Samsung is aiming for a 256 GB SSD by the end of the year. With Intel hopping into the game it should get interesting. I am hoping SSD technology explodes so that prices drop and we won't have to sacrifice lots of storage. It only makes sense to develop SSD as it gets physically harder to cram storage on magnetic drives.
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Intel Entering Solid State Drive Market
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Man, that's bloody excellent! That means we might get some decent sized (64GB and up) fast and relatively cheap Expresscard32 SSDs in a year or so
Its good to see more competition in the market. Seeing as how Intel already makes a large portion of the internal components in many laptops, this should help to dramatically decrease prices as other manufacturers will slash prices to compete. Until SSD reach a capacity of at least 200GB, I really can't see them being the norm in primary drive configurations. Yes SSD's are faster but capacity is still capacity and consumers are filling up their HDD's faster than ever with music, pictures, and video. At the price that SSD's will sell for, it won't be a viable solution for consumers that are worried about capacity. Yes SSD capacity will increase but what about the cost of replacing it. Even in 2 years, having to replace a large capacity SSD will make someone think twice about buying one in the first place (in comparison to the price of HDD's). Now there will always be people who can afford more expensive systems, but they (we) never move the industry where it needs to go. Its ALWAYS the average consumer that pushes technology forward. I think the best way to incorporate SSD technology is to use them in a dual HD configuration with the OS and applications run on a reasonably sized (and priced) SSD of about 80GB and a standard HDD of about 300GB 7200rpm (with options to increase both of course). There might need to be some case redesigns but hey, that would be an ideal system.
An interesting question is do you need something like the SCSI command set with a non-rotating storage device. Also you might want to re-vist the clasic "elevator algorithm" used to optimize head motion. With no heads to move and zero rational latency yu might even want to redesign the file system. Framentation is no longer even remotely a bad thing. Heck you may even want fragmentation to spread usage oover the entire device to prolong it's life.
In face why even use the SATA interface. Flash RAM is just a slow RAM. Why not treat it as a thrird level RAM. Inother words as a backing store.
How many people here remember the OS called "Multex". The word "unix" was play on the older OS. It was a good description too. multex was huge and complex while unix was intended to be smaller and simpler. Back on topic. The Multex file system was very well suited to Flash RAM. Under Multex all files were always considered to be in RAM. Programs never did reads or writes to disk because the files were all memory mapped. To pull this off you need a large address space (32-bits is to small) and a virtual memory system. Multex ran on a 48-bit machine back in the early 60's UNIX was a grossly streamlined Mulltix but maybe today we can finally afford to do what was so expansive 45 years ago. Given enough cheap flash RAM we could do away with most of the parts of the file system. Flash, unlike a disk drive is truly random access.
So happy I bought mine last week...
It's working great, and I'll be happy to maybe get a new one in 2010!
In the near term you are correct but if flash RAM really does fall in price at 50% per year then it is falling faster then the price of disk drives. At some point flash will be cheaper.
In general prices fall faster for newer technologies. As a technology matures all of the easy innovations are already done and it gets harder to think of ways to make it better. Disk drives are more then 40 years old now but they are based on drums that were first made in the 50's (much like the way audio records went from cylinders to platters but the basic technology was still a needle in a grove) Rotating magnetic memory was born in the mid 50's and is older then most people who use it. Flash by comparison is much newer and we might expect there is still 50 years of life in the technology.
Intel is betting that the price of flash will fall below the cost of rotating magnetic memory and become the dominant storage media. In time it will be
architected?
"When Intel launches its...products, you'll see that not all SSDs are created equal," Winslow said. "The way the SSDs are architected, the way the controller and firmware operates makes a huge difference"
Did that guy actually say "architected?" That's the greatest made up word since "misremembered."
"When Intel launches its...products, you'll see that not all SSDs are created equal," Winslow said. "The way the SSDs are architected, the way the controller and firmware operates makes a huge difference"
Did that guy actually say "architected?" That's the greatest made up word since "misremembered."
In reality, what are the chances in the future of an OS that is Multex based being written for Apple? BTW, I am learning quite a bit by reading your posts. Thank you.
