PDA

View Full Version : Samsung Launches Flash for Laptops


johnnymk
03-21-2006, 02:50 PM
Samsung Launches Flash for Laptops

By Alexei Oreskovic
TheStreet.com Staff Reporter
3/21/2006

Flash memory's budding campaign to conquer the PC got a boost Tuesday when Samsung officially debuted a notebook hard drive based entirely on the popular semiconductor technology.

The 32-gigabyte NAND flash drive is designed to replace a laptop's conventional hard-disk drive, bringing benefits such as faster boot-up time and longer battery life.

At a time when some analysts and investors are fretting that overenthusiasm for flash memory is causing manufacturers to produce too many of the chips, Samsung's hard drive offered a hint of the potential for new markets to soak up the increasing supply.

But while flash hard drives offer many advantages, analysts say they're not about to replace conventional hard-disk drives anytime soon.

"Samsung is basically trying to make the market aware of their solid-state disk drive with their announcement, and I think they would expect that that market opportunity is really rather niche at this point," says John Rydning, the hard-disk drive research manager at industry research firm IDC.

The reason is simple: Flash is astronomically more expensive than hard-disk drives.

An 80GB notebook hard drive costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $130; flash memory costs around $50 per gigabyte, according to analysts. At that rate, a 32GB flash drive would cost a whopping $1,600.

Samsung has not yet released any details on pricing for the flash drive.

According to Samsung, its flash hard drive weighs half as much as a comparatively sized hard-disk drive and reads data three times faster. The flash drive also uses only 5% of the electricity needed to power a hard-disk drive.

Samsung says it believes the worldwide market for solid-state disk drives will total $4.5 billion by 2010, up from an expected $540 million this year.

NAND flash memory retains data even when a power supply is switched off, making it a popular technology for storing digital music and photographs on new electronic gadgets such as MP3 players, cell phones and digital cameras.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wouldn't it be possible to have a 1 GB Flash drive AND a regular hard drive?. The regular HD would be in sleep mode until activated, which would conserve power.
gwilks98
03-21-2006, 03:16 PM
Damn, you beat me to it. Oh well...here's another article:

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/03/21/32gb_ssd_samsung/


Samsung Launches Flash for Laptops

Wouldn't it be possible to have a 1 GB Flash drive AND a regular hard drive?. The regular HD would be in sleep mode until activated, which would conserve power.

Yes, but you can do something similar right now. I've seen people dedicate a gig of RAM as a RAM drive, and work strictly from it. (Very useful in HD intensive aps, since RAM speed blows away flash and HD speeds.)

The only problem is the lack of permanence to the data. Kick the power strip and you're dead.
ShawnLee
03-21-2006, 03:30 PM
I like the idea of a heavy duty flash drive. If it were cheaper, I could so totally see these as a sort of combat survivable personal computer for soldiers. Small e-mail and picture usage.
Itsme
03-21-2006, 03:59 PM
Isn't this how laptop prices started out years ago? Yes, compared to the prices of today's low-end laptops, the cost for the flash memory seems too much for a competitive laptop. However, people still buy $2-$3K Toshiba laptops even today.

I'd image that the initial laptops using this new technology will be very high-priced. However, no company get a new breakthrough for long...others will come out with similar devices and the prices will come down.
Chgoman
03-21-2006, 06:39 PM
If they build enough interest and get prices down over the next few years that would be great. Faster drive that takes less energy, weighs less and to my understanding has less failure problems.
mcs328
03-21-2006, 08:32 PM
Hooray for the rich early adopters!!! Let them beta test the production ones early and bring the cost down for us not so rich people. Remember the CD player? The CD Burner? The DVD burner? All expensive but the rich early adopters made it all within our reach a year later.

Maybe they could be used in servers first and networked together?
shocky123
03-22-2006, 09:36 AM
Hooray for the rich early adopters!!! Let them beta test the production ones early and bring the cost down for us not so rich people. Remember the CD player? The CD Burner? The DVD burner? All expensive but the rich early adopters made it all within our reach a year later.

Maybe they could be used in servers first and networked together?
I highly doubt these flash drives can touch the speeds of enterprise server drives.
Power consumption isnt an issue when you can afford 10,000 32GB drives that spin at 15k rpm.

Once they can move this technology into more realistic sized drives, then this will kick off. By realistic I mean ~250Gb drives at under 300 bucks.. then people will opt to buy them over conventional drives.

/edit: I just read the specs... Servers will NEVER use these until they can at least triple the speeds.
~Kyle
Paymaster
03-22-2006, 11:02 AM
It's interesting that they say it "reads data three times faster". Flash writes are much more complicated. You need to move valid data out of a block, erase the whole block, then program the bits for the write. I wonder how this compares to a hard drive...
Pemolis
03-22-2006, 11:59 AM
I highly doubt these flash drives can touch the speeds of enterprise server drives.
Power consumption isnt an issue when you can afford 10,000 32GB drives that spin at 15k rpm.

Once they can move this technology into more realistic sized drives, then this will kick off. By realistic I mean ~250Gb drives at under 300 bucks.. then people will opt to buy them over conventional drives.

/edit: I just read the specs... Servers will NEVER use these until they can at least triple the speeds.
~Kyle

Flash maybe more complicated to write to, but you remove the overhead of Disk Spinning, RPM's, head seeking, reading, writing, and deleting all being dependant on the floating head of the disk.


RamSan internal storage.
Over 400,000 random I/Os per second.

Developers of an Online game (eve-online) uses this for their online game (they originally used server drives).

I have to admit... RamSan solid state drives gave them a Huge increase to both server response time, and I/O (especially when 20k + people are all interfacing with it at once). This doesn't use Flash ram though.

http://www.superssd.com/products/ramsan-320/



and now here is the server end.
1TB of of solid state storage on a 4Gbit fiber-channel connection

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=1273


Interesting quote:

[quote]
The Tera-RamSan comes equipped to handle complete blackouts with the use of internal hard drives matched to the capacity of the memory modules. During a power outage, the unit will copy the entire contents of its memory onto disk before shutting down approximately 1 hour after losing power. Since the Tera-RamSan uses DRAM rather than NAND-based memory, a battery-disk-based backup solution is necessary. As of currently, flash-based RAM is not quite fast enough for the applications for which the Tera-RamSan was designed for. [/qoute]
LegendKiller
03-22-2006, 12:28 PM
It wasn't that long ago when HDD's were stuck at 5.4k spindle for most applications. Give it some time.
gwilks98
03-22-2006, 06:55 PM
Something else to consider, most flash memory is rated for a million read/writes or so before pooping out. I wonder how a flash drive would react to the constant reading that occurs on a hard drive while you have your computer on.
bachviet
03-22-2006, 10:45 PM
Good idea but the price has to come down a lot more before it becomes applicable/marketable. :D