Solid State Drives in Notebooks? 46
spenney asks: "It seems like the most problematic part of any notebook is the speed of the hard drive (and they also get noisy). I noticed this site selling 2.5" solid state disks (SSDs). Anybody currently using one of these in a notebook? I can't find pricing anywhere, but they've gotta cost a fortune." How long do you think it will be before the major laptop manufacturers start adopting this technology?
My experience with laptops... (Score:4, Insightful)
The constant moving, up and down, left and right, jostling, dropping, the occasional beating-by-classmates (consider laptop being hauled around in a backpack - yes, the Targus ones are damned, good, I have one [If you need a laptop bag, GET ONE!], but the padding doesn't stop the heads from skittering across the platters when the laptop is subjected to smacking, pounding, and even spinning around.) Data is lost, the discs spin down, and it's all just one big bloody mess. Solid state drives, if affordable, could definately revolutionize the way I look at laptops, the way my school looks at laptops as a student solution, and the way the laptop community works.
But... will it catch on? Please? I hope so. This is one thing that would suck to see it go the way of vaporware.
Re:My experience with laptops... (Score:1)
Over the course of my freshman year, I had 3 hard drives fail, and I know plenty of other people who have lost 1 or 2, and several people who've lost 3 or more. I'm just lucky now that I have a new desktop, the laptop hardly ever gets used.
I actually made it a point of mine to NOT move the laptop around, if possible, after my second drive died, and for the most part it sat on my desk, with the same result as when I did carry it around with me.
You know you have HD problems when the service guy can't believe that you were able to get ANYTHING off the disk, that's always a good thing to be hearing.
Old school suggestion (Score:3, Informative)
Don't move a machine while it is running.
The theory behind this was the gyroscopic forces of a four pound (2kg), five platter hard drive spinning at 3600 rpm were incredibly strong and the drive heads were very large (quarter inch by quarter inch, or thereabouts) and were quite a bit more massive than today's itty-bitty drive heads. It was believed that yawing the drive (moving it so the spindle changed the direction it was pointing) would cause insane pressure on the bearings, and that the inertia of even a short quick movement could set the drive heads to enter a harmonic weave or bounce.
Enter laptop drives spinning at 5400rpm - granted lighter and only a single platter, but still moving a LOT faster and now envision how much movement the laptop gets while it is turned on : you keep it in your lap, you turn it on its side, you flip it around to show your friend, you take it off your lap to put it on the desk so you can get up to get a drink, you pick it up off the desk to put it back on your lap
I would imagine that you could destroy a laptop hard drive in a weekend by vigorously flipping the laptop around while the drive is running - aye? So if you are slowly flopping your laptop around while the drive is spinning, you are merely destroying it slower.
I would wager that you can't damage a laptop drive with the heads parked (all current drives park the heads when they power down) without cracking the laptop case and screen.
Granted current generation IDE drives are failing in record numbers, but if you want your drive to live to its potential quit moving it while it is on. Get an external keyboard / mouse (I use the Logitech iTouch keyboard / mouse and love them), this won't affect your hard drive but will let you put the keyboard in your lap and toss it around if you like, while the laptop remains stationary. Put the laptop on a table, turn it on
I would LOVE a solid state drive, but at a dollar a meg I'm not getting one any time soon. Treat your laptop like it was a delicate, fragile piece of precision hardware and your hard drives are going to last a LOT longer.
they say the price is $1-2/mb (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edfeature
Re:they say the price is $1-2/mb (Score:2)
Hey that's pretty expensive! ( looking at the 30 gig IBM laptop drive that I remember as being a real bargain at about $200 )
Why don't you just load up on ram and set up a software ram drive, and get one of those 500meg compact flash things ( a real bargain at about $160 ) that they use in digital cameras for long term user file storage?
That would be the cheapest. Booting and program storage is an exercise left to you, but a boot from cd setup would work.
Lots of ram usually beats a fast disk unless you are sloshing around big files like for instance in video editing or manipulating a 300 meg photograph, and even then an extra gig of ram is probably a better investment than a super fast hard drive.
Servers are a whole other ball of wax of course.
Is there some problem you actually trying to solve ?
Re:they say the price is $1-2/mb (Score:1)
Really though, just wanted to see if anyone is doing it and whether it makes sense to spend $1/mb for it.
Re:they say the price is $1-2/mb (Score:1)
Um, aren't the 500 meg compact flash devices actually miniature hard disks, e.g. the IBM microdrive? (I may just be showing my ignorance though.)
Re:they say the price is $1-2/mb (Score:2)
Re:they say the price is $1-2/mb (Score:1)
I have done this (Score:3, Informative)
It works nicely, but it is a little slow. If you use it like a massive floppy drive for moving massive files between laptops, it is great. Totally reliable. Just a little slow, about on par with IDE drives of a couple of years ago - 1.0MB/s or a little slower is what I remember my rig running. I had visions of running a database app on it (no moving parts! zero latency!) but the read/write speeds and throughput throttled the system pretty bad.
