So excited about flash drives...

[Chris2wire]

Im SO glad to see the PQI 64gb flash sata/pata drive.

When flash drives replace hard drives all of this spinning speed crap and grinding and wearing down will be out the window.

HOnestly I think flash drives replacing hard drives will be one of the biggest new eras ever in computing.

 

[pkme2]

"While $1000 for a 64GB disk drive sounds a bit steep." http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32315
I think I'll stick with my 40GB Pocket USB drives
for $70.

 

[EagleEye]

Originally posted by: pkme2
"While $1000 for a 64GB disk drive sounds a bit steep." http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32315
I think I'll stick with my 40GB Pocket USB drives
for $70.

That is a pocket harddrive...... he is talking about using a flash drive for a hard drive not the other way around like ur pocket drive

 

[SexyK]

15MB/sec... sounds great :roll:

 

[pkme2]

Originally posted by: EagleEye

Originally posted by: pkme2
"While $1000 for a 64GB disk drive sounds a bit steep." http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32315
I think I'll stick with my 40GB Pocket USB drives
for $70.

That is a pocket harddrive...... he is talking about using a flash drive for a hard drive not the other way around like ur pocket drive

I know a flashdrive because I have several 512mb around. It doesn't justify the price of $1000. My point is that price has to become realistic before any will be sold in large amounts.

 

[l3thal]

When flash drives can get near the speed and reliability of a PATA/SATA come talk to me.

Ive seen flash drives wiped so easily from magnets, HDDs on the other hand contrary to popular belief... Take a lot to wipe from a magnet

Just think of how strong the magnet inside the HDD is for the servo arm. I about broke a finger between two of those once. rofl.

 

[Chris2wire]

Originally posted by: l3thal
When flash drives can get near the speed and reliability of a PATA/SATA come talk to me.

Ive seen flash drives wiped so easily from magnets, HDDs on the other hand contrary to popular belief... Take a lot to wipe from a magnet

Just think of how strong the magnet inside the HDD is for the servo arm. I about broke a finger between two of those once. rofl.

Uhm, what does a flash drive speed have to do with pata/sata speed? Flash drive is a drive, pata/sata is an interface....

We're talking about a flash drive used on a Pata/Sata connection, instead of a spinning hard drive.... No spinning hard drive will equal the speed of a flash drive on the same connection (SATA for example)

 

[w00t]

flash is nice as drives now having moving parts which eventually break if we have flash drives there's no real moving parts in those so i'd say this is a step foward when speed and price get to about the same as spinning hardrives that'll be nice.

 

[Sniper82]

I've heard USB flash drives can only be used so much before crapping out(or some anyway)? Like write and rewrite on so many times. Probably heard wrong though.

 

[l3thal]

Originally posted by: l3thal
When flash drives can get near the speed and reliability of a PATA/SATA come talk to me.

Ive seen flash drives wiped so easily from magnets, HDDs on the other hand contrary to popular belief... Take a lot to wipe from a magnet

Just think of how strong the magnet inside the HDD is for the servo arm. I about broke a finger between two of those once. rofl.

Uhm, what does a flash drive speed have to do with pata/sata speed? Flash drive is a drive, pata/sata is an interface....

We're talking about a flash drive used on a Pata/Sata connection, instead of a spinning hard drive.... No spinning hard drive will equal the speed of a flash drive on the same connection (SATA for example)[/quote]

I don't think it's possible for a Flash drive, no matter what the connection to write as at 150 Mb/s

 

[Ipno]

Flash drives have a limited lifespan as to how many times they can be written to. Not a viable hdd replacement.

 

[gramboh]

If you read the comments on one of the dailynews posts about the new drives (might be AT Comtex article I can't remember where), there are algorithms that control the read/write to avoid this problem. Also it does not occur when data is written but rather when a sector has to be wiped clean and new data written. With the proper algorithm the expected life is 50 years or something, even as an OS drive. The only place you wouldn't use it is for a scratch drive for a server/DB that is constantly at full I/O.

