash's advantage comes at the expense of extremely slower write speeds, and extremely reduced erase/write-cycles.

RE using Flash to completely replace all conventional RAM...
It's technically not feasible for another reason that hasn't been noted yet. Computers depend on the ability to use trivial low-level operations to read and write individual bytes of system memory.

Current Flash memory offerings cannot erase/write individual bytes independently of all surrounding bytes. Flash is arranged in pages of typically 256 bytes or more, and in order to modify one byte in a given page, all the bytes in that page would need to be erased at once and then re-written with the modified contents. Sure, it would be possible to design a Flash controller which transparently accepts trivial commands like, "change byte 0x0123456789ABCDEF to the value 0xAA", and silently translate them into the necessary "read page"/"erase page"/"write page" operations. But the overhead would be huge and the unnecessary wear would be crippling.

Using Flash to replace hard drives, on the other hand, is perfectly feasible because HDD's are already organized into multi-byte sectors, which make a perfect analogue to Flash pages.

 

[Rocketman]

I noticed in the 10.4.9 update thread that no one had posted Safari Is Snappier™
by page 7, which I thought was highly unusual. So I did the unthinkable, and posted it.
My post was deleted so quickly that at first I wasn't sure it went through.
Well, I was vindicated when others reported that Safari was indeed faster.

Personally, a big part of why I read these forums is for the lack of censorship,
and if this disturbing new trend continues, i'll simply spend more time on other sites
(read: fewer hits to this site = less ad revenue).

I guess I am slightly in favor of deleting things like Safari Is Snappier™ posts and PBG5 next Tuesday too as repetitious and spam. What I object to more is deleting actual content. I have had several posts with profanity be auto-modified too.

I find that in other industries, rocketry in particular, the heavy hand of deletions are far worse and by keeping up the posts that result in the inappropriate deletions, one can get very easily banned, especially if you politely and accurately criticize the host/moderator.

At least here people are not banned just for telling the truth in a polite way. I appreciate that.

The value to macrumors to me is the fact so many OTHER sites' content are summarized then commented on by smart people. You don't ever get ragged on for posting links from other folk's sites either.

So many web hosts have a "not invented here" philosophy that reduces the value of the experience.

Rocketman