Thinkpads Forum

Didn't notice flash drives are here
http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/prod ... indexnum=8

Together with Tpfancontrol, one can have the ultimate silent laptop.

That is good to hear, but what are their performance like?

daeojkim wrote:That is good to hear, but what are their performance like?

This is more important for me; I have yet to see a HDD burst upwards through the 80MBps limit even though even PATA can pull off 100MBps using UDMA5. Also remember that the PCI bus has a limit of 133MBps.

I have yet to see what real performance they will add; consider, for example, an X Series Thinkpad. Small, light, silent for the most part (except for misc. noises here and there plus the HDD I/O ops from time to time.). If you have it with 2GB of memory, or even 1.5GB, there is little reason to even have a Flash IDE in it. It isn't quite replacing the secondary storage of the HDD with a "faster" memory option. So you never really get an all-primary-storage solid state system that is homogeneous in terms of operation.

Say, extending the example, that Photoshop needs to use swap space...Why? Why do you have to go to any disk outside of memory and wait; even if you have a Flash IDE device, it is still going to be slower than going directly to memory instead. If you have 2GB, or any really large amount of memory on your system and real-time performance is important, you might as well use the HDD as it was meant to be used, as a "secondary/long term non-volatile" storage device, and up your memory even more. The cost/benefit analysis on such drives is, from the point of the mfg. and even the Hybrid drives, prohibitive.

Further, assume that you have 256MB for a flash hybrid drive; the benefits are using it as a form of L3 caching to speed up tasks like booting, fast access, etc....Ignoring the low-level driver API and hefty controller they will have to make to handle it, how much does the 256MB of flash cost? Say $5. Makers consider saving a few cents on the manufacture of HDDs as great cost-reduction, adding $5 to the overall cost will either make it tank in the traditional market or force it into more of a niche-market with lower overall margins. Most of the laptop HDD industry isn't looking to do that.

For now, I think most people and manufacturers will stick with increasing the capabilities of HDDs and then just peek at the abilities of the younger Flash IDE storage devices. It doesn't present itself, at least to me, as something that everybody is going to use as the "Quantum Leap" in storage technology for laptops and computer overall.

Better to pay for a normal, high capacity 5400RPM or 7200RPM, HDD and a good dose of memory than to pay more for less storage and a questionable increase in how fast the system access the main storage.

Yet, for special applications where you can't have moving parts or the like or simply perfect silent operation whilst maintaining transfer speeds, a Flash IDE device would be a good choice to replace a HDD in a small, ultra-portable device like the X Series Thinkpads.

Don't worry, it's for sure far slower than a 7K60.

Different people have different needs. For VPN, web surfing and emails, I wouldn't mind using flash and get longer battery life.

For some people, a dead silent computer is priceless.

It's still way too expensive at the moment.

Main drawbacks of 100% flash menory hard drives* are:

a) You're basically tied up to a wall socket outlet--losing all power and you'll lose ALL your data!

b) Cost--they can have up to 20 GB now, but cost is much much more...



Note: "*" - not to be confused with those with spinning HDD with flash menory buffer cache (sometimes up to 1 GB).

Isn't the point of flash memory that it's NON-volatile, so when you lose power, you don't lose everything?

As for wolf's claims there are several reasons why you would want a solid state or hybrid drive instead of a hard drive.
1) as the title of this thread points out, hard drives are loud. Well. Depending on the brand I guess. The drive on my T60 is louder than the actual fan in the system. Solid state has no moving parts, so no noise
2)Faster transfer rates (theoretically, I haven't seen benchmarks to prove this yet). Sometimes I have 1 gig or more in the paging file, if this whole thing is in a faster disk, then I can minimize the lagging effect of everything freezing until the hard drive gets its information.
3)No moving parts, so no possible hard drive damage. This point is somewhat moot because of APS anyway, but it's a reason people would change.
4)Now this is a major concern: Battery life. Flash memory doesn't use up nearly the amount of juice that keeping a spinning disk platter going does, so I've read somewhere that switching to all solid state can account for a 20%-25% increase in battery life.

However, as has been stated, solid state is expensive, the sizes are too small and at the moment the performance advantage doesn't seem to be there, but in the future I think that using flash memory in notebooks is going to be the way to go, especially with the optimizations in Vista. While I may not go out and buy a prohibitively expensive HHD when Vista comes out, I may still invest in some kind of 2 GB flash card to still take advantage of an all-flash paging file and try and minimize actual hard drive usage.

kulivontot wrote:Isn't the point of flash memory that it's NON-volatile, so when you lose power, you don't lose everything?

As for wolf's claims there are several reasons why you would want a solid state or hybrid drive instead of a hard drive.
1) as the title of this thread points out, hard drives are loud. Well. Depending on the brand I guess. The drive on my T60 is louder than the actual fan in the system. Solid state has no moving parts, so no noise
2)Faster transfer rates (theoretically, I haven't seen benchmarks to prove this yet). Sometimes I have 1 gig or more in the paging file, if this whole thing is in a faster disk, then I can minimize the lagging effect of everything freezing until the hard drive gets its information.
3)No moving parts, so no possible hard drive damage. This point is somewhat moot because of APS anyway, but it's a reason people would change.
4)Now this is a major concern: Battery life. Flash memory doesn't use up nearly the amount of juice that keeping a spinning disk platter going does, so I've read somewhere that switching to all solid state can account for a 20%-25% increase in battery life.

