Flash drives in future Apple laptops?

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 42
    wmfwmf Posts: 1,164member
    Flash chips may be slow, but a flash drive would have many chips, so it could internally stripe across them.



    ThinkPads have the hard disk in a bay; I think there's just one screw holding it in. You could probably plug it right into a WiebeTech dock.



    Microsoft has proposed to add flash to hard disks as a write cache.
  • Reply 22 of 42
    kolchakkolchak Posts: 1,398member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by heinzel

    Mmmh. Didn't Samsung say the 16 GB device is a prototype, i.e. it's "expensive laboratory technology", just as much as the other RAM types are at this point?



    There's a big difference between a whole new techology and a refined, miniaturized version of existing technology. If you think bringing unproven technologies to market that have previously never been out of the lab is so simple, I have some stock in magnetic bubble manufacturers I want to sell you.
  • Reply 23 of 42
    hirohiro Posts: 2,663member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by wmf

    Flash chips may be slow, but a flash drive would have many chips, so it could internally stripe across them.



    ThinkPads have the hard disk in a bay; I think there's just one screw holding it in. You could probably plug it right into a WiebeTech dock.



    Microsoft has proposed to add flash to hard disks as a write cache.




    Many flash drives are slow because the controllers and drivers are slow and very cheaply made. With multiple chips put together like DIMMs are and decent controller circuitry Flash would be a lot faster than a HD. Just the uniform access time replacing rotational latency+head travel would be a HUGE win. I don't know about the write cycle thing though. That could kind of be an impediment.
  • Reply 24 of 42
    hirohiro Posts: 2,663member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by heinzel

    Mmmh. Didn't Samsung say the 16 GB device is a prototype, i.e. it's "expensive laboratory technology", just as much as the other RAM types are at this point?



    A product prototype is not an experimental laboratory technology, its an implementation of a tech that is no longer experimental. The issues for these chips are production costs/scale, not a "can it work?"



    Nearly all of the costs/scaling questions are quickly solved if the manufacturer believes in the market for the product. It's when the market balks that the product prototypes die on the vine, despite the fact they work just fine.
  • Reply 25 of 42
    h228h228 Posts: 26member
    I would love to have this drive in any of my computers.



    Here are some performance characteristics from the linked page:







    Quote:

    Burst Read/Writet100.0 MBytes/sec

    Sustained Readt 45.0 MBytes/sec

    Sustained Writet40.0 MBytes/sec

    Access timet<0.04 ms



    I don't think we'll ever see a spinning drive with access time like that!



    I'd already have a couple if their price weren't measured in the 10's of thousands of dollars.
  • Reply 26 of 42
    heinzelheinzel Posts: 120member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Hiro

    A product prototype is not an experimental laboratory technology, its an implementation of a tech that is no longer experimental. The issues for these chips are production costs/scale, not a "can it work?"





    Well, considering that e.g. Motorola has been sampling >1 Mb MRAM chips to customers for evaluation, at least this manufacturing variant has definitely left the experimental stage and seems to be manufacturable. It does however lack the capacity and maturity/low price. Gee, with non-volatile RAM, who needs hard disks anymore - I would love to have an instant-on laptop with 40 GB RAM

    Unfortunately, if Moore's Law holds true for this type of memory, we are *definitely* talking many more than 5 years for this yummy phantasy to come true.

    Oh well.
  • Reply 27 of 42
    hattighattig Posts: 860member
    I think we'd see faster rotation 1.8" hard drives at 20/40/60/80GB way before anything like this got cheap enough and reliable enough to use. I know some sub-notebooks already use 1.8" hard drives.
  • Reply 28 of 42
    http://news.designtechnica.com/article7516.html



    read that and stop throwing out "facts" of life for technology.



    Some details from the article.



    It's a 1.8 inch drive.



    It has a power consumption rate less than 5% of today's hard disk drives, enabling laptops to extend their battery life by more than 10 percent.



    (If Intels new Yonah chip does bring us to 8 hour battery life, this new hard drive could be saving us almost an hour in battery life? Sounds real good to me.)



    The new drive also weighs less than half that of a comparably sized (1.8in) HDD.



    Plus it should be nearly silent and a lot cooler than todays hard-drives. Two real huge biggies in laptops.



    It reads data at 57MBps and writes at 32MBps, so its already faster than other 1.8 platter drives.



    Plus it will be available for consumers in a month or two.





    This new drive approaches all the major issues that laptop makers have to deal with and destroys them.



    Plus since its built of NAND flash, which is being scaled up by many many suppliers, I think that the capacity could rise quickly. At the moment it seems like the drive will be double the storage of whatever the highest level flash card is on the market.



    Lets just see how expensive it is... Tech companies can do anything as long as its cheap enough for people to buy. Maybe this wont be cheap enough...



    Note: I did some more research and the highest capacity Toshiba 1.8in hard drive is:

    60 GB

    15ms Seek Time

    Buffer to Host- PIO\t16.6MB/sec

    Buffer to Host- Ultra DMA\t100MB/sec



    Main thing seems to be capacity...