I just re-benchmarked it, read speed peaked at 875KB/s over the course of 24Megs of data, averaging around 500KB/s - 700KB/s, write speed peaked at 435KB/s averaging maybe 400KB/s over the course of 40Megs total in three large files.
They come in sizes up to 1G, and the prices on those are dropping FAST (under $150 now for a Gig, maybe $200.) For a removable media they are great. For moving massive files around between computers they are great, esp. if the machines are not networked. For storing a bunch of data while you reinstall your OS and apps - great.
Hope to replace your hard drive? Sorry but not really fast enough. I guess if you had LOTS of RAM (enough that your machine doesn't swap) and just wanted to boot your computer (OS, apps) from the CompactFlash you could put four 1G cards on adapters and fill the two IDE channels on a computer - one for the OS and the other three to store your programs and data on
Would be really quiet though, and if you coupled it with a CPU that was a few generations old (say a mid range Celeron, perhaps) that could use one of those heat-pipe coolers with no cooling fan - totally silent computer.
Re:I have done this (Score:1)
What about the limit on number of rewrite? (Score:4, Insightful)
or is this a different kind of flash from an alternate universe that i dont know about. I noticed on the webpage, they mention a very high MTBF, which is logical, but dont say anything about the number of rewrite cycles...
Ghoul2
Re:What about the limit on number of rewrite? (Score:4, Informative)
Also, many flash parts have a 1e6 writes rated life span. That is, they will survive a *minimum* of 1e6 writes or you can have your money back.
Re:What about the limit on number of rewrite? (Score:1)
Re:What about the limit on number of rewrite? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, they say that typical endurance is 27 years for a drive that gets written 100GB a day [bitmicro.com] and 28000 years if the drive gets written only 100MB a day. And those are just for 1GB model. 4.6GB model can take 100GB a day and still survice 123 years. I'd call that damn reliable. No details how they do that but I guess there's some hardware layer that remaps new data to least used areas.
The only thing I don't like is the read and write speeds. And the price, probably.
1,000,000 rewrites (Score:1)
Re:What about the limit on number of rewrite? (Score:1)
Laptops? They dont think so... (Score:3, Insightful)
From their own Applications page [bitmicro.com] you can see that their not even looking for the laptop market:
Not that it isn't a good idea, but they are just not going to price them to compete with the standard Magnetic disks. But looking at the performace [bitmicro.com] these would kick butt in any server application!
Re:Laptops? They dont think so... (Score:3, Interesting)
Your comments about the uses of such a device in servers is perceptive. I see stories about Solid-State Hard Disks(SSHD) a few times a year. Like many other technology topics, it's either cyclic, or brought out in slow news days.
Just about everywhere I've seen them discussed in any real depth though, server applications are the ones most commonly brought up. There are 2 main reasons for this. The first is that businesses are much less sensitive to price overall than your average Joe looking for a nice system to do email with. For the forseeable future (or until a fundamental change of technology), these SSHDs are going to be really expensive, especially when you compare them to magnetic media like hard disks. ($1/meg as opposed to $1/gig).
That's where the performance comes in. For sheer performance, you can't beat memory speeds. Even the 10k RPM drives are pokey by comparison to the access and transfer you can achieve in properly engineered SS hardware. Historically, we've seen, in general, a 1000x difference between disks and memory. (I'll probably get slammed on my numbers)
So, if you have an application that really needs a bunch of speed in randomly accessing a great deal of data, you might be willing to pay for it if you need it badly enough. You get 1000 times the speed at about 1000 times the price.
Personally, I'd think there are better solutions for this though. Rather than having a SSHD, you could just use more main memory and cache the hell out of your data. I used to work at a place where we had a multi-GB database, that was read into memory on boot, and then accessed from there. This was necessary due to the extreme time-sensitive nature of responses to queries necessary on the device. Disk reads of any kind would have pushed us beyond the required response times, so we just didn't have them. Sure made the system slow to boot up though :-)
Server Market (Score:3, Interesting)
One issue wil be total cost though. Currently we estimate the need for 4 clusters of drives.
1 X 42TB cluster and
3 X 28TB clusters.
At $1 per MB those are some signifigant numbers.
126 million dollars in arrays. vs something like an X Raid [apple.com] at $6038 TB-1 [apple.com] or a total of 761 thousand. There is a cost factor difference of 165.