However, as has been stated, solid state is expensive, the sizes are too small and at the moment the performance advantage doesn't seem to be there, but in the future I think that using flash memory in notebooks is going to be the way to go, especially with the optimizations in Vista. While I may not go out and buy a prohibitively expensive HHD when Vista comes out, I may still invest in some kind of 2 GB flash card to still take advantage of an all-flash paging file and try and minimize actual hard drive usage.

Point 1 is very valid; I have trouble with Point 2 as I have not seen, heard, or have evidence of the flash drives being just *that* much faster than an ordinary HDD. First, you will waste money if the flash itself is inherently faster than 100MBps with UDMA-5; second, it is still slower than memory. You will not attain a perfect, homogenous "solid state" system with it. The HDD access will still be slightly slower than the primary RAM. Third, these things have a very low GB/Dollar ratio, far smaller than any HDDs I have seen. Because of this, they can only be truly justified, from a monetary standpoint, when they are to be applied to a situation where silence whilst maintaining higher transfer rates and/or non-mechanical storage (Point 3, vaild yet again) has to be used for various reasons.

My point is that, even if they are faster, it won't be an amazing benefit; especially if one already has 2GB and is working, for example, in Photoshop. In such a case, why would you swap important instructions to the disk? That simply makes it slower, not as much as if you were swapping to a standard HDD, but still significantly slower from the standpoint of the operator and Photoshop as it is limited by how fast it can pull that swap data back which is bandwidth limited by whatever the drives specs are.

I have doubts about battery usage, although it is easier to have a comparable amount of Flash memory have far less of a power requirement than a mechanical HDD. You can get some pretty good savings from HDDs to begin with as they only need to spin performing I/O ops, you can either stop them or limit the amount they spin. Although, if you have a constant stream of I/O ops for an extended period of time, Flash would likely require less power consumption.

I sure hope, however, that Vista has better management of Flash paging than does Windows XP; in Windows XP, it is virtually non-existant unless the user gets a Flash storage device, attaches it to a hi-speed USB 2.0 port or similar such port via PCMCIA, then tells Windows to use it as a swap drive, then reboot. I tried this out with 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, then 2GB of Flash (memory sticks primarily) and the results were that you don't get a good return for all the work you put into it. I could detect a slight increase with Photoshop when I had 25 images actively being edited and it really needed to access swap space, although I am sure that a defrag of a normal user's HDD would give that little benefit a run for its money. The best thing, and this has been since memory and HDDs were called Primary and Secondary storage respectively, is to max out the memory on your system if you are constantly doing such things. In Windows XP at least, the benefits of a flash swap space are dubious at best. I would like to see how Vista handles it.

There are some limitations:

Like USB "keychain" drives, they are non-volatile, but do have write limits when they start to misbehave (corrupt). Not as durable as a normal HD.

The cost per GB is insane... Windows Vista + Office 2007 alone is likely going to be about 8GB... that's $500 of storage just for a wordprocessor!

Prices have to seriously drop before they make much progress in the laptop market... it WILL happen, but not just yet. Right now it's just not practical if you need > 6GB.

Don't forget storage needs increase not to far apart from Moore's law. Peoples storage needs are skyrocketing.

Here's the article on RAM replacing HDD's for everyone's interest:

www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/07/can_gigabyte/

I thought non-volitale RAM is even slower than regular RAM?

Okay, I understand looking at this from the leading edge angle, but I see it from the trailing edge, a 256mb flash drive in a 701C or 240 would work fine for someone who still uses small operating systems llike Dos, Win3.1, OS/2 or a small linux. And the hard drives made for the 701 are not fast and getting old now.
BTW, yes I said Flashdrive, also seen them called FlashDisks, something Sandisk made in the 2.5 laptop form factor and I have two, they are supposed to handle more write cycles than the pcmcia and cf versions. Searching for them is no fun cause some USB thumb drives have been called that too.

I think the main speed difference isn't due to transfer rates, but more seek time. On a HD this is typically 8-9ms, whereas on a flash drive it's almost non-existant.

TheOnys wrote:I think the main speed difference isn't due to transfer rates, but more seek time. On a HD this is typically 8-9ms, whereas on a flash drive it's almost non-existant.

Yes, the drives have seek times and rotational latency. Although, if you are still sticking to the standards that most HDDs go by, you will still be knocking the upper limits of the transfer rate provided by the system controller. Without upping that, you will be stuck even if you shelled out that much money for a Flash IDE storage device in place of your HDD.

christopher_wolf wrote:

TheOnys wrote:I think the main speed difference isn't due to transfer rates, but more seek time. On a HD this is typically 8-9ms, whereas on a flash drive it's almost non-existant.

Yes, the drives have seek times and rotational latency. Although, if you are still sticking to the standards that most HDDs go by, you will still be knocking the upper limits of the transfer rate provided by the system controller. Without upping that, you will be stuck even if you shelled out that much money for a Flash IDE storage device in place of your HDD.

Well yes, what I meant was that on a purely transfer rate test (for example, timing the time it takes to load a 500MB contiguous file into ram), they may not be faster but in real-world situations where data may be accessed fairly randomly around the drive they could come out on top.

w0qj wrote:Here's the article on RAM replacing HDD's for everyone's interest:

www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/07/can_gigabyte/

I thought non-volitale RAM is even slower than regular RAM?

erm...

Well considering normal ram has to refersh itself hundereds of times per second (thus slowing it down stupidly) I would say no.