SanDisk Corporation is bringing to the market a 32 gigabyte (GB), 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD) as a replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk drive. The new drive is initially aimed at enterprise users as the first step toward mass consumer adoption, according to the company.
With the declining cost of NAND flash memory SanDisk says the SSD is a viable and economically attractive alternative to existing technologies in a wider variety of applications, including mobile PCs aimed at enterprise and consumer users.
It is projected that inclusion of the SanDisk 32GB SSD in a notebook PC could increase the end-user price by around $600 USD in the first half of 2007.
Using NAND flash and SanDisk’s TrueFFS flash management technology, the SanDisk SSD delivers two million hours mean time between failures (MTBF).
Another Source:CNet
In its own tests, SanDisk says its flash drive can boot up Windows Vista — the next version of the Windows operating system — in 35 seconds, 28 seconds faster than the 55-second boot-up time required with a conventional drive.
(Yes, I see the math error here.)
So how long before, price, capacity, and availability all reach a happy level? I want one now.
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See also an earlier post by Eideard: Samsung
Thanks to GregA (again).
If I’m not mistaken there is a notebook manufacturer that gives you an option of having a solid-state drive for your OS but it is only 8 GB. 32 GB clearly makes this a viable choice. As long as heavy writing would not affect the long term durability of the drive, I’d pay $600 to have near-instant booting. Hell, I’d pay twice that just to put the swap file on its own solid-state drive.
Make it half as expensive, and give it four times the capacity, and I’d buy one. Give it time, this looks good.
Just like my car, Hybrid’s are the way of the future.
Solid State have a finite read-write capability. You don’t want to waste read-writes on those thousands of tiny files like logs and swaps.
However the hybrid hard disk, for just a few $$ more, can dramatically speed up read times on those large Write-Once Read-Many files, which is where 99% of the OS Kernel sits.
Regular RAM boosted into the hybrid drives also helps reduce read/write times, and RAM is dirt cheap in the 1 gigs range.
Some of you have hard disks with only 8 megs of cache memory.
Also the hybrids allow those gigabytes loving folks the cheap and reliable gigs. In the news there’s talk of a 300 TB drive coming soon in a 3.5″ form factor.
My rant against hard drives is them not living up to their life ratings. Completely eliminating mechanics is a good thing.
However a 600$ markup with just 32gigs when my tiny USB key has 2 gigs, and 80% of it’s space is taken up by things other than the memory, a solid state disk should have a higher capacity.
I think the 32gigs is just to keep the costs down, and must be loaded with internal redundancy, so 144gigs is reduced to 32gigs in order to be reliable.
#1, they have made Vista able to use internal or external memory that’s faster than a HD, connected via USB, SATA or other for that very purpose. So run out and load Vista, and share with us your results.
Umm, is flash memory supposed to have a limited number of writes before it goes bad?
Your computer boots up in 30 seconds instead of a minute. Big yawn. How much does this help after the system is booted up… almost nothing.
Th eonly thing this is good for is for true ‘diskless’ workstations. Aside from that it is technology looking for a purpose.
I would buy one for transporting data.
#3: Holy grail of mass storage: much faster than a disk drive, no mechanical parts to wear out (so it’s also shock resistant), high storage density, and of course no “finite read-write capability.” And it needs to be cheap.
The “finite read-write capability” implies you have to replace your solid state disk every so often, which also means you have to transfer its contents when you do so, before it wears out.
Old fashioned “core memory” satisfied most of these requirements, but the storage density was very low.
I wonder where the MBR would go on one of these gizmos? I recently suffered through a corrupt and unrepairable MBR on a 120 GB IDE Western Digital. It worked out all right, the MOBO was SATA capable, I installed a three hundred GB Seagate, deleted the boot partition on the Western Digital, installed XP, the new drive detected all the partitions on the old drive, and after a little partitioning I was back in business with a whole bunch of hard drive space. Something new for me: for the first time I have a computer where the O/S sits on a drive other than “C”; “I”, actually.
Are you willing to spend $600 to make Windows boot a little faster, and maybe run a little faster?