Consider ... (Score:2)
1. Multi-tier the data. Early computers went CPU - Core Memory - Paper Tape for storage. This was wicked slow so they added a faster medium in the middle : CPU - Memory - Hard Drive - Paper output. Still slow, added something fast here : CPU - really fast cache memory - RAM - hard drive - paper output. Consider something between the memory and the hard drive as sort of a non-volatile cache
2. Tweak your data model. If database performance is the bottleneck, consider denormalizing your data some to make it more 'write friendly.' Also if you can trim the size of your recordsize by 10% and throughput was an issue, all of a sudden you increase performance by 10%.
3. Perhaps something that large and importance would be best designed and implemented on something other than Apple [apple.com] hardware. With a server room full of Blade servers, three racks could hold 1024 servers, each with two 60G drives and you would be at your 126TB with the processing power of a super computer (1024 CPUs of whatever flavor you want
4. If you are going to dream, dream big. By the time you are done writing the software Moore's Law will have caught up with you to provide you with the hardware necessary to get decent performance. If a computer simulation will take 5 years to run on today's hardware you will finish faster by waiting a year and running it on whatever hardware is top of the line then.
Just curious about the nomenclature you used - 14MBs-l - could you break this down for me? I am guessing megabytes per second, but the -l throws me. Unless that is seconds to the -1 (which is MB/s, which is what I was guessing anyways
Re:Consider ... (Score:1)
1. Medical application thus with 5000 individual databases that need redundandcy
2. Unfortunately because of Hippa we are limited in a number of ways. However its teh issue of trackinghe movements of 5000 users constantly through the system with Database writes that causes the bigger issue
3. Sorry sir, as a 20 year network guy with in excess of 70 industry certs in M$, Apple and Unix systems I am sticking with Apple in this. Besides you should know better than to try and change a macHeads mind on systems
4. Who is dreaming. quite honestly this is not that big a project. We are at final beta stage now as it is. Moores law really doesnt apply as it is data storage that is the issue not processing power. As it stands the model involves 4 clusters of machines as it is.
fianally as you guessed it is MBs-1 not MBs-L so yes I could also write it MB/s or even MB but as i prefer standard scientific notation I shall remain with MBs-1
Perspective (Score:2)
5000 databases? Sounds like it is massively Normalized to me, and then some. All well and good until the relationship engine is driving databases in which the relationships between databases are four or more layers deep (in a row - meaning that changing the record on the master table drives the records on all the secondary tables, and these drive the records in 3'iary tables, which in turn drive 4'iary tables
Watch the resource allocation during production. If the system is swapping data in and out to the swapfile and the box will hold more RAM, add more RAM.
How about 15 full size racks of Blade Servers (340 per rack), thus 5000 completely autonomous 1.3GHz machines, each with two 20G drives set up in a RAID 1 configuration
I wasn't saying you were dreaming when you designed it, I was saying that you weren't dreaming when you designed it. If you start designing a system and all of the hardware is commercially available at design time, you aren't pushing it hard enough
Is fibre channel an option? How about fiber optics between all the servers, and between the servers and the last switch before the end users? Anything faster than Gigabit networking available for the Apple servers (I don't know, I'm asking)?
I'm not quite as long in the tooth (13 years professional, plus the 5 I spent in college) but I would love to get a look at some of the system documentation, design spec's
Re:Perspective (Score:1)
There is a reason there are 5000 databases
Processing power isnt an issue the 22 servers planned are way more than enough to handle anything we want to throw at them from this application. and if it isnt the system is completely scalable.
Sorry, I can't go into specifics for confidentiality reasons.
Here's some pricing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Here's some pricing (Score:2)
Laptops? What about servers? (Score:2)
Right now, its as easy to put $170 drives in each machine rather then go with a centeral RAID/NFS server, but even with such a beast, it would be nice to have a solid state, realy fast, drive ~2gb. Im also thinking things like nodes in a (computational) cluster, thin clients, lab machines, etc etc.
Does such a thing exist?
Exist? (Score:3, Informative)
This doesn't cover all your uses, but for the ones it does cover
Power consumption. (Score:2, Informative)
From the linked page the 30GB drive is listed at using
write 3.3W, read 3.1W,idle 2.4W.
From a fijitsu web page http://hdd.fujitsu.com/global/drive/mhs2xxx/catal
wead/write 2.30W, idle 0.65W, standby 0.25W, sleep 0.10W.
When I first saw the post, I was hoping for quite the opposite. The last thing I need is my laptop to run dry faster, I don't need the fast read/write in a laptop.
Re:Power consumption. (Score:1, Informative)
Most people could get by with 2 Gigs.
Assuming its proportional: (which I doubt, but I bet its pretty close)
Your Wead/write would be 0.18W
and your idle at around 0.12W
Sounds sweet to me.
Extremely expensive (Score:1)
If I remember correctly, the cost was on the order of $1,000 a Gigabyte.
Quite a prohibitive price for most applications.