 

[SexyK]

Originally posted by: Chris2wire

Originally posted by: l3thal
When flash drives can get near the speed and reliability of a PATA/SATA come talk to me.

Ive seen flash drives wiped so easily from magnets, HDDs on the other hand contrary to popular belief... Take a lot to wipe from a magnet

Just think of how strong the magnet inside the HDD is for the servo arm. I about broke a finger between two of those once. rofl.

Uhm, what does a flash drive speed have to do with pata/sata speed? Flash drive is a drive, pata/sata is an interface....

We're talking about a flash drive used on a Pata/Sata connection, instead of a spinning hard drive.... No spinning hard drive will equal the speed of a flash drive on the same connection (SATA for example)

What do you mean no spinning drive will equal the performance of a flash drive? Did you look at the Inq article?

PQI claims a sustained read speed of 'up to' 15MB per second, and write speed of 13MB per second for its 64GB device. This is significantly slower than traditional hard drives.

Read speeds of 15MB/s? Hard drives hit 70MB/s+ routinely nowadays. Sure, flash has lower access times, but they will be way slower for most of the average user's tasks.

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: l3thal
When flash drives can get near the speed and reliability of a PATA/SATA come talk to me.

Ive seen flash drives wiped so easily from magnets, HDDs on the other hand contrary to popular belief... Take a lot to wipe from a magnet

Just think of how strong the magnet inside the HDD is for the servo arm. I about broke a finger between two of those once. rofl.

Flash drives aren't affected by magnetic fields. What are you talking about? I just tested your contention out with a flash drive and a HD actuator magnet and I didn't suffer any data loss.

Meeting the reliability standards of a Winchester drive is a pretty easy since hard disks are so unrealible. Meeting the transfer speeds of HDs will also be an easy task. After all, there are flash chips made that have double clocked interface (not cheap though). The speeds of hds are actually really low and I expect that flash drives will eventually be able to push a few hundred MB/s in the near future.

 

[SexyK]

Meeting the transfer speeds of HDs will also be an easy task.

An easy task? Are you involved in the industry or something? If it was so easy to achieve hundreds of megabytes per second, i think someone out there would be pushing the tech pretty hard. I don't really see going from 15MB/s to 100's MB/s in the "near future," but maybe you're right.

 

[ai42]

I would be happy if some HDD maufactuer would slap in like a 1GB flash chip on a hard drive so you could suspend to flash in almost no time.

As far as flash hard drives. Well it is certianly cost prohibitive. It will certainly be fast. As noted before 15MB/s is nothing special, but there are a dozen or more chips so if you use them in parallel or RAID then you can get some pretty quick speeds. If I recall reading a couple of weeks ago about Samsung releaseing some notebooks with a flash based hard drive in Korea with crazy low boot times due to almost zero latency.

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: ai42
I would be happy if some HDD maufactuer would slap in like a 1GB flash chip on a hard drive so you could suspend to flash in almost no time.

As far as flash hard drives. Well it is certianly cost prohibitive. It will certainly be fast. As noted before 15MB/s is nothing special, but there are a dozen or more chips so if you use them in parallel or RAID then you can get some pretty quick speeds. If I recall reading a couple of weeks ago about Samsung releaseing some notebooks with a flash based hard drive in Korea with crazy low boot times due to almost zero latency.

Models with 256MB of onboard flash are on the way. In fact they will be required for laptops to be Vista Premium certified.. I expect that the next gen MacBooks will also support these hybrid drives, since Intel is making a big push to make these hybrids the new standard.

Flash memory will likely never catch up to paltter-based hard drives in the capacity race, and HD audio and video is going to increasingly become the norm, requiring terabytes of data on future computers. I expect that instead of completely flash-based drives, you'll instead see these hybrid drives with a few gigs of flash for the frequently used data like the OS files and a few terabytes of space for your hefty files. Maybe a portion of the flash could be set aside as a backup space for critical data, so it would survive a fialure of the mechanical part of the drive.

 

[raincityboy]

This is what I am excited to see . From what I have heard, some companys are expecting to introduce it with in a year or two.