Over the last year a quiet revolution has been brewing - solid state drives, SSD. If you have been in an electronics store lately you have seen flash drives of up to 8gb. Prices range from under $10 for a gig to mid 200s for 8gig. Now look at that I can have 8gb flash drive for $250 bucks. Put enough of those together and I could have a sizable hard drive.
Well the vendors are way ahead of you. SanDisk this year announced 16gb, 32gb, and 64gb drives. They also now have a 128gb drive. Wow! Several computer companies have now started shipping with these drives. And next year is sure to be dubbed the year of flash drives. Toshiba just announced that it has flash drives up to 128gb which will be sent to vendors by Feb and ready to start shipping computers by March of next year. This is a big deal as Toshiba is one of the largest NAND manufacturers. It should also drive down the cost of the drives as well. A 32gb drive will run you $1500 bucks and a 128gb one almost $4k.
So what are the performance specifications. The figures below are for the SanDisk SSDs.
Latency is < 1ms
Seek is < 1ms
A sustained read rate of 67-megabyte (MB)/sec
A sustained write rate of 47-megabyte (MB)/sec
Power consumption is very low around 210ma for reads and 220ma for writes
A Seagate 7200rpm 2.5 inch drive
Latency is 4.2ms
Seek is 10.5ms
A sustained read rate of 34.5-megabyte (MB)/sec
Power consumption is 2.4w for reads 220ma for writes
So what does it all mean? For starters how about much faster boot times but some estimates these drives can shave up to 30 seconds off of booting XP. Vista Enterprise reportedly boots in under 30seconds. My own experience with embedded devices vouches for the fast boot time. In addition, hard drives consume lots of power so a flash based laptop should have much higher battery run times with reports on times up by 25% or more. One reviewer put use time comparing to similar machines at almost 5 hours vs. under 3 hours with mechanical drive. Another benefit is lower heat. Hard drives produce lots of heat so now the only heat being generated is by the CPU. These also reduces power consumption as the fan doesn't run.
The biggest con right now is price and availability. I suspect that by Fall of 2008 a lot of laptops will come with 64gb drives and more drives will be available as replacements. Right now a 32 gb drive runs around $1k. A 64gb is $1.7k and 128gb runs a whopping $3.9k. We should see prices drop to 1/4 by 2009.
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