When will laptops switch from HDD to Flash?
So I was reading an article on CNET about Apple making a $500 million prepayment on NAND technology from the Intel/Micron venture, and I read a comment someone made on it that Apple may not just be looking at getting this for their iPods.
It makes all the sense in the world for laptops to switch from HDDs to flash.
Is it time for laptops to switch from HDDs to flash?
Discuss.
It makes all the sense in the world for laptops to switch from HDDs to flash.
Is it time for laptops to switch from HDDs to flash?
Discuss.
Comments
Originally posted by SoopaDrive
It makes all the sense in the world for laptops to switch from HDDs to flash.
Everything but price.
Originally posted by SoopaDrive
So I was reading an article on CNET about Apple making a $500 million prepayment on NAND technology from the Intel/Micron venture, and I read a comment someone made on it that Apple may not just be looking at getting this for their iPods.
It makes all the sense in the world for laptops to switch from HDDs to flash.
Is it time for laptops to switch from HDDs to flash?
Discuss.
People have been talking about switching from magnetomechanical storage to solid state storage for the better part of the last 30 years. The problem with such predictions is that magnetomechanical storage manufacturers continue to increase capacity while reducing prices faster than any competing technology. With the flash drive, the solid state people finally have a success in general purpose computing. However, the flash drive replaces the floppy and ZIP drive, not the built-in hard drive. [The flash drives in the small iPods represent a restoration more than it represents a breakthrough. Pre-iPod MP3 players did not use hard drives.]
Hard drives are among the most failure-prone components in Macs. I would love to see them replaced with flash drives. However, I am not holding my breath.
Where they can be useful is to store the RAM contents during "hibernate stage" so that the you can shut the computer down for a long time and it will wake up VERY quickly.
You will see this type technology on harddrives in the very near future (next generation).
Originally posted by skatman
Flash drives can only be rewritten 100000 times before loosing ability to "remember". Modern OSs like OSX writes and buffers all the time, so your HD will expire quickly.
Where they can be useful is to store the RAM contents during "hibernate stage" so that the you can shut the computer down for a long time and it will wake up VERY quickly.
You will see this type technology on harddrives in the very near future (next generation).
To put that into perspective, if you restarted your laptop 5 times per day that would be 100,000 / 5 or 20,000 days, or divided by 365 would be ~54 years, if Flash drives were used on start-ups. I can see a 2gig module being tied to the MB of all Macs. Currently my system accounts for 1.96gig in that folder. Maybe there was more to that big Flash memory buy than meets the eye. Good topic!
I DARE you to try that with your hard drive, i'd give it a week.
Originally posted by skatman
Flash drives can only be rewritten 100000 times before loosing ability to "remember". Modern OSs like OSX writes and buffers all the time, so your HD will expire quickly.
Where they can be useful is to store the RAM contents during "hibernate stage" so that the you can shut the computer down for a long time and it will wake up VERY quickly.
You will see this type technology on harddrives in the very near future (next generation).
Originally posted by SoopaDrive
So I was reading an article on CNET about Apple making a $500 million prepayment on NAND technology from the Intel/Micron venture, and I read a comment someone made on it that Apple may not just be looking at getting this for their iPods.
Yeah I've been following the announcements. Overall Apple is shelling out something like 1.25 BILLION to secure Flash supplies. I find it hard to believe that Apple can go through that much FLASH in three months with the current iPod line up.
It makes all the sense in the world for laptops to switch from HDDs to flash.
Is it time for laptops to switch from HDDs to flash?
No it isn't time to switch over to an all solid state laptop. Especially considering a UNIX base OS like OS/X. Contrary to what some have claimed here UNIX has the potential to wear out flash rather quickly.
There are ways around that of course but then other technical issues come into play. One of these is the speed of flash or in some cases the lack of speed.
Discuss.
So at this point I don't see Flash replacing harddrives in full size laptops. That doesn't mean that it couldn't effectively be used in other devices like slate type machines.
One potential usage that Itel is working with right at the moemnt is the use of Flash as a sort of cache for the harddrive in a laptop design. The idea is that frequently used apps and possibly data end up sitting in flash that can be read at high speed and low power. The Flash cache is kept to a reasonable size to keep cost reasonable yet let the HD shut down for a very long time. Finding info on exactly what Intel is doing here is a bit difficult but if you read the trades you will know that something is going on here.
