The Death of the Hard Drive?

[wdhpr]

I just read this article about computers changing from hard drives to flash memory. Google and Apple appear to be leading the way on this.

Quote:

The Apple iPad has no drive, and the newest MacBook Air laptop skips a hard drive entirely as well; they all rely on flash memory chips for storage.

Read more:

This technology will also rely on cloud computing. Not sure I want to have the internet to get things done.


Wdhpr

[Jojoyee]

Although replacing popular hard disks with flash memory for PCs won't happen overnight but likely that's the trend.

SSD will become more affordable when its price drops further and as always it takes time to get there to repeat what's happened to the USB sticks replacing the 3.5" floppy disks since some years back?

[Awgeewhiz]

What would make sense would be to have OS'es on flash chip/drives and
data on removable ssd's.

[wdhpr]

After reading up on SSD's I dont think they will be replacing HDD's anytime soon. The real pitfall with SSD's are the number of times they can rewrite. I think Awgeewhiz has the right idea. The current cost factor also has an impact. Heres a comparison between SDD's and HDD's

Wdhpr

Wikipedia

[maplichen]

I always find it strange when I see it reported that these new devices have no hard drive. As far as I can tell you are just replacing an SATA hard drive with a solid state hard drive. The hard drive is still there, just smaller and perhaps a bit faster depending on whose technology you are using.

On the other hand I agree completely with Jojoyee. The change is going to happen unless an even better storage technology is developed. I don't think the average consumer is going to be bumping up against that rewrite number.

[bibzgi]

Just as a marginal remark, I excitedly hope to muster up US 10 over the weekend and get my first USB flash drive on Monday at Walmart.

US 10 = one Chinese takeout lunch special with one can of soda.

[Ritho]

Originally Posted by bibzgi

Just as a marginal remark, I excitedly hope to muster up US 10 over the weekend and get my first USB flash drive on Monday at Walmart.

US 10 = one Chinese takeout lunch special with one can of soda.

Is that how much it costs now there to get a drink, a box of moo goo gai pan, and some chow mein? There used to be a Chinese fast food place on every other corner, in Phoenix at least. Our favorite one was about 8 bucks all-you-can-eat on weekdays. Down by the Fiesta Mall in Mesa. Here in Cluj, Romania there are only a couple or three Chinese places. None of them are quite as good as those very "unauthentic" ones in the States, but you can still manage to get your fill of Mono Sodium Glutamate, so you can walk away feeling like you got your money's worth.

Anyway, some newer flash memory is rated for around 1,000,000 write/erase cycles (also called p/e cycles program/erase) which is quite good especially with wear-leveling technology which evenly distributes the writes dynamically across all the memory blocks.

One of the best tests for memory sticks has been Vista/7's "ReadyBoost" Has anyone ever experienced a Flash Drive failure with this? The memory is "flashed" a lot as ReadyBoost is pretty drive intensive, but with wear leveling technology, and bad block management even on lower P/E rated drives that adds up to a lot write functions. I believe P/E normally applies to the number of times each block can be written to, not how many times the drive itself can be written to. So on 1 or 2GB drives you are talking about many millions of write functions. Here is an interesting article that goes into more detail and testing. http://www.bress.net/blog/archives/1...rive-Last.html

[wdhpr]

The reason I'm Leary of the whole rewrite issue is that I have a USB flash stick(2 gigs) and the capacity has dropped ever so slightly since I first bought it 3 years ago (a meal and two extra egg rolls). About 120 megs since brand new. Perhaps it was the formating I used.

Wdhpr

[Ritho]

Originally Posted by wdhpr

The reason I'm Leary of the whole rewrite issue is that I have a USB flash stick(2 gigs) and the capacity has dropped ever so slightly since I first bought it 3 years ago. About 120 megs since brand new. Perhaps it was the formating I used.

Wdhpr

What you are experiencing there is probably the BBM (bad block management) in action. The on board chip does redundancy checks to verify that data is written correctly. It a write fails because some of the "transistors" fail in that block then the data is written to a new block or sector and the bad block is marked so as not to be written to again. As blocks fail your drive capacity will drop. It is nothing to worry about, as that is the way it is designed. I have hear some people say, "If one sector fails, then you lose everything on the flash drive." That is simply not true.

If for some reason you start seeing large chucks failing over a short period of time, then it is time to retire the drive

[wdhpr]

What you are experiencing there is probably the BBM (bad block management) in action. The on board chip does redundancy checks to verify that data is written correctly. It a write fails because some of the "transistors" fail in that block then the data is written to a new block or sector and the bad block is marked so as not to be written to again. As blocks fail your drive capacity will drop. It is nothing to worry about, as that is the way it is designed. I have hear some people say, "If one sector fails, then you lose everything on the flash drive." That is simply not true.

Thanks for the info Ritho
You sure cleared up the issue for me. I guess its no differant then what a hard drive does when it finds bad blocks as well. I now have three USB drives and the cost's continue to go lower. I have done some more reading and have come to the conclusion SSD's are indeed a better option for a number of reasons. Maybe someone will invent some Bio Gel-Pac thingy to replace SSD's

You have to check out this youtube video

Wdhpr