    (Is it just me or does anyone else see this as a possible solution to the battery life of the iPod?) I guess it still depends on price but I believe (I could be wrong) that the iPod uses a 1.8in drive. 95% power reduction in the HD of an iPod sounds... Amazing. The drive would have to be at least 20GB for Apple to use it I guess.
  • Reply 29 of 42
    mike12309mike12309 Posts: 135member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by thesosguy





    (If Intels new Yonah chip does bring us to 8 hour battery life, this new hard drive could be saving us almost an hour in battery life? Sounds real good to me.)







    lol!! haha intel power efficient? lol... yeah... intel are about as power efficient as a burning oil well.



    their new desktop chips run at 65-70C on full load... their laptop models generate less just because the processor runs at only a portion of its possible preformance. The only way an intel chip is gonna give you 8 hours is if its a 2.5Ghz running at 400Mhz or if its a 3 year old celeron.



    check out Toms hardware guide testing of intel chips, hot and inefficient, AMD always gets 20-40% less power consumption (and AMD used to be considered the hotter chips).



    i have SERIOUS doubts that any intel chip will give better battery life than a G4 without cutting preformance of the chip. Look at PC laptops for your examples, its hard to find one with a battery life greater than 4 hours... many are like 2.
  • Reply 30 of 42
    My girlfriend has a centrino running at 1.6 and I have a g4 PB running at 1.33.

    Both have same amount of ram.



    Hers is generally a lot faster than mine and last longer every time we go somewhere to work on projects. Both of us using photoshop and dreamweaver for the majority of our work.



    My laptop is a good 6 months older so the battery could just me more lame... or perhaps hers has just a bigger battery and that says it all. It could even be possible that I click and do stuff more than her so I use up the battery life faster. All that aside, hers last longer than mine and its 2 or 3 generations older than Yonah. So she won the laptop performance war. Except that she is stuck with windows...



    I kinda lost hope in the Moto G4 a while ago... Intel beat them...



    Hell even Steve had to admit it and switch...



    Are you just flaming me for saying Intel instead of AMD? I was just referring to the chips we will be using in newer Apple stuff anyways.



    Edit: Looked into it...



    A new Apple 15in PB 1.67 comes with (according to apple):



    50-watt-hour lithium-ion battery (with integrated charge indicator LEDs) providing up to 4.5 hours of battery life (15-inch models)

    So 4.5 hours claimed by Apple...



    I dont even need to link to Centrinos that run 5-7 hours... they have been around for a while... Like a year...



    Also, I'm not sure what video card she has... I suppose that could be a huge factor in the power usage... just my 2cent from life.



  • Reply 31 of 42
    mike12309mike12309 Posts: 135member
    Quote:

    Are you just flaming me for saying Intel instead of AMD? I was just referring to the chips we will be using in newer Apple stuff anyways. [/B]



    nope i was citing stress and power consumption tests. centrino's are P4's that reduce their preformance to save power. my experience as been you either lose preformance or battery life, depending how you configure the thing. Im surprised it is more powerful than a new G4 // maybe the G4 should be pulled i guess, it is getting kindda old.



    and no im not happy with the intel switch. intel is the microsoft of chips, im a recent switcher, and i feel somewhat betrayed... if i wanted intel id build a system with an intel inside... at least for my desktops anyway.
  • Reply 32 of 42
    pyrixpyrix Posts: 264member
    It would be neat if they could do it - which i doubt.



    I dont see what the problem with hard drives is really - I think it would be better just to stick one of those 1.8" hard disks into a Powerbook/iBook, and get 20gb of storage (Toshiba made one.), and not have to worry about access times too much.



    As someone pointed out, you can stick as much small stuff into a small case as you like - look at these new PDA's, 4gb hard disks, 800mhz processors, slideability*, but a terrible UI, becuase there is no keyboard or mouse. Fundamental flaw of the PDA - people want a readble screen.



    And Samsung could only reach 100gb if someone baid for R&D, and with hard disks getting cheaper, coming down to about $1AUD/gig



    In short, why bother?



    *slideability - the ability to slide into ones pocket.



    EDIT: Looking at the last posts, this has somehow turned into an intel power consumption thread, and i should rave about that as well.



    Pentium M, Celeron M, whatever are really just PIII's on steroids, and PIII's were made before the ghz myth really came into play. Thus they are fairly power efficient, at least I've seen well disigned Wintels getting quite admirable battery lenghts.
  • Reply 33 of 42
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by thesosguy

    http://news.designtechnica.com/article7516.html



    ....




    The link raises a few questions. Toshiba's SSD is supposed to be "nearly silent." Nearly silent? Where does the noise come from? In the 1.8" configuration, the drive is supposed to have a capactity of 16 GB. However, the HD capacity of the cheapest iBook is 30 GB. Demand for HD capacity is on a continual upward slope. Can SSD catch up and keep up? And then there is the matter of price. How much will these things cost?
  • Reply 34 of 42
    e1618978e1618978 Posts: 6,075member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by h228

    [B]I would love to have this drive in any of my computers.



    5,000,000 write/erase cycles until failure - if you use this as a primary drive on a laptop, you will start wearing out the drive pretty quick.