Apple could take a slightly alternative approach to above and put things like /usr/bin and /bin on flash. That could provide a significnat boost with respect to power usage reduction yet remain stable. It certainly would eliminate some of the concerns with wearing out FLASh.
Of course we probably should consider that Apple might be securing these supplies for devices we don't know about at the moment. A slate type computer mentioned above could be one. Another could be an iPod device wth enhanced functionality. Cell phones? My bet though is Apple and intel working together to innovate on the laptop front. Maybe not the caching arraingement above but I'm expecting to see innovation of some sort on the laptop front, the product line has been very stale of late and a Yonah will do nothing to change that.
Dave
Originally posted by SoopaDrive
So I was reading an article on CNET about Apple making a $500 million prepayment on NAND technology from the Intel/Micron venture, and I read a comment someone made on it that Apple may not just be looking at getting this for their iPods.
It makes all the sense in the world for laptops to switch from HDDs to flash.
Is it time for laptops to switch from HDDs to flash?
I am afraid not, or at least not for another 2-5 years ...
Why ?
1) PRICE
2) SPEED (surprisingly flash drives are rather slow, and while raising speed is very easy - by doing a LOT of things in parallel - it will also seriously increase price).
But I really see a subnotebook with about 16-32 GB flash-drive at a decent price in 2008 !!!
http://www.fool.com/news/mft/2005/mf...ce=y&bounce2=y
Sounds a bit like a Bob Cringley type of speculation.
Still, I would add this to the article's speculation:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?pro...&detail=medium
Finally, if we are to broaden "computers" to "devices" and not assume that flash memory necessarily replaces the entire HD, I'd say it is a reasonable technology path for Apple to go down.
Originally posted by Chris Cuilla
I found this (speculative) article about Apple developing "instant on" computers interesting in light of this discussion...
The article seems very PC-centric to me. Most Mac laptop users (and, I would hope, desktop users too) never shut down their computer, but simply put it to sleep when they aren't using it.
Wake up from sleep has been instant in Mac OS X since the beginning - even in Classic it was a lot better than 20-30 seconds.
Apple has been experimenting with quietly saving ram to disk when the machine is asleep so as to avoid the very rare case of a crash on wake-up, or the battery running out whilst asleep.
While there are no doubt technical advantages to using flash to do this, the advantages are not likely to be very significant from a user standpoint.
Originally posted by Anders
Everything but price.
Originally posted by Socrates
... Most Mac laptop users (and, I would hope, desktop users too) never shut down their computer, but simply put it to sleep when they aren't using it. ...
I never use sleep, because it's never been reliable for me. Sometimes the machine would refuse to awaken, other times it'd crash. (sigh) Of course, this is a common problem on Cubes.
Originally posted by kim kap sol
We're not going to see Flash replace HDs...but what we might see are hybrid that keep files or parts of the OS that need rapid access...the HD would mostly be used for data that rarely needs attention.
Flash writes and reads significantly slower than most HDs. You wouldn't be using flash for stuff that you regularly accessed unless you wanted a significant hit on performance. The only benefits to flash are smaller sizes and lower power and the price increase for those two benefits is very significant.
ways to differentiate apple mactel from others as i raised in other threads, flash use would be one, a apple branded cell phone (not one done by committee aka rokr) and a home media center that thumbs it's nose at convention--most pc manufactures just rebrand a pc for a "home media center" leave it to apple to inovate and surprise us all. my thought is when, hmmmm the buzz is now i think within 6-8 months we will have these products. my prediction and i'll come back to check it's accuracy. i just think there is something momentous happening at apple timed around this mactell thing.
Still, onlooker's got a good point. Make the flash memory replaceable - and upgradable. Then in a couple of years you can take out the 8GB card and put in a 40GB card. Good!
Further Flash is slow so the types of devices it might be implemented in first may not be the laptops we think of today. An ideal implementation platform for flash would be a tablet type device with built in WiFi. WiFi to allow data storage to a more traditional computer. What would really be neat is a tablet that is both a functional computing appliance and a video display device.
Flash offers all sorts of opportunities but I don't see it catching up with disk drive technology anytime soon. At this point it offers a low power advantage andthat is about it.
Thanks
dave
Originally posted by hxc04
It's going to happen some day. People never thought you could ever use a terabite of info on one computer. Just give it a few years.