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

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quote:

Scott has been introduced to the rave scene, and Ecstasy, by Craig. The two of them go out on the weekends, with some of Craigs friends, and stay up all night, dancing in a drug-fueled trance.

Last edited by Moral Hazard on Apr-26-2011 at 07:48

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.

___________________
My party schedule:
2009-02-21 - DJ Attention @ I'm So Popular
2009-06-18 - DJ Annoying @ People Need To Know Where I'll Be
2012-11-32 - DJ Insufferable ɸ Or At Least the Stalkers I Complain About
2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
9999-45-81 - Tweaker Gimp ☼ I Probably Won't Even Go To This But I Have To Make Sure I Fill Up All The Available Space Here

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'm the trouble starter, fuckin' instigator.
I'm the fear-addicted, danger illustrated.

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.

___________________
My party schedule:
2009-02-21 - DJ Attention @ I'm So Popular
2009-06-18 - DJ Annoying @ People Need To Know Where I'll Be
2012-11-32 - DJ Insufferable ɸ Or At Least the Stalkers I Complain About
2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
9999-45-81 - Tweaker Gimp ☼ I Probably Won't Even Go To This But I Have To Make Sure I Fill Up All The Available Space Here

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.

___________________
My party schedule:
2009-02-21 - DJ Attention @ I'm So Popular
2009-06-18 - DJ Annoying @ People Need To Know Where I'll Be
2012-11-32 - DJ Insufferable ɸ Or At Least the Stalkers I Complain About
2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
9999-45-81 - Tweaker Gimp ☼ I Probably Won't Even Go To This But I Have To Make Sure I Fill Up All The Available Space Here

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.