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

[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.