Actually, it's not made up:
I think it's jargon, to be frank.
And this:
from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Even to my surprise (BA in Creative Writing from Pepperdine University), "misremember" is, in fact, a real word (according to the Princeton WordNet. I googled the word to see if it was a Bush-ism that you were referring to. I'm glad it's not... then he might look like a smart guy.
But DRAM (as its name implies) needs to be constantly refreshed and SRAM, while its outputs are "static" once the data is latched, is still volatile. You'd lose your whole SSD disk contents as soon as the power was removed. Not exactly useful for a device that is supposed to replace a hard drive.
So how does one obtain permanent storage using a DRAM/SRAM-based device?
Motorola should get in the game too. They can make low capacity drives and call it the Megabyte Myth when asked why they offer low capacities at a higher price.
I'm happy to see Intel get in the game. They are very smart company that has been leading the way for many years in whatever product they venture in. I've been waiting for SSD computing for sooo long i'm glad i'll live to see it. BTW I am a INTC shareholder.
More important is the fact that Intel recently announced creating (in partnership with another firm) flash memory with faster write speeds and longer cell rewrite life. Will light a fire under the other players fore sure
I'm wondering if the MBA is going to turn out like the Core Duo Intel macs. The technology Apple were really waiting for (Core 2 64-bit) was not quite ready yet. In the case of the MBA - to make it work you need faster, bigger, and less expensive SSDs, but in the meantime Apple went with the drives they could get right now.
Going to be real interesting.
Have to say - I love this line of reasoning! In an eye-blink (yes, a year or two is an eye-blink) we might really have very thin and VERY powerful laptops without too many compromises (except maybe for the lack of a superdrive).
Thats not true at all. There are many enthusiasts, pro users, etc that would love to see a fast SSD in a Macbook Pro. Another obvious solution would be a fast 32-64GB SLC SSD and a ~250 2.5".
Why are people suggesting SSD's of 80GB and 120GB.
Its solid state!!!!! All storage capacities will be in 2^n amounts 32/64/128/512 etc.
Hence 64 currently available for Macbook air's!
You call yourselves computer enthusiasts?
Yep I do call myself that. You could call yourself that too if you knew what you were talking about!
i'm kidding, no hard feelings.Nope. You are correct in that the individual flash chips themselves are 2^n, but todays chips are only at 8gigabit capacity i believe. In other words, they use a bunch of these chips together to get the final capacity.
Som things are wrong here, Mr. computer engineer.
First of all, although there have been "RAM drive" type solid state drives, usually when people refer to SSDs they are almost ALWAYS talking about non-volatile flash SSDs; Especially in any context about consumer computers and storage. Frankly, I haven't heard nearly ANY news or discussion about non-flash based SSDs in ages.
Yes, flash has a much slower read/write rate than DRAM/SRAM, but flash is used for non-volatile permanent storage to replace a traditional harddrive, so obviously extra speed of RAM is worthless for this application.
As far as comparing flash SSDs to SATA drives, It really depends on what speed HDD you are talking about.
If you are comparing your flash SSDs with a 15,000 RPM SAS drive, they obviously are much slower for sequential file read/writing for all but the fastest (and most expensive) SSD drives.
But for average laptops that mostly have 5400rpm (or even 7200rpm) drives, or subnotebooks with 1.8" 4200rpm drives, The average flash SSD speed of 45-75MB/s read and 30-40MB/s write is competitive and in fact, usually somewhat faster. More expensive and power hungry flash SSDs are on the market with sustained sequential read/write speeds of around 100MB/s.
Obviously though, the real advantage of flash drives compared to traditional HDDs is in the incredibly quick random access response time of fractions of a a millisecond compared to the 6-12ms of HDD.
So in fact, manufacturers are not lying in stating that flash SSDs are in fact much faster than comparable HDDs, and always in response time. lower power use and durability are other benefits.
Flash SSDs should be much more reliable in the standard reliability measure of mean-time-between-failure as far as random failures of which consumer level HDDs are notorious for. And recently, the wear-resistance has gotten significantly better.