    In flash products that I have worked on, we had low-level load balancing software that moved stuff around to evenly wear the disk out, but we still had to be careful not to use flash too much or it would wear out (like if you write to flash every time something changes, and it changes more often than you expected).



    A previous poster mentioned virtual memory, which would trash this fairly soon.
  • Reply 35 of 42
    cubertcubert Posts: 728member
    I've only seen one post in this thread that got it right. Holographic storage is the future of hard drive technology. Check out this link to learn more about it.



    http://www.inphase-tech.com/technology/index.html



    InPhase is the leader in this field and will have their first holographic hard drives out in early 2006. There is also a video somewhere on their site that is worth looking at. The advantages are: no moving parts and over a terabyte of storage in an extremely small space. Supposedly, their hard drives will only work with x86 processors. Another reason for Apple's recent move? I don't think it's a coincidence.
  • Reply 36 of 42
    hirohiro Posts: 2,663member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Cubert

    I've only seen one post in this thread that got it right. Holographic storage is the future of hard drive technology. Check out this link to learn more about it.



    http://www.inphase-tech.com/technology/index.html



    InPhase is the leader in this field and will have their first holographic hard drives out in early 2006. There is also a video somewhere on their site that is worth looking at. The advantages are: no moving parts and over a terabyte of storage in an extremely small space. Supposedly, their hard drives will only work with x86 processors. Another reason for Apple's recent move? I don't think it's a coincidence.




    Well for someone trying to sound so authoritative you sure bought an x86 only line all too easily. External storage is dependent on the external bus connection specifications, not the CPU which it will never actually interact with in a direct manner. If you have the correct bus congiguration and driver, a peripheral can properly operate physically regardless of CPU flavor. The data stored will be somewhat CPU dependent because of the endian issues, but thats just byte ordering and can be overcome with swizzle filters as a layer just above the filesystem if you really wanted to.
  • Reply 37 of 42
    nofeernofeer Posts: 2,427member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by mike12309

    lol!! haha intel power efficient? lol... yeah... intel are about as power efficient as a burning oil well.



    their new desktop chips run at 65-70C on full load... their laptop models generate less just because the processor runs at only a portion of its possible preformance. The only way an intel chip is gonna give you 8 hours is if its a 2.5Ghz running at 400Mhz or if its a 3 year old celeron.



    check out Toms hardware guide testing of intel chips, hot and inefficient, AMD always gets 20-40% less power consumption (and AMD used to be considered the hotter chips).





    intel was chosen to insure continuous large quantities of quality chips, after being burned by ibm (big) and moto (big) i'd go with intel. intel has the most chip producing capacity of any chip maker. maybe amd is better but where will it go, what is their capacity and what about name recognition, centrino was very wll marketed, ask about an amd chip, do people know any??? it also takes away a windows marketing ploy of we are bigger better, there will be easier for people to switch to mac os x, since they are already familiar with intel e.g. centrino---it's the laptop market that has the margin and future.
  • Reply 38 of 42
    mike12309mike12309 Posts: 135member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Mr. Me

    The link raises a few questions. Toshiba's SSD is supposed to be "nearly silent." Nearly silent? Where does the noise come from? In the 1.8" configuration, the drive is supposed to have a capactity of 16 GB. However, the HD capacity of the cheapest iBook is 30 GB. Demand for HD capacity is on a continual upward slope. Can SSD catch up and keep up? And then there is the matter of price. How much will these things cost?



    does flash have to match the curve? having the OS on a small (4-20GB) flash drive and having other data on a traditional HDD could provide good preformance boost... i know thats probably not feasible for laptops, but for desktops sure. On top of that HDD's have been at a max of 500GB for like a year now... they really arnt increasing past that right now because there is no consumer demand for TB (terabytes) currently (outside professionals). So hard drives have reached the max oh what consumers will demand currently. Besides once you get above 200 or 250GB you begin to run into speed and preformance problems when you have filled the drive. Ever try nearly filling a 500GB drive... not nearly as quick as when it was new (yes this is true for all HDD's but its worse are huge drives). Additionally i believe demand is there for new larger capicity flash drives... though i believe its a demand for 1-4GB more than 20+, but we will get there eventually.
  • Reply 39 of 42
    What about the iPod thing? If these drives are cheap enough that is...
  • Reply 40 of 42
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by mike12309

    does flash have to match the curve?



    Yes and no. Yes, if the Flash drive is to replace hard drives in conventional computers. No, if they are used in here-to-fore impossible applications. If a PowerBook has a hard drive with capacity 100 GB, the customer will not accept the offer of PowerBook with a SSD of capacity 40 GB just because it uses a different technology. OTOH, a PowerTablet that uses a 40 GB SSD might succeed because the SSD allows much longer battery life in a much thinner package than is possible with a hard drive.

    Quote:

    Originally posted by mike12309

    having the OS on a small (4-20GB) flash drive and having other data on a traditional HDD could provide good preformance boost....



    My System and root-level Library folders combine for 5.3 GB. My BSD subsystem and Mach kernel add gigabytes more. Parkinson's Law holds. We are fast approaching the day when 20 GB will not be enough to hold everything in a standard OS installation.
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