Flash drives for notebooks

[unixronin]

CNet reports that Sandisk has announced a line of flash disks for laptops, to be available at present only to manufacturers, and apparently available only in 32GB capacity at this time.  They're pushing it as faster, more robust, and energy-saving -- Sandisk claims notebooks with the solid-state drive will have up to 10% longer battery life and boot Windows Vista almost twice as fast (35 seconds instead of 55).

The issue they don't mention is media life.  Flash memory has a finite lifetime in terms of write cycles.  I can only assume they're hoping that by the time you start hitting the write-cycle limit on the flash disk, you're ready for a new and bigger drive or a new laptop anyway.

Comments

[skellington.livejournal.com]

Flash is up to 100,000 to over a million writes per flash sector, depending on the technology and manufacturer.

The technology also exists to do "wear leveling" where they use indirection to keep from writing any given sector too many times. It can copy data from relatively unused sectors to ones who have been written more. I assume it would be implemented in this drive internally.

With those two features, I don't expect any problems. You'd be talking about collectively writing something over a petabyte over the lifetime of the drive before you'd even think about having problems.

Using a serial download to some boards I was programming several years ago, I think I calculated that doing downloads 7x24, I wouldn't run into problems for something like 2.5 years.

Admittedly ATA-133 is faster than RS-232, but unless you're running a high transaction database server, you also aren't even necessarily writing to the drive much at all; especially on a laptop.

I suspect the primary source for new files on a laptop would be the Internet. Using a fully saturated 1.5mbps DSL link, if I'm doing the math right, it would take 200 years to download a petabyte (i.e. browser cache).

Of course, we use our laptops to compile code, but I still don't think it would die in less than the 2-3 years our laptop drives usually last.

[arasirsul.livejournal.com]

Not to mention, if one were truly worried about it, one could set up a ramdisk to handle temp files and stuff that gets updated often like log files, and only write it all back on shutdown (or pick your favorite reduced schedule). Not that this would exist in Vista, but it's still a possible solution.

That said, the real benefit to me isn't startup or shutdown times,and it's not even battery life, it's damage resistance. Laptop drives can take some pretty insane abuse, but they're still mechanical. My office laptop, I'm generally doing other stuff when I start it up so I don't usually care about bootup speed, and my personal laptop never gets shut down, and wakes from sleep almost instantly. Battery life on both is still pretty nice, though the office laptop does have two batteries under the hood to do it...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the killer feature: "No moving parts." Shock resistance.

[novel-tharkun.livejournal.com]

Does Vista allow swap space, I'm sorry, virtual memory to be turned off? If not, good luck with overwrite protection.