It's a wrap!
Thank you all and if you have any questions, ping me back at michael.kanellos@cnet.com
There are more events to come. Check out the calendar here
http://forums.cnet.com/4520-12548-6748916.html
I should
but off the top of my head, can't think of one. send me an email to michael.kanellos AT cnet DOT com (replace "AT" with "@" and "DOT" with ".") and I will trace down one of the reviewers. Generally, the name brand ones will be about the same. They tend to go for the better components and controllers.
USB flash drive recommendation
I have no idea what I should look for when buying a usb flash drive with 8GB capacity. Can you recommend a good, reasonably priced one that reads/writes quickly, or are they all about the same?
To all of the above
1. I wrote that story about the returns. It was a report from Avian Securities. Later, they admitted they were wrong. However, iSuppli has noted that returns on flash drive notebooks is a little higher than normal. Why? It's probably not mechanical failure. It might be more than consumers are disappointed. You get benefits--better battery life, quicker boot up--but maybe not $800 worth.
Better controller? Sure. That's classic silicon engineering. Intel knows how to incrementally boost speed.
128 probably coming this fall. Flash doubles in density at an annual rate so inevitable. But it will cost you. Figure about $900. Next year cheaper.
Reliability, speed and availability
Reliability: CNET posted a story that a lot of HDD laptops are being returned due to failures. This isn't the 100K read/rewrite issue obviously. Comments on that?
Speed: Intel is touting a new controller -- will that be a speed increaser (do you buy their hype)?
Availability: Will a 128 gig HDD be available this fall?
FWIW, if there is a faster, 128gig HDD this fall, I'd gladly pay $1K extra just so my laptop fan stops! 64 gig is tight for this price premium.
Jim Handy on flash lifetime
Jim says, don't worry, be happy. It will work out.
" Flash is not the best way to archive data, however I have never seen a guaranteed data retention for mag tape! Even film gets bad over the years.
"If you do a whole lot (10K+) of erase/write cycles the flash becomes leaky enough that data may become corrupt in 5 years or so, but with less cycles the data should last for ten years.
I agree, though, that outside of archiving, the life of the data on the SSD should outlast the PCs lifetime."
So there you have it!
Durability
To be honest, a flash drive will probably function as long as you have your notebook. Don't forget, the military has used these for years (the whole flash drive thing came out of the Israeli Defense Force.) Now the price is trickling down to tickle some consumers.
faster yes.
The more I used it, the more I liked it. boot up time was rapid. opening applications was quicker. You could run lots of applications without hiccups. It was only a few seconds, but you could feel the convenience factor.
I saw a guy at samsung open and close his Outlook account several time. Opening outlook only took a few seconds, instead of the minute plus time it can take now. I thought it was a miracle.
A guy at Intel has been playing with one too. here are his findings.
http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2008/04/ But $800? ouch.
More memory start-ups
There are some interesting start ups with memory ideas. Keep an eye on Grandis, doing STT-RAM. Basically, it uses magnetic principles in flash. The company says it can make a more dense version of flash in the near term. IBM has a similar concept.
There is also nanochip. they are doing phase change. But they have switched business models. They used to do a millipede like memory. So I'm somewhat skeptical.
there is a guy in england to experimenting with storing data in protein globules. very far out.
Speed
You have used a notebook with a flash drive as it's main drive. You mentioned it was quiet. Did it seem faster?
Durability: Flash vs HDDs
How much more durable are flash drives going to be than hard drives? What will this mean to the consumer?
Handy has some phase change tips
BAE Systems. Very interesting. They do all those military projects, so if you are in the DoD you might get this in your rugged laptop someday soon.
Archiving with flash
Man, that'd be one pricey option. Tape and hard drives will be cheaper. Flash is good for speed. in a corporate environment, you'll probably see flash in servers that throw up web pages or run wall street simulations. But data will stay stored on tape or drives.
But that's a good point. you want to back up with flash. The flash industry says that data can stay inside of a flash chip for ten years.
