Flash Harddrives, nearly happening

pixie pie · Post by **pixie pie** » January 4th, 2007, 19:59

Whilst spying on the EVE forums, seems these guys were talking about them, and, well its probably one of the large wants for any UBER gaAImer.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36706

Basically, Sandisk have released a 1.8" 32GB harddrive made entirely from Flash memory. Uses only 0.4W (Regular HDD 1W). Faster. No boot times etc.

Of course, it costs the bomb (And won't actually be available yet).

But this is where the future is at, especially with all the regular Harddrive manufacturers building Hybrid Drives for when Fista arrives.

Woo Elephant Yeah · Post by **Woo Elephant Yeah** » January 4th, 2007, 22:38

Not to mention they hardly ever get corrupt or fail like a normal hard disk does.

It all sounds like a good idea to me

Stoat · Post by **Stoat** » January 4th, 2007, 22:47

Oooh. I thought hybrids were coming first. How fast is it to write to?

Hehulk · Post by **Hehulk** » January 5th, 2007, 0:13

pixie pie wrote:Whilst spying on the EVE forums...

Ah ha! So your the spy!

spoodie · Post by **spoodie** » January 5th, 2007, 10:16

Stoat wrote:Oooh. I thought hybrids were coming first. How fast is it to write to?

There's a bit more information on the engadget site: http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/04/sand ... n-to-fall/
No info on write speed though.

Traditional harddisk are an old bottleneck that needs to be eliminated. Although I imagine there'll be around for a long time yet as they're cost effective for large data storage devices but for running speed critical stuffs these are the way forward.

pixie pie · Post by **pixie pie** » January 5th, 2007, 19:20

Write speed was on the link I gave:

The firm rates it as yielding a mean time between failure (MTBF) of two million hours, has a sustained read rate of 62MB per sec and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second.

I doubt these will be cheap enough for normal use, but I imagine one of these drives would be absolutely great for an OS disk. However the Hybrids are pretty good, because they'll put the data onto normal hard disks when it needs to; but its a lot more like having more RAM (well technically its HD cache) but it still looks fairly interesting.

Post by **FatherJack** » January 5th, 2007, 19:43

About time this technology caught up with OS size, I remember booting Win3.x and Win95 from RAMdisk back in the day and wishing there was a way to retain the data at power-off.

"In laptops early 2007" eh? I wonder whose? /prepares to fiddle figures for his companies recommended laptop supplier

pixie pie · Post by **pixie pie** » January 5th, 2007, 19:48

FatherJack wrote:
"In laptops early 2007" eh? I wonder whose? /prepares to fiddle figures for his companies recommended laptop supplier

Well as far as it looks like, its a typical 1.8" drive, so if they make a 2.5" drive, then you could slot it into any laptop? Hoping the power plug works on the Flash drive too. I'd imagine it would.

Post by **deject** » January 5th, 2007, 19:54

pixie pie wrote:Write speed was on the link I gave:

The firm rates it as yielding a mean time between failure (MTBF) of two million hours, has a sustained read rate of 62MB per sec and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second.
I doubt these will be cheap enough for normal use, but I imagine one of these drives would be absolutely great for an OS disk. However the Hybrids are pretty good, because they'll put the data onto normal hard disks when it needs to; but its a lot more like having more RAM (well technically its HD cache) but it still looks fairly interesting.

uhhh, if I'm reading this correctly, and I like to think that I am, the article only mentions read speed, which as most people know can vary greatly from the write speed.

pixie pie · Post by **pixie pie** » January 5th, 2007, 23:32

deject wrote:
uhhh, if I'm reading this correctly, and I like to think that I am, the article only mentions read speed, which as most people know can vary greatly from the write speed.

d'oh, my bad. Yeah write speed is likely to be slower, but for flash I think its fairly similar actually.

spoodie · Post by **spoodie** » January 6th, 2007, 0:09

I'm glad it wasn't me missing something. I suppose write speed is not as important anyway, in the realm of PC gaming I mean.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 6th, 2007, 0:21

write is probably as important for drives like these, as they're intended really to be page/swap files, but without the overheads of a HDD.

5punk

Flash Harddrives, nearly happening

Flash Harddrives, nearly happening

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