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this laptop is supposed to have a flash hard drive

i can't wait for all the laptops to make this transition... in a year or two

quote:

Originally posted by FunkyCrew I think initial research like that is good enough to be a little more cautious

Fan of the precautionary principle, are you? None for me, thanks - I'll stick with my cell phones, computer monitors, plastic wrap, McDonald's cheeseburgers, aerosol deodorant, microwave ovens, aspartame, tuna fish and salmon, tylenol, tap water, dental fillings, Windex, insecticide, prescription drugs and vaccines, Alar, sugar, asbestos, potato chips, herbicides, red meat, soap, food dye, toothpaste, and yes, even testicle heating.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut Fan of the precautionary principle, are you? None for me, thanks - I'll stick with my cell phones, computer monitors, plastic wrap, McDonald's cheeseburgers, aerosol deodorant, microwave ovens, aspartame, tuna fish and salmon, tylenol, tap water, dental fillings, Windex, insecticide, prescription drugs and vaccines, Alar, sugar, asbestos, potato chips, herbicides, red meat, soap, food dye, toothpaste, and yes, even testicle heating.

lol, how long did it take you to come up with that list?
Quite thorough. ^5.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut Fan of the precautionary principle, are you? None for me, thanks - I'll stick with my cell phones, computer monitors, plastic wrap, McDonald's cheeseburgers, aerosol deodorant, microwave ovens, aspartame, tuna fish and salmon, tylenol, tap water, dental fillings, Windex, insecticide, prescription drugs and vaccines, Alar, sugar, asbestos, potato chips, herbicides, red meat, soap, food dye, toothpaste, and yes, even testicle heating.

impressive list indeed!

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Originally posted by DigiNut Ultraportables suck ass. Wimpy performance, no battery life, and run hot enough to burn your lap if you actually leave it there.

You are using the ultra portable for the wrong reason then. Small laptops should never be complete replacements for what a desktop can do, and when used properly, they are not.

Such small laptops allow you to do specialized tasks in any environment, with a minimum of equipment to carry. The laptop which I showed does everything I want it to do for school. I can configure networks, program, and do word processing, all with minimal power (P2-266). And, after I replace the batteries, I should have up to a 5hr life span on a single charge. When paired with the right operating system, and choice of software, I would take ultra-portable over ultra-capable, and some what portable.

If I need to do any movie, audio, or graphic editing, I can wait till i get home to use my a more powerful computer.

daddy likes

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut Ultraportables suck ass. Wimpy performance, no battery life, and run hot enough to burn your lap if you actually leave it there.

14 Hour expected battery life.

source


And in my experience, it's actually been the opposite. Ultra-portables have higher batter life, no? I've got a very non-portable Inspirion 9100, weighs like 10lbs and has a batter life of under 2 hours. Not only that, but it runs very hot, and needs fans blasting at full speed to cool itself most of the time.. I forget the model number, but the more portable inspirion that is essentially the same as the 9100, but different processor and smaller body, had a battery life that was over twice as long. And alot quieter.

quote:

Originally posted by DJ Chrono 14 Hour expected battery life. source

lol, got me on that one.

Granted a lot of that extra life will be thanks to the flash drive. I wonder what life will be like when its actually processing, chomping away on data, rather than just reading from the drive.

quote:

Originally posted by DJ Chrono 14 Hour expected battery life.

Bahahahaha... as if. I guess they can claim anything they want before the thing is actually developed!

quote:

And in my experience, it's actually been the opposite. Ultra-portables have higher batter life, no? I've got a very non-portable Inspirion 9100, weighs like 10lbs and has a batter life of under 2 hours. Not only that, but it runs very hot, and needs fans blasting at full speed to cool itself most of the time.. I forget the model number, but the more portable inspirion that is essentially the same as the 9100, but different processor and smaller body, had a battery life that was over twice as long. And alot quieter.

You haven't specified what was in the ultra-portable, but the Inspiron 9100 uses a Pentium 4 and other horribly inefficient components, whereas I'm going to guess that the ultraportable you're talking about uses a Centrino (Core Duo or Pentium M) and integrated graphics, both of which deliver much better performance at much higher power efficiency; hence less heat, less noise, and more battery life. The difference in computing has been extremely noticeable, especially in the laptop world, ever since Intel abandoned the sinking ship of the P4.