Flash lifetime
Flash is good for 100,000 cycles. For an MP3 player, that's fine, but for a notebook, it does raise issues. Not for all notebook users--100K is a lot--but some. It is improving, however. Numonyx, which makes phase change memory, says they have conquered that problem. Thus, if the can get volumes up, you might see Numonyx drives that get around that and give you full peace of mind in four or so years.
From expert Jim Handy on when flash overtakes drives.
Flash will start gaining once all that extra storage becomes an appendage.
"Sales will take off once users stop seeing value in increasingly larger HDDs. There has been no indication of this happening any time soon in the PC, although it really happened in the iPod.
Until then, we expect to see SSDs continue to have parts costs that are abough 20x that of HDDs of the same capacity," he writes.
thanks Jim.
Flash drive failure
Really? Wow. Unfamiliar with that. NAND flash, the kind used in flash drives, is more subject to errors than NOR or likely regular drives. Also, a lot of giveaway thumb drives probably come with cheap controllers. It might be that instead of the storage medium itself.
Reliabilty is a big issue, though. Flash drive makers don't use multiple cell flash because it is less reliable than single cell. Single cell, however, costs more.
Battery life
Yes. Flash will definitely help. If flash makers also come out with new enclosures, you will see the size of notebooks drop. Right now, the flash drive guys just use regular notebook cases.
I don't know if it is half of the power. Drives probably consume about 25 percent. Hybrid drives, which combine flash and drives, help somewhat.
One thing that is great about flash drives is the silence. no spinning. I had one for a few weeks and the lack of noise, and the sense of security that the motor wasn't going to conk, were great.
Longevity of Flash beyound read writes.
One of the big problems we face with digital data is archiving On a flash drive when will the data be unreadable if I stop using the drive? I.e. what are the possibilities for archiving with flash?
Flash will probably never be cheaper
Flash is just inherently more expensive. Both technologies are also dropping in price at about the same rate and evolving in density about the same rate. It's one of the more difficult races in technology out there. The question is, at what point does it become cheap enough and dense enough to get people to buy it. At that point, flash becomes the notebook storage device, but the drive guys will be selling mondo sized drives for backup storage.
When chips that store data through magnetic principles, you might see flash start to surge closer.
Quality wise
they all seem pretty good. For all the knocks you hear about hard drives, they function well. But will see if I can get answer to that. Hitachi still one of the tech leader. It's that IBM heritage. So you can't go wrong. The problem they are facing, though, is sales. You may see them get sold soon.
Phase Change
There's another company doing Phase Change, BAE Systems. They have a license for apploications above 50,000 ft. - space stuff. They never get any mention, but they are well on their way to having a qualified proiduct to ship this year.
Phase change could be huge.
But it's a big if. The memory has been in development for decades. Numonyx, a JV with ST and Intel, says it will have the first chips out this year. Density is good and so are characteristics. But, man, it's a whole new technology. It's not easy to get to global volumes.
Flash memory burnout - resolved?
For years, flash memory has had issues with the total number of writes before drive failure. Do these issues still exist?
If so, it seems that having a machine with limited memory that is hashing the drive, then the lifetime of that flash drive would be seriously impacted. No?
Why do flash drives have so many errors?
I work at a school, and the students always use their flash sticks to save their work.
Many times, the drive could be seen in the Disk Utility, but it could not mount. I tried to repair it, but it did not work.
So my question to you is: Why do flash drives get corrupted so easily? In fact, to further back up my point, I've have 3 flash drives die in one day. Wow.
tough one
A lot of people think it will be 2012. It's a combo of both pricing and capacity. Corporate notebook buyers can probably live with 64GB. Thus, when 64GB is cheap enough, it will take off. I think gartner has said it could be ten percent of market by then. Regular drives will have hundreds of GBs and consumers will buy that, but in the corporate world you might see execs give up extra capacity for weight and better battery life. seems like a sensible trade off.
