SanDisk rolls out flash hard drives for laptops | CNET News.com
I think this is important. A solidstate, diskless hard drive, with faster data access and near to no crash risk. I’d buy one.
“SanDisk on Thursday released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive. The drive is available only to manufacturers, and the company declined to give out pricing or identify any notebook makers that will adopt it, but SanDisk said notebooks sporting the drive could come out in the first half of 2007.”
It is a step in the right direction but for its current limited size and increase cost I think I would stick to the traditional magnetic platter. I have a Dell laptop (sorry about that) that had a 40gb drive crap out after 93 days (3 days out of warranty) but could buy a superior (to the OEM) replacement drive for about $80
Lucky for me this laptop stores no data, it is used as just a workstation. If I had lost critical data, I would probably have a different opinion about adopting this new technology. We will have to see how quickly the size increases and price drops.
But is 32GB enough for Vista? Inquiring minds want to know.
Jim
I like the idea of a non mechanical mass storage device, but I thought that flash memory had limitations on how many times it could be rewritten reliably. I’ve read of this limitation on automotive applications such as the ECU and they are only warranted for 100 re-flashes. I suspect that a lat-top drive would exceed that in a day or two.
I’ve also heard that there is a new technology of solid state memory without the draw backs of flash. Not sure of the cost though.
Really? I thought this is basically a whopping big USB drive. Those have write limitations too?
To Jim’s comment, let me throw in $.02 worth…
I’m sure there is a MTBF spec for each memory cell, though I don’t know what it is, and what variables affect it. For the sake of arguement let’s just say it’s 200, and the warranty for car flash memory is 100 to stay safely inside the spec and control warranty costs.
In the case of the car, the ammount of memory is fairly small, and variable are being stored in specific locations, at least it was the case in technology through the early 90’s. My point is that you’d be hitting the same cell over and over – guaranteed.
In the case of randdom storage devices, you don’t write to the same space every time, and in fact even magnetic media breaks down – magenetic HDDs have an algorythm that keeps track of bad sectors. In old days, there was a table entered and printed on the label of the drives (circa 1980’s) that had to be manually entered when the drive was set up. Now days, it’s handled dynamically. But my point is that the same management software could be added to manage the remaining good cells in an SSD device the same way it’s managed in magnetic. Just with prolonged and heavy use, the ammount of available storage will decrease, argueably much faster that equivalent magenetic media. If there is enough of it, will it effectively outlast the warranty or usage expectancy of 2-3 years that exists today?