Tiny Laptops

kwokers

Not sure what MartyJ's angle is - if I take it literally - the actual mean time between failures (MTBF) say, for a Fujitsu 120Gb 2.5 inch disk is rated on average according to Fujitsu (in their specifications tab):

300,000 POH (actual power on hours)

http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/storage/hdd/mobile/mhv2120at.html
Now when you compare that to the life of a Flash Disk, it doesn't come quite so close.

Here is the CEO blog entry of a rather well known Technology company that is thinking of incorporating this type of Disks in it's servers. The point he makes is that Flash memory isn't quite as reliable:

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/not_a_flash_in_the

When you look at a gaming machine, you're going to be accessing swap/virtual memory an awful lot more than you would if you were just doing basic word processing. Sure, it's not going to happen over night, but eventually it will happen sooner than a normal hard disk.

More over, this seems to be reflected in other tech sources:

See here:
Title: "Notebook flash drives found to have high failure rates"

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/03/18/notebook-flash-drives-found-to-have-high-failure-rates/

Title: Solid-State Drives Get Astounding Failure Rates Inside Notebooks

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Solid-State-Drives-Get-Astounding-Failure-Rates-Inside-Notebooks-81133.shtml

Title: Flash drives hit by high failure rates
http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?newsid=11747

If you check the dates, they are all on the 18th March 2008 - in the tech world, this wasn't new news as the statistics have always been there, but it made big news as Netbooks are making big inroads into the mainstream & this is bad news for consumers.

Ok, this is starting to go off topic now - I'll be quiet now, I promise.

[Deleted User]

SSD's are better for portable computers, ie netbooks, due to the lack of mechanical components that constantly moving them could disrupt.

Marty_J

kwokers wrote: »

Not sure what MartyJ's angle is - if I take it literally - the actual mean time between failures (MTBF) say, for a Fujitsu 120Gb 2.5 inch disk is rated on average according to Fujitsu (in their specifications tab):

300,000 POH (actual power on hours)

http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/storage/hdd/mobile/mhv2120at.html
Now when you compare that to the life of a Flash Disk, it doesn't come quite so close.

For a company that thinks its HDDs should last on average 30 years between failures, it's a bit stingy with the 3 year warranty, isn't it?

The component life is rated at 5 years or 20,000 POH, which seems a bit more realistic.

When you look at a gaming machine, you're going to be accessing swap/virtual memory an awful lot more than you would if you were just doing basic word processing. Sure, it's not going to happen over night, but eventually it will happen sooner than a normal hard disk.

Yes, and it would wear out a normal HDD faster too. What matters is whether it will shorten the life of the device, not which will break first.

More over, this seems to be reflected in other tech sources:

See here:
Title: "Notebook flash drives found to have high failure rates"

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/03/18/notebook-flash-drives-found-to-have-high-failure-rates/

Title: Solid-State Drives Get Astounding Failure Rates Inside Notebooks

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Solid-State-Drives-Get-Astounding-Failure-Rates-Inside-Notebooks-81133.shtml

Title: Flash drives hit by high failure rates
http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?newsid=11747

If you check the dates, they are all on the 18th March 2008 - in the tech world, this wasn't new news as the statistics have always been there, but it made big news as Netbooks are making big inroads into the mainstream & this is bad news for consumers.

It's a new technology, just as HDDs once were. Its widespread adoption is not a bad thing, it's a good thing. The more people who use the technology, the more manufacturers will invest in it, and the better the technology will become. In ten years (or sooner) we'll look at HDDs the same way we look at floppy disks, and good thing too I say. They're big, they're noisy, they generate heat, they use lots of power, they have moving parts, and if you read these tech boards for any length of time, they're not quite the paragons of reliability you make them out to be.

superscaper

Marty_J wrote: »

It's a new technology, just as HDDs once were. Its widespread adoption is not a bad thing, it's a good thing. The more people who use the technology, the more manufacturers will invest in it, and the better the technology will become.

Yep, it's hardly as if flash is already at the pinacle of its' development (speaking from my past research area which included nano-flash and organic/plastic flash memory).

markelock

psp or ds?

isn't a laptop to play fm09 a sledgehammer to crack a nut scenario?

amcluesent

The price decline of flash is amazing, something like minus 40% compound annual. Projecting forwards, 500Gb flash modules cheap as chips for laptops by 2012.