http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=6938

SanDisk Corporation is bringing to the market a 32 gigabyte (GB), 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD) as a replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk drive. The new drive is initially aimed at enterprise users as the first step toward mass consumer adoption, according to the company.

With the declining cost of NAND flash memory SanDisk says the SSD is a viable and economically attractive alternative to existing technologies in a wider variety of applications, including mobile PCs aimed at enterprise and consumer users.

It is projected that inclusion of the SanDisk 32GB SSD in a notebook PC could increase the end-user price by around $600 USD in the first half of 2007.

Using NAND flash and SanDisk’s TrueFFS flash management technology, the SanDisk SSD delivers two million hours mean time between failures (MTBF). With no moving parts, it does not need to spin into action or seek files in the way that conventional hard disk drives do. These characteristics make it possible for this class of devices to deliver higher performance when compared with hard disk drives.

The SanDisk SSD achieves a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes (MB) per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer. This is more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives, according to the company.

People could expect a laptop PC equipped with SanDisk SSD could boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in as little as 35 seconds. It also can achieve an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds, compared with 55 seconds and 19 milliseconds, respectively, for a laptop PC with a hard disk drive.

Another advantage of SanDisk SSD is its extremely low power consumption rate compared to the hard disk drive: 0.4 watt during active operation versus 1.0 watt . This is particularly important to extend the battery life for the benefit of enterprise mobile users.

The 1.8-inch 32GB solid state drive is now available for original equipment manufacturers.


I heard a few months ago one of the UMPC (samsung i think) makers is already marketing an entirely Solid State mobil computer in Europe

That's pretty amazing. It's only a matter of time until all computers will replace hard disks with flash-based drives. Can we say "instant-on computers"?

It is only going to be as good as motherboard manufactures want it to be.

Pretty awesome. I'm sure anyone familiar with the semi-conductor industry saw this coming a while ago and welcome the news. As DD mentioned, however, it's going to take a motherboard manufacturer with some balls to make something we can use to actually exercise that speed. Lets all hope that happens soon... When it does, imagine how much smaller and lighter notebooks (especially those not equipped with an internal CD/DVD drive) will be.

a friend of mine (comp sci phd) built himself a completely solid state computer, its eerie to see a computer not make any sound.

This was announced two years ago... ;)

They need to bring the price down quite a bit. Not to mention flash based disks have a read/write life. Meaning they can only be written to so many times before they stop working. For portable flash drives it's generally not an issue because you're just transferring files and will probably never reach the max writes on most devices. However, if the same tech is used for a hard drive where the OS (like Windows) is constantly writing to the hard drive, it won't take long at all to "burn out" the drive.

Unless SanDisk overcame this problem somehow you will most likely see systems running hybrid drives that utilize both platters and flash. The OS would reside on the flash portion, but all writes would be done to the magnetic media. This would still increase battery life quite a bit.

We'll see how all this plays out in a couple of years.

a friend of mine (comp sci phd) built himself a completely solid state computer, its eerie to see a computer not make any sound.A full size PC or mini-itx? Solid state drives have been around for a long time, but the cost is way beyond what any sane person would spend for a PC. You could, however, setup a mini-itx or nano-itx PC that uses flash instead of a hard drive for the OS (usually Linux). That is still "solid state", but not really. It still has the write limitations that any other flash-based system would have.

Solid state drives have been used in military applications and other industries where platforms are subject to shock during operation.

As ronin pointed out flash media has a maximum number of writes before failure. Embedded systems programs have to take that into account and judiciosly write to NovRAM (Non volitile RAM).

in a traditional computer i suppose you could put 8 gigs of RAM in and keep all your swap space/paging files off the harddrive to keep the number of writes down. But that would cut into the power savings of using a flash drive.

but they didnt offer it 2 years ago- they do now

but they didnt offer it 2 years ago- they do nowActually, they did, it was just insanely expensive and therefore not on the consumer market.

right:D:

I'll probaly pick one of these badboys up this Christmas. Hopefully it'll be less then half the price by then.

