RE: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] ultra cheap notebooks with solid-state "disks"

["Spurling, Shannon" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Aparently Flash devices don't have a lot of the old limitations any
more. I was researching Flash memory the other day, because I had heard
people who should know better say that it's called Flash because it's
fast. One was even saying it was faster than ram. Of course that's
really bunk, but I wanted to know the origin of such claims. While
looking into it and finding the claims totally baseless (as I half way
expected), I did discover that the write and read cycles of many of the
faster flash technologies is within 2 to 3 times the speed of disk reads
and writes. What makes it good for a storage medium is the lack of a
seek time. Taking the seek time into account, flash competes very well
with standard disk technologies. I can't remember where I saw this, but
if you google "flash access speeds", you can find it pretty easily. I am
sure it can compete with the lower RPM IDE drives they put in laptops.
Faster speed disks would have a larger difference.



S-

 
-----Original Message-----
From: EMAIL:PROTECTED
[mailto:EMAIL:PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jonathan King
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2007 3:47 PM
To: MLUG Off-Topic Discussion
Subject: Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] ultra cheap notebooks with solid-state
"disks"

On 6/8/07, McNutt, Justin M. <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> I wonder how they plan to deal with the fact that you can only get so
> many writes to flash before it starts to fail (far fewer than on
> winchester technology).  Also, read/write times to flash aren't that
> great.

The write numbers are now pretty high, and most of these devices now
do "write balancing" in hardware. You are of course correct that i/o
won't be screaming on this thing.

> Perhaps it isn't a flash disk at all.  One could build a solid-state
> storage device using ordinary RAM chips and a battery.  It would still
> be fairly cheap and fast as lightning.

Think that would draw too much power to enjoy truly wonderful battery
life, but I could be wrong. Also, it would become a big disaster if
you lost all your juice; ordinary RAM *is* volatile, after all. :-)

jking

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