Ultraportables have lower battery life by definition because they have smaller batteries. It's just common sense. You can't compare the new UPs with older tanks because the technology is completely different.

no laptop in the world would give you 14h battery life

quote:

Originally posted by geroin no laptop in the world would give you 14h battery life

the new ones should, with their flash based hard drives.

it's like when the ipod ditched their hard drives (with physical components) to the nano (flash based), you saw almost a doubling of battery life.

all this for a stupid laptop....WTF....ITS JUST A COMPUTER

quote:

Originally posted by Porky it's like when the ipod ditched their hard drives (with physical components) to the nano (flash based), you saw almost a doubling of battery life.

Right, and less than 1/10th of the storage space. Flash drives are still completely cost-prohibitive for a general-purpose PC; nobody's going to buy a laptop with an 8 GB hard drive.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut Right, and less than 1/10th of the storage space. Flash drives are still completely cost-prohibitive for a general-purpose PC; nobody's going to buy a laptop with an 8 GB hard drive.

Even if they manage to stuff a 40GB flash hard-drive in there it will be laughable.

I also forgot to mention, part of the problem with Flash memory is that it can only be rewritten so many times; a typical worst-case limit is 10,000 times. That's fine for a USB stick or an iPod nano where you might change the contents once a day or even once a week, and do it all at once - it will last for years that way. Disks in actual PCs, though, have some sectors rewritten hundreds or thousands of times per day (just think about the page files), and the Flash memory would have to be constantly replaced.

Flash also has great random-access times, which is why Vista has some features that allow you to supplement hard drives with a thumbdrive, but it's also got terrible bandwidth compared to even the lowest-end 4200 RPM laptop hard drives.

We're nowhere near the stage of being able to do away with hard drives in ordinary PCs. I'd love to see it happen, so I could do away with the last few noisy pieces in my own PC, but we are years if not decades away from being able to do that.

It's really a moot point in terms of power consumption, since laptop hard drives only consume a few watts (even desktop drives use less than 10 W at full load). Most of the power consumption is in the CPU (25 W or so) and the inherent inefficiency of a DC power supply. Getting rid of the hard drives completely would improve battery life by maybe 10%, if that.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut I also forgot to mention, part of the problem with Flash memory is that it can only be rewritten so many times; a typical worst-case limit is 10,000 times. That's fine for a USB stick or an iPod nano where you might change the contents once a day or even once a week, and do it all at once - it will last for years that way. Disks in actual PCs, though, have some sectors rewritten hundreds or thousands of times per day (just think about the page files), and the Flash memory would have to be constantly replaced.

If that's the case, then how come flash based hard drives already exist on the market?

SanDisk 32GB SSD

Samsung 32GB SSD


The SanDisk one is listed at 2,000,000 hour MTBF, while regular hard drives are rated more typically around 500,000 hours.

And on a side note,

"The performance of Samsung's SSD exceeds that of a similarly sized hard drive by more than 150%. For example, it can read data at a rate of 56MB per second and achieves write speeds of 32MB per second, which is more than twice as fast as comparable hard disk drives."

They have other very appealing qualities too, for example size/weight,silent opperation, almost no heat emissions, shock resistant, and on and on.

It seems to me like the only drawbacks of SSDs are capacity and price at the momenet, which is obviously going to improve in the near future.

Two things:

1. There's a world of difference between MTBF and Flash rewrite limits. The problem is well-known and well-documented. The MTBF on a Flash drive is completely meaningless if you're trying to run an entire OS on it, because the drive will "fade" much faster than it will fail by virtue of all the rewrites. We're literally talking months, maybe weeks. Even if the drives supported millions of write-erase cycles, which they don't, they still wouldn't survive as long as a magnetic drive would.

2. I don't know how they can possibly claim that 56 MB/s is "more than twice as fast as comparable hard disk drives" - new hard drives are capable of 150 MB/s or even 300 MB/s. It's only with random access that Flash performs better; sequential access, especially with a lot of data, is much slower.

"Solid-state drives" do not solve many important problems but they do create several. The real-world performance improvement is marginal, the price differential is high, and they'll die long before 2 million hours if used as a primary hard disk. There are much more promising technologies for storage, but unfortunately most of them won't be hitting the mass market for 10 years or more, and even then they will be prohibitively expensive.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut 2. I don't know how they can possibly claim that 56 MB/s is "more than twice as fast as comparable hard disk drives" - new hard drives are capable of 150 MB/s or even 300 MB/s. It's only with random access that Flash performs better; sequential access, especially with a lot of data, is much slower.

You are comparing interface speeds versus actual transfer performance. Yes SATA-III has a maximum theoretical transfer speed of 300MB/s, but what will you actually see? The SSD will actually transfer data at 56MB/s, while their interface maximum is over 100MB/s.

The SSD are not
quite as fast as fastest other notebook drives in max throughput, but their minimal seek times will help improve the score.

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