However, if the same tech is used for a hard drive where the OS (like Windows) is constantly writing to the hard drive, it won't take long at all to "burn out" the drive.MadRonin, you seem plenty knowledgeable about this, why didn't you mention wear-leveling to the audience? Personally, I agree with you - even with wear-leveling algorithms I think regular Windows might very well burn out a FLASH drive whether it was rated for 1,000,000 write/erase operations or 10,000,000 write-erase operations (read operations are free).

I've designed a few embedded products where we used a small FLASH array (just a few MegaBytes) instead of a hard-disk drive. Yeah, it's tidy. I remember one 386 system that would pop to the DOS prompt in less than a second. Ooops, that's dinosaur technology, you don't want those stories. ;)

MadRonin, you seem plenty knowledgeable about this, why didn't you mention wear-leveling to the audience? Personally, I agree with you - even with wear-leveling algorithms I think regular Windows might very well burn out a FLASH drive whether it was rated for 1,000,000 write/erase operations or 10,000,000 write-erase operations (read operations are free).

I've designed a few embedded products where we used a small FLASH array (just a few MegaBytes) instead of a hard-disk drive. Yeah, it's tidy. I remember one 386 system that would pop to the DOS prompt in less than a second. Ooops, that's dinosaur technology, you don't want those stories. ;)

Microsoft offers a version of windows that is "read only", it is not available to the public we use it for the work we do.

Microsoft offers a version of windows that is "read only", it is not available to the public we use it for the work we do.That would help a lot. The user won't deliberately ask for 1,000,000 write-erase cycles - who ever made 1,000,000 file revisions of a Microsoft Word document? Even with a 5-minute auto-back-up interval you can't get those kind of numbers in a human lifetime. However, an operating system like Windows has tons of little-known tasks that want to twiddle bits. You would especially want to forbid a memory swap file - must not try to use a FLASH hard-disk like more RAM. If fact, you'd do the opposite, you'd cache portions of the hard-disk in the RAM you have so you could buffer up many changes before making a write.

You would certainly do some writing, and even a read-only version of Windows (Digital Damage, perhaps this is Windows CE?) would need to make some temporary files. However, each sector gets about 1,000,000 write-erase cycles so if you have used up nearly 1,000,000 cycles in your "scratch pad" area you can swap in your read-only Windows then get 1,000,000 write-erase cycles in the space Windows had been. See the sectors are pretty small, 32kB or so, far less than 1 Megabyte so there is plenty small granularity for managing the wear leveling of a 32G storage unit.

That would help a lot. The user won't deliberately ask for 1,000,000 write-erase cycles - who ever made 1,000,000 file revisions of a Microsoft Word document? Even with a 5-minute auto-back-up interval you can't get those kind of numbers in a human lifetime. However, an operating system like Windows has tons of little-known tasks that want to twiddle bits. You would especially want to forbid a memory swap file - must not try to use a FLASH hard-disk like more RAM. If fact, you'd do the opposite, you'd cache portions of the hard-disk in the RAM you have so you could buffer up many changes before making a write.

You would certainly do some writing, and even a read-only version of Windows (Digital Damage, perhaps this is Windows CE?) would need to make some temporary files. However, each sector gets about 1,000,000 write-erase cycles so if you have used up nearly 1,000,000 cycles in your "scratch pad" area you can swap in your read-only Windows then get 1,000,000 write-erase cycles in the space Windows had been. See the sectors are pretty small, 32kB or so, far less than 1 Megabyte so there is plenty small granularity for managing the wear leveling of a 32G storage unit.

Nope not windows CE, but we do use CE for some Biometric Readers. It is a small footprint version of Server 2003.

MadRonin, you seem plenty knowledgeable about this, why didn't you mention wear-leveling to the audience?I can't give away all the goodies to the childrens... :p:

I can't give away all the goodies to the childrens... :p:Yeah, probably too-much-detail for most, but zoom44 seems to like the electronic gadgets so I figured I'd throw out a few more goodies.