Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

KeyLimePi · May 25, 2005, 04:52 PM

Samsung's NAND-based solid-state disk (SSD), a storage system based around flash memory chips, sounds like the next logical evolution for portable storage. It's lighter, faster, consumes less power, gives off less heat and is completely silent. This article says they will begin production on a commercial version this August. I don't think they're making anything bigger than 16GB at present, though.

I guess if you think about it, spinning platters do seem a little archaic. I can just imagine a future iBook using this. Thin, light, rugged and lots of battery life.

Mastrap · May 25, 2005, 05:08 PM

I'm liking it. The fewer moving parts, the better.

tooki · May 25, 2005, 05:42 PM

What the article doesn't say is how expensive they will be. It's gonna be a while before solid-state storage approaches the cost of disk-based storage.

tooki

historylme · May 25, 2005, 06:59 PM

uhm, http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000567044497/

I remember hearing about a 176gig flash drive version.

that's right
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000247044286/

MaxPower2k3 · May 25, 2005, 07:00 PM

if 16GB is too small, how about 176GB?

Also note that the previous, 90GB iteration of that drive was $40,000.

historylme · May 25, 2005, 07:03 PM

You beat me to the linky though.

RonnieoftheRose · May 25, 2005, 07:19 PM

A disk with no moving parts isn't going to be as fast as a HDD for a while, especially a RAID.

MaxPower2k3 · May 25, 2005, 07:26 PM

that drive history1me and I linked to has a burst transfer rate of 320mb/sec. that compares pretty favorably with current HDD technologies, no? Maybe not RAID arrays, but to single drives (and there's no saying you couldn't RAID some of these flash drives if you had the cash-- imagine a RAID5 array of 176GB flash drives... for several hundred thousand dollars!)

Luca Rescigno · May 25, 2005, 07:31 PM

The main problem is the limited number of rewrites that flash memory can sustain before failing. The number is not very high (10,000 or something). Fine for taking pictures with a digital camera, but when you're running a complex piece of software from it that could mean a failure in just a few weeks.

RonnieoftheRose · May 25, 2005, 07:34 PM

Originally Posted by Luca Rescigno

The main problem is the limited number of rewrites that flash memory can sustain before failing. The number is not very high (10,000 or something). Fine for taking pictures with a digital camera, but when you're running a complex piece of software from it that could mean a failure in just a few weeks.

Exactly. Working with High Definition video would toast flash memory. Odd thing there is a new High Def camera that uses solid state memory in a PCMCIA factor. Cost is something around $1000 per GB with a maximum disk size of 6GB. Rubbish. Stick a proper HDD carriage in a camera.

bubblewrap · May 25, 2005, 08:34 PM

I had an old MacII that had a NuBus card that had 64megs on it as a solidstate hard drive.
I forget what it's proper name was.

A RamDART. That's what it was!

Kvasir · May 26, 2005, 01:35 PM

Originally Posted by RonnieoftheRose

A disk with no moving parts isn't going to be as fast as a HDD for a while, especially a RAID.

I'm confused, I thought that was the whole point of these flash drives? Most hard discs these days have mean transfer rates of a few hundred megabits per second, or less than 100 megabytes per second. The M-System drive has a mean transfer rate of 320 megabytes per second. And it's rated for over 5 million write/erasure cycles. The military (and areospace industry, I gather) is buying them instead of hard discs for mission critical servers.

tooki · May 26, 2005, 02:00 PM

Originally Posted by RonnieoftheRose

A disk with no moving parts isn't going to be as fast as a HDD for a while, especially a RAID.

Nonsense, mechanical parts are the biggest bottleneck in computing today.

The fastest "disk" you could make today would be a RAM disk that used some form of backup power -- it'd be, well, as fast as RAM, which is to say, hella fast.

Consider that RAM can be written to/read from at gigabytes per second. No single disk can come anywhere close. Heck, few disk arrays are that fast.

tooki

Oneota · May 26, 2005, 05:04 PM

Saw this awhile back:

GOOD VIBRATIONS DELIVER DATA
As computer processors are getting faster and faster, the time it
takes to retrieve data from a computer's hard disk is still a
bottleneck. The problem is physics -- hard disks spin at between 5,400
and 15,000 rpm, and if they went any faster, the forces generated could
shatter the plastic. Enter Dataslide, which proposes to abandon rotation
in favor of vibration. The company has a prototype drive that contains a
rectangular plate coated with magnetic storage material similar to
what's used in disk drives. A second plate hovers above with an array of
heads that have been lithographed on to its surface using the technique
used to make the pixels in LCD screens. Instead of spinning under the
heads, the lower plate vibrates from side to side at 600 times per
second, a process that inventor Charles Barnes says delivers data 10
times faster than the 15,000 rpm rotating disk drive. Barnes envisions
tweaking his product to increase the frequency of vibration to 100,000 a
second -- equivalent to a disk rotating at 12 million rpm. (The
Economist 10 Feb 2005)
<http://www.economist.com>

macaddict0001 · May 27, 2005, 07:10 PM

the bad thing about a ram disk though is that people would be po'd about their data getting erased.