Or, to put it another way, are you willing to pay $600 so that Microsoft doesn’t have to put any effort into making Windows less bloated and slow?
This has the effect of driving down the price on flash memory even more regardless of its success.
The real losers I think are floppies and C/DVDs. Why would you use them any more with FM being what it is?
Why wouldn’t you want solid state in a notebook
Reduced weight, reduced cost, reduced maintenance, reduced battery use…it all seems to be a bonus to me.
I’ve been waiting for SSD drives for years.
The primary problem with SSD tech is the single-bit failures which occur in flash memory after 1-2 million write cycles. Windows and programs written for it write to hard drives often for many (stupid) reasons. Of course, a simple fix that popped into my head is something Seagate HDDs do under certain circumstances: Read-After-Write verification on their hard drives.
Why Windows still needs a swap file on a system with 2 Gigs of RAM is beyond me, I just think Microsoft is freakin’ lazy. However, running certain programs without a swap file will get you an “Out of Memory” error, even if you have plenty of available free RAM.
#3 was right in saying hybrids are the thing. Of course, manufacturers could, and should put more RAM in their hard drives — but they don’t, and won’t for a while.
Habla “Planned Obsolescence” ?
woot!
I am thinking we see them integrated onto motherboards next. Now that it is just a chipset, it seems like it would be easy enough to put them on the motherboard during fabrication. Dont need a data or power cable at that point. Maybe there is a $200 emachine in the works?
Also price shock today… I got a brand new acer integrated everything today off of the display for 450 bucks. It has an AMD X2 and a gig of ram in it. Some crazy large hard drive. It looks like Circut City is selling every last one of their windows XP computers out to prepare for the vista launch.
XP IS DEAD!!! LONG LIVE XP!
Also on the load time thing… I bet XP boots in like 5 seconds with one of these.
I am thinking we see them integrated onto motherboards next.
I’m laughing only because you are probably right.
It would be nice to see these put into a Moblie PC or Palm, could this work for digi-cams???. It’ll really only be good for anyone that wants to have a ultra-moblie computer that is really capable or taking alot of ruff treatment. I also wonder about the read/write limit, is this a limit imposed by the manufacturer or a limit of the tech? I don’t think it’s a KGB trick for Vista though.
Solid State has many advantages over mechanical devices. With the economies of scale, this can only get better.
I don’t understand all those commends implying that Vista is slower or takes longer to book then XP. It boots much faster in my computer (not a “pure blood” by any means, single core athlon 3800, 1 gig of ram, single sata HD), without readyboost of whatever. First use it, then bash it, not the other way around (which is going to happen, of course).
#20, I have WINME on my kid’s computer. (I’m too cheap to buy her a copy of XP) It boots faster then my wife’s with XP Home and mine with XP Pro. I find the kid’s computer is faster with most ops excepting photo and video editing and playback. But then, she also has much less on her computer then we do.
THIS JUST IN
Hitachi has announced a one terrabyte Hard Drive. It is expected to cost around $400. This news is a big hurdle for SSDs to beat. The SSD is around $20 / GB and the Hitachi is around $0.40 / GB.
http://tinyurl.com/yg6k27
Like it or not, (but as they say in the House of Commons, “If not, why not?”) this is the inevitable future. Storage media with moving parts will go the way of the buggywhip sooner than you think, which is as it should be, really.
Channeling Kreskin, I PREDICT! that nonmechanical media will reach a 51%+ market share before 1/1/2010. And I have a damn good track record in such predictions… in fact, my predictions usually turn out afterwards to have been too conservative. So watch this space!
#22, I agree that eventually SSD will become standard. I think your timetable is way too short however. This costs 50 times as much as what Hitachi’s HD does per GB. Then it is only 1/30 the size of the Hitachi. So to store 1 TB of videos I could use $50,000 of SSDs or $400 of Hitachi.
Sure Sandisk will improve and the scale of economy will bring the price down. But so will Hard Disk Drive manufacturers be hard at work increasing capacity, efficiency, speed, and reliability.