Re:Extremely expensive (Score:3, Informative)
For most applications today yes, I would agree with you this is way more expensive than we have become accustomed to paying, but it is also way more performance than we are accustomed to getting - if adding a $2,000 solid state drive to a web server doubled the number of simultaneous connections it could handle that would be very cheap : $2,000 is about two days of custom development and there is no way you could get a programmer to double the performance of a system in two days.
For commercial apps, I see these things possibly making a difference IF they can keep the performance substantially faster than regular hard drives.
Been some time... (Score:2)
Have 1GB Sandisk FlashDrive. Silence is wonderful! (Score:3, Interesting)
I do have to be careful about space and it is a little slow. Very important to defrag regularly, speed drops greatly with fragmentation. I'm using Win98 to save space. Unfortunately, it will not run with Win's Virtual Memory set low or to zero. It can be tricky to format the drive.
Love the silence.
http://www.sandisk.com/oem/flashdrive.asp
Re:Have 1GB Sandisk FlashDrive. Silence is wonderf (Score:1)
I suppose you could get a 2GB SanDisk for your boot/swap drive and then put in one of their 2GB PC Cards (Type II slot) for apps and such. Add a wireless adapter and you're all set. Anyone know if the PC Cards will work under Linux?
Re:Have 1GB Sandisk FlashDrive. Silence is wonderf (Score:2)
Re:Have 1GB Sandisk FlashDrive. Silence is wonderf (Score:1)
Please explain why. Any other reason aside from the obvious performance issue?
Anyhow, I am stuck with it on Win98. When I tried setting virtual memory to 0 or to a small value either Win98 or an app would sooner or later get upset.
Thanks
Answers (Score:3, Informative)
2. If footprint and performance is your concern, consider a minimal install of Win95. Get it patched up nice and it is tight, stable. Doesn't run DirectX8.1 or higher - just FYI - but for normal use it is way better than 98
3. The reason for not putting a swapfile in flash has to do with the incessant writes/reads/rewrites to that file. Flash has a notably short lifespan (not terribly short, but if you hammer on the same blocks over and over and over it takes its toll.)
4. With enough RAM (256M is not unreasonable to fill a laptop with) you can run Win95 with no swapfile (YMMV)
Re:Answers (Score:2, Insightful)
The system has 160Mb, which is the max for it. For my next system, I will look for one that takes more RAM.
The Win98 never crashes (except for the rare shutdown hang.) It does crash if I fiddle with the swapfile size or turn it off. Like you say, instability. I do run Norton WinDoctor regularly to clean up the registry.
I don't think I want to go back to 95 in order to gain more space, but it is an interesting idea.
I will look into a minimal XP installation with no swapfile.
Best thing is to stop keeping so many unused apps and unused files on the system! I have IE set to keep only 0 days worth of history. And use Norton Clean Sweep once in a while. Mijenix SizeManager is very helpful on this. Amazing the redundant, old, and usused junk that collects in a Win system.
By the way, I back up the key files online to a small TypeII PCCard Sandisk and, of course, offline.
Thanks again for the insight.
Re:Have 1GB Sandisk FlashDrive. Silence is wonderf (Score:1)
It is a Sandisk FlashDrive that drops in the system in place of the 3.5" IDE hard drive. Physically it is a Type III ATA PCMCIA card which comes from Sandisk with a heavy metal adapter.
There are other brands as well. Sold for industrial controllers and aerospace/military applications.
If you already have a PCCard ATA unit --- I did not see the adapter anywhere on the Sandisk site but I expect that it is orderable as a repair part somehow. You'd probably have to call the Sandisk support folks. Have not looked explicitly for it, but I have never noticed an adaptor like that listed anywhere. It is a very simple connector and frame assembly with few electrical components.
Check the industrial section of their Website for details. The FlashDrive is an industrial product, not a consumer product, so it is expensive and hard to get. I got mine from Bell Microproducts. Google the various part numbers (they come in different temperature grades) to see who else has it or will order it for you. I remember that either PCConnection, CDW, or Insight listed them as special order at a high price.
Yesterday I was listening to a mockingbird while using this system indoors...
Why are they slower when fragmented? (Score:2)
pcmcia card drives (Score:2)
Re:pcmcia card drives (Score:2)
Take a 1G CompactFlash card and a 2G PCMCIA Toshiba hard drive. Get in your car. Driving down the street at 30 miles an hour, toss both out the window. Find them, take them home, put them in a laptop.
Actually the original idea for the thread was using solid state drives (not the SanDisk CompactFlash like I am using - I think the thread got hijacked to the tune of flash disks as alternatives to hard drives) to get zero noise, incredibly fast access, and less fragile - the PCMCIA drive by Toshiba may be quiet, but not silent, and fast, but not as fast as the BitMicro stuff wants us to believe the SSDs are.
get these drives cheap on ebay. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:get these drives cheap on ebay. (Score:1)
If you're not talking about Flash, then ignore the above, and accept my apologies for the confusion.