The future of hard drives.

[Peterpigman]

Looks like HDDs are going to change in the near future Samsung have brought out an "all flash" solid state drives for laptops which seem pretty quick although small capacity at the moment.

The 64GB drive is faster than its predecessor too, with maximum read and write speeds of 64MBps and 45MBps, respectively - 4.3 and 6.4 times greater than a typical 80GB hard disk drive, Samsung claimed, and 1.2 and 1.5 times faster than its 32GB SSD.

An SSD is commonly comprised of either NAND flash (non-volatile) or SDRAM (volatile).

SSDs based on volatile memory such as SDRAM are categorized by fast data access, less than 0.01 milliseconds (over 250 times faster than the fastest hard drives in 2004) and are used primarily to accelerate applications that would otherwise be held back by the latency of disk drives.

DRAM-based SSDs typically incorporate internal battery and backup disk systems to ensure data persistence. If power is lost for whatever reason, the battery would keep the unit powered long enough to copy all data from random access memory (RAM) to backup disk. Upon the restoration of power, data is copied back from backup disk to RAM and the SSD resumes normal operation.

However, most SSD manufacturers use nonvolatile flash memory to create more rugged and compact alternatives to DRAM-based SSDs. These flash memory-based SSDs, also known as flash drives, do not require batteries, allowing makers to replicate standard disk drive form factors (1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch). In addition, nonvolatility allows flash SSDs to retain memory even during sudden power outages, ensuring data retrievability. Just like DRAM SSDs, flash SSDs are extremely fast since these devices have no moving parts, eliminating seek time, latency and other electro-mechanical delays inherent in conventional disk drives. (Though flash SSDs are significantly slower than DRAM SSDs).

Solid state drives are especially useful on a computer which already has the maximum amount of RAM. For example, some x86 architectures have a 4 GB limit, but this can effectively be extended by putting the paging file or swap file on a SSD. These SSD do not provide as fast storage as main RAM because of the bandwidth bottleneck of the bus they connect to, but would still provide a performance increase over placing the swap file on a traditional hard disk drive.

* Faster startup – Since no spin-up is required.
* Far faster than conventional disks on random I/O.
* Extremely low read and write latency (seek) times, roughly 5 orders of magnitude faster than the best current mechanical disks.
* Faster boot and application launch time when hard disk seeks are the limiting factor. See Amdahl's law.
* In some cases, somewhat longer lifetime – Flash storage typically has a data lifetime on the order of 10 years before degradation. If data is periodically refreshed, it can store data indefinitely. Flash drives have limited endurance (typically, 100,000–300,000 write cycles), which, if a single block is written once per second, leads to failure in a few days at most. However, all flash drives employ a technique known as wear levelling, where writes are smoothly distributed over all blocks. This means that if one write occurs per second, and n is the number of writes before failure and m is the number of blocks on the disk, failure no longer occurs in n seconds, but in (n*m) seconds. Given that blocks are typically on the order of 1kb and an 8 GB disk will have 8,388,608 blocks (8*1024*1024*1024 / 1024), assuming only 100,000 write cycles this gives about 26,600 years before failure; remember also this is with one write per second for that entire time. In consumer level devices you can expect the drives data storage component to last roughly 10 years in normal use.

http://www.samsungssd.com/

[RORER-714]

This shit has come along way quick,this was a computer when I was a kid.I can remember waiting until I was tall enough to steer.

[D.O.A.]

Originally Posted by RORER-714

This shit has come along way quick,this was a computer when I was a kid.I can remember waiting until I was tall enough to steer.

bwahahahaha... turn left at ogrish, NO I SAID LEFT YOU FUCKING IDIOT!

*pulls into snuffx.

[D.O.A.]

Originally Posted by Peterpigman

* Faster startup – Since no spin-up is required.
* Far faster than conventional disks on random I/O.
* Extremely low read and write latency (seek) times, roughly 5 orders of magnitude faster than the best current mechanical disks.
* Faster boot and application launch time when hard disk seeks are the limiting factor. See Amdahl's law.
* In some cases, somewhat longer lifetime – Flash storage typically has a data lifetime on the order of 10 years before degradation. If data is periodically refreshed, it can store data indefinitely. Flash drives have limited endurance (typically, 100,000–300,000 write cycles), which, if a single block is written once per second, leads to failure in a few days at most. However, all flash drives employ a technique known as wear levelling, where writes are smoothly distributed over all blocks. This means that if one write occurs per second, and n is the number of writes before failure and m is the number of blocks on the disk, failure no longer occurs in n seconds, but in (n*m) seconds. Given that blocks are typically on the order of 1kb and an 8 GB disk will have 8,388,608 blocks (8*1024*1024*1024 / 1024), assuming only 100,000 write cycles this gives about 26,600 years before failure; remember also this is with one write per second for that entire time. In consumer level devices you can expect the drives data storage component to last roughly 10 years in normal use.

http://www.samsungssd.com/

pretty awesome, only can wonder what seagate and WD have up their sleeve.

[Zyber]

Originally Posted by D.O.A.

bwahahahaha... turn left at ogrish, NO I SAID LEFT YOU FUCKING IDIOT!

*pulls into snuffx.

Yeah but where are the JetPacks they promised us?

[D.O.A.]

Originally Posted by Zyber

Yeah but where are the JetPacks they promised us?

DUI on a jetpack? Now that, i would like to see.

[Peterpigman]

Originally Posted by D.O.A.

DUI on a jetpack? Now that, i would like to see.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=F5HCblbdyv0

[FlaK]

Originally Posted by D.O.A.

bwahahahaha... turn left at ogrish, NO I SAID LEFT YOU FUCKING IDIOT!

*pulls into snuffx.

hehehe.... fortran that's prolly the closest they got with that speculation =)

[Trauma Hound]

I can wait a little longer to get a new machine. Jesus, and then get fiber-optic internet. Recipe for caemsauce.

[Peterpigman]

Originally Posted by Trauma Hound

I can wait a little longer to get a new machine. Jesus, and then get fiber-optic internet. Recipe for caemsauce.

Imagine teh porn you can download on a fibre optic network!!!

[Sonne]

Originally Posted by D.O.A.

bwahahahaha... turn left at ogrish, NO I SAID LEFT YOU FUCKING IDIOT!

*pulls into snuffx.

lmfao

Holy shit.

[legne]

Ooooooh!
When I was a kid, 20mb harddisk was the big thing - and it cost a trillion dollars.
It's weird to see all this technical progress. Like, I remember those HUUUGE "mobile" phones (cellphones for you yanks), with the swirly cable and a battery the size of my head. Now you get mobile phones that fit in to the palm of your hand, it's so weird.
I can't imagine what this technology will be like when my future children are teenagers.

Oh, and my pic. That's my granddad's computer. Floppydrive bitches!
Kids these days don't even know what a floppydrive is =(
Oh god, check out the phone in the background. Fckn 80's.

[RIDAD]

^ Sheesh, looks like an old IBM with a "hard card". Anyone here ever have a Commodore VIC 20? 4k of ram

[NorthernThreat]

hahahahahaha whats the fucking wheel for LOLOLZZ

[D.O.A.]

Originally Posted by EyeOfTheCrow

hahahahahaha whats the fucking wheel for LOLOLZZ

to scroll down pages, they condensed that shit between the mouse buttons nowdays