Will this improve battery life for laptops?
I know that a lot of notebook/laptop manufacturers are always looking at ways to improve battery life and mobility. However, from my understanding, the rotating hard drives that we know of today, almost consume more than half of the total power for a laptop, as well as the optical drive. Do you feel that having laptop manufacturers switching to flash drives will make mobile computing much more efficient, as well as allow the laptop to last longer without charging?
squished
IBM put millipede on the back burner. In a nutshell, tiny actuators would melt a spot on a a surface to register a 1 or 0. You have heat, mechanical movement, etc. It is complex. IBM, however, thinks they have a winner with racetrack memory. In racetrack data gets shuttled up and down on a wire. very dense. 100x over flash. here is a link.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9915449-7.html?tag=bl
Price trends
How do the trend lines look? Is there a point in the near future where the price of flash will drop below a HD?
Cost
It's the basic technology. In a nutshell, drive guys can get far more GBs in a platter than flash guys can put in a chip. Thus, 100GB of conventional drives don't cost much. It's a platter and some controllers. 100GB of flash would require several chips.
reliability? You can drop flash from a plane and it will survive. regular hard drives won't. regular drives allegedly last far longer in terms of years, but few people will ever wear out their flahs drives.
Hitachi vs. Samsung vs the others
Hello from the great white north - the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,
I am axiously awaiting the new Hitachi 5k320 for my laptop. Unfortunetly, it is still no where to be found online. I've read some pretty good things about the new line of Samsung laptop drives (Spinpoint) but I am still a little nervous about the brand. What are your thoughts on the current top laptop drives? Is Hitachi still king or are they falling behind the pack with respect to release dates of their products? Simply put, what hard drive do you feel is currently the best in the 2.5" market? I'm looking for something fast and roomy (320gb would be nice)!
Thanks,
Shane
Phase Change Impact?
What is the potential imapact of Phase Change Memory (PCM) to this debate?
Price per Gig?
What do you think the price per gb will have to drop to before SSD break into the mainstream? And do you think they'll be as reliable as the magnetic hd's we're used to?
Why do Flash Drive Cost More?
Why do Flash drives cost more? they seem to have the same size of harddrive inside them as the regular external drives. Plus i think they intake the power from the computer they are plugged in to. So what is the primary reason for them having a higher price and also which type of drives a more reliable? I have heard and seen the external drives failing a lot more.
by
Atik - 4/17/08 11:10 AM
IBM Millipede
What ever happened to the IBM Millipede project? five or so years ago it looked like they were well on the way to commercialization. Now, nothing. Do you know what happened?
Pricing
Just to throw out some stats: flash drives cost a lot more than regular drives. At Dell.com for instance, swapping a 64GB flash drive for a 80GB regular drive adds about $900 to the cost of a notebook. That's double.
Flash at retail costs about 2x to 3x as much. You get a lot with drives. a 1TB drive at retail goes for $259. Or around $4 a GB. Flash drives are 8GB and below and it's about $9 or more. But they are smaller.
At the wholesale level, that 2x 3x cost advantage for drives still holds.
Welcome storage fans!
We will be answering your questions today about flash memory versus hard drives. I'll answer them but we will also have special guests. Jim Handy of Objective Analysis, one of the country's big flash analysts, will be on tap to answer questions and we can even ping companies directly.
Michael Kanellos CNET News.com editor at large, Live!
Ask the Editors Live! event. Topic:
Flash vs. hard drivesThe battle over the future of storage is ramping up, but do you want to buy a flash-based notebook yet? Find out that and much more in our next upcoming Ask the Editors Live chat event which is all about the future of storage technologies. Live event begins at 11 a.m. Pacific Time (2 p.m Eastern), Thursday, April 17</b>. Our special host will be CNET News.com editor at large, Michael Kanellos, who will be answering your questions on flash drives, future storage technologies, and where hard drives are headed. Don't miss out!
Click here for upcoming Ask the Editors Live events and past transcripts of events.
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