Solid State Drive with 32GB Flash Memory

[mightyt]

Any thoughts?

SanDisk SSD SATA 5000 2.5"

Seems very cool ...

Interesting possibilities for an OS & SW Boot Drive!

Wonder if they will be RAIDable ...

[sandor]

Originally Posted by mightyt

Any thoughts?



Wonder if they will be RAIDable ...

It is built to be a drop in replacement for an SATA drive, so RAID sould be no problem.

[bcjenkins]

where do you buy one?

[jmiddleton]

The technology makes sense for ultra low power applications or situations where the machine will take a lot of physical abuse but high price and low capacity will probably keep it out of the mainstream. There the trend seems to be hybrid drives which combine the high capacity of a conventional hard drive with the low power and zero latency of flash. I'm not sure if you can buy a hybrid drive yet but several manufacturers (including Seagate) have announced them.

[mightyt]

Originally Posted by jmiddleton

The technology makes sense for ultra low power applications or situations where the machine will take a lot of physical abuse but high price and low capacity will probably keep it out of the mainstream. There the trend seems to be hybrid drives which combine the high capacity of a conventional hard drive with the low power and zero latency of flash. I'm not sure if you can buy a hybrid drive yet but several manufacturers (including Seagate) have announced them.

Agreed, big benefit for notebooks where battery life is a concern. However, though I like the Hybrid idea, I see this as a stepping stone. By 2008 I'll be we will likely see 60+ gig. Most of the time that's great for a boot disk with OS and software. Personally where I can I like to keep data on a separate drive. Plus, Hybrid concerns me in one way ... Like the TV with a VCR or DVD in them. One goes bust, the other goes with it. Having then separate you have the best of both worlds and eliminate that concern. I also agree with you on the price, though I believe it will take the usual route. High price until demand an manufacturing are up.

Personally I like the obvious ... no platters, silent and faster. All we need is the bigger and cheaper part!

My biggest problem is my one ... The "I want it now" factor"!

T.

[jmiddleton]

Pundits have been predicting the death of the hard drive since Intel started shipping bubble memory back in the 1970's (anyone else have enough grey hairs to remember that stuff?). Problem is that price/performance of drives has kept improving much faster than the potential solid state competition and, with the recent switch to vertical recording that is unlikely to change any time soon. Another problem with the current generation of flash chips is the limited number of erase and re-write cycles. There shouldn't be a problem if you're using it as an application cache (like Vista ReadyBoost) but the 300K cycles I've seen quoted won't last long if you're using it for volatile data. From what I've read, the hybrid drives actually use ReadyBoost to manage the integrated flash to avoid this problem. Since the flash chips are solid state, they should be a lot more reliable than the mechanical components of the drive.

[lobosrul]

Once I can get a 128GB solid state drive for ~ $200 I will replace my boot drive. I expect that to be in about 2 years. As far as mass storage goes... maybe in 20 years.

[olyar15]

IMO, get a regular laptop drive. They are cheaper, almost as quiet if you acoustically suspend the drive, and the speed difference won't make much of a difference in an HTPC environment. Plus, you don't have to worry about the limited writes inherent in a flash drive.

[SHS]

That drive is only available for OEMs and big system builders only at witch have a hefty price of $350 each USD for large volume orders only and prices maybe expected to be around $200 for a 64 GB drive by year end with maybe >80 MB/s read/write speed and I wouldn't count on 128GB solid state drive for $200 any time soon where we need the enterprise/military-grade solid-state storage solutions engineered for the high performance, high reliability with out $10,000+ price tag that 64GB.
The problem with solid-state storage is there approximately write/erase endurance of 100,000 cycles need be more reliability around 1,000,000+ cycles
http://www.storagesearch.com/siliconsys-art1.html

and the speed difference won't make much of a difference in an HTPC environment.

Not ture SSD read and write cycles which are super fast access time is avg 0.10ms vs regular drive access time is avg 9.5ms
I love to go to SSD but price tag is super way to high when we beable to buy 1TB soon $400

[rleeson]

... don't flash memory devices have a limit on the number of times they can be rewritten... something like a million cycles... for the sectors holding data files that wouldn't be an issue... but for the sectors that carry the the directory information and are altered with every file write to the disk that million writes limit would be eaten up in no time... so for an archive they might work but unless you can't live a spinning disk for reasons like "high G" (ex massive shock and vibration...) I'll stick with spinning media...

[stevech]

Microsoft in Vista is talking up drives with built-in flash (NAND) memory drives. Sounds like they are using it for the virtual memory swap.

In one bit I read, when asked about the 100K cycle limit of most flash, the Microsoft product manager quickly swept the topic under the rug.

It is common for software to have software to spread the cycles evenly around the flash, rather than hitting the same locations over and over as you do on a hard disk. But even so, it seems like a solid state disk for this would need to use RAM not NAND, and that begs the issue of how you make the RAM storage persistent across a power failure (other than merely a battery).