Solid state drives on their way

[Spino]

Really? I'm impressed. Had enough trouble getting them to run after that back in Windows95 days, surprised it still works. Good to know though. After my last reformat I did that cunning partition thing too...

I don't want to be misleading so I must clarify that 'most programs' in my universe means games. Obviously the more complex utilitarian apps, especially those that incorporate themselves into the explorer shell or system tray, won't work using this method. You'd be surprised how many apps will continue to work though. However, it's been my experience that most games installed to the D: partition will continue to work even after you've nuked the registry and wiped the install info present on the C: partition. Saved games and personal settings aside this method saves you an entire evening (or two) of reinstalling and reconfiguring those multi-gig footprint games.

[Lemur]

As much as I would love a solid-state or hybrid drive, I hope they'll be able to address the issue of longevity. Last I checked, flash memory has a finite number of times it can be overwritten ...

[x-dANGEr]

As much as I would love a solid-state or hybrid drive, I hope they'll be able to address the issue of longevity. Last I checked, flash memory has a finite number of times it can be overwritten ...

Hmm..?

Is 10,000 writes enough? Absolutely, assures Barnetson. Samsung memory uses a technique called "wear leveling" to distribute the writes on a media through as many groups of cells as possible. The idea behind wear leveling is that all of the cells have approximately the same amount of writes to them, maximizing the life of the device. Consider a typical computer that writes 120 megabytes per hour to the hard drive. On a 32GB solid-state NAND drive, wear leveling would distribute this data over the entire drive -- it would take 267 hours to fill the device once. Even on a multi-cell flash device, at this rate it would take no less than 150 years to burnout all the bits on the SSD. Single-cell drives are capable of ten times as many writes.

[Husar]

Argh, wanted to wait for one of them hybrid drives, hoping they may be somewhat like two HDDs(like one flash HDD with say, 20Gb and 400GB usual HDD space) but looks like the flash is not even enough to install windows on and is used as temporary storage or so(maybe windows page file?).
Just read this blog entry from some Lenovo employees to see what I mean, looks like it's not worth getting one of these for now. Also makes me curious about how those flash-only drives will be and when they will come.

[Spino]

Now we're getting serious... SATA interface and 128gig capacity drives...

http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/17/adata_ssd_128gb/

A-Data shows off massive 128 GB solid state drive
Humphrey Cheung
January 17, 2007 13:10

Las Vegas (CA) - A-Data, a Taiwanese memory and peripheral company, has shown off prototypes of an upcoming solid-state drive for ExpressCard, IDE and SATA interfaces. Mainly built for notebook computers, the drives have capacities of 32, 64 and 128 GB.

The samples were shown to editors of the Inquirer website and they have a few pictures embedded in their article. The 32 and 64 GB drives come in 1.8" form factors while the 128 GB drive is in a 2.5" size.

Solid state drives promise to be much faster than traditional hard drives. Since there are no moving parts, the drives can reach sustained read speeds of 62 MB/s and have an access time in the sub-millisecond range. Regular hard drives typically have access times between 8 and 19 ms. In addition, SSDs promise to enhance battery life by a few minutes.

A-Data didn't specify the price, but did say that mass production should start late Q1. Both Samsung and Sandisk have announced competing 32 GB solid-state drives. Those will be several hundred dollars and we expect A-Data's drive to be at least one thousand dollars.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36841

Future of Flash revealed

CES 007 A-DATA in an SSD bonanza with 32, 64 and 128GB drives

By Theo Valich in Las Vegas: Wednesday 10 January 2007, 10:38

WERE YOU TO ASK what is the integral part of practically almost all CES products (CE, cars, PC – does not matter), there'a s one-word answer: Flash.
Flash memory is everywhere with firms handing out 1GB, 2GB and even 16GB drives willy-nilly.

But the best is yet to come. And Taiwanese memory company A-DATA is here to show off the next generation of flash hard drives.

A-DATA is currently sampling 32GB SSD in a ExpressCard size, 64GB in 1.8" notebook size and a massive 128GB one in 2.5" form with classical SATA-II connectors. Mass production is slated for late Q1 and early Q2, with availability expected to follow right after the start of production.

Pricing is as yet unannounced but the product manager for the line-up explained that with the prices of the SSD drives coming down by half, year on year, you might expect that late Q4 will bring a generation of sub-notebooks that could break even with the mobile hard drives. µ

[Caius]

Imagine XP booting up in two seconds flat. Imagine your favourite game doing much the same. Imagine no more hard drive whine.

Will the processors tolerate this new type of disks?Will the pc overheat very soon.Im not sure.

[Caius]

Imagine XP booting up in two seconds flat. Imagine your favourite game doing much the same. Imagine no more hard drive whine.

Will the processors tolerate this new type of disks?Will the pc overheat very soon.Im not sure.

[BDC]

Will the processors tolerate this new type of disks?Will the pc overheat very soon.Im not sure.

It'll be fine. The amount of data that's sent back and forth is huge within the system, hard drives are just slow...