128GB flash hard drives announced: death of the spinning platter?

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Nathan Davis16 January 2007, 4:34 AM

Hard drives based on as much as 128GB of flash memory are starting to appear. Will you finally lose the mechanical hard drive this year?

This year is already hotting up in the feisty storage arena, considering Solid State Disks (SSD) are almost ready to hit town. And large ones at that.

SanDisk was the first to announce its SSD drive this year, a 32GB 1.8-inch drive aimed at replacing laptop hard drives. The drive will sport a sustained read rate of 64MB/s and can apparently boot Vista Enterprise in around 35 seconds.

Now available, the drive will go directly to laptop vendors rather than retail. It says the drive will increase a laptop by about US$600, which is slightly hefty, to state the obvious.

Ritek has announced its own SSD drive, and it will be available in 16GB and 32GB flavours. These will be available in both 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch variants and support Vista's ReadyBoost function.

These will be available by the second quarter of 2007, according to DigiTimes, with a 64GB edition coming later in the year.
PQI already has a 64GB edition, however, unleashing its own SSD drive in 2.5-inch form with a SATA interface. PQI believes it will reach 128GB before the end of the year.

Just to continue the trend, here, such a 128GB beast already exists. A-DATA tells The Inquirer that it plans on mass producing its 128GB SSD SATA drives by the second quarter of this year.

Ritek, PQI, and A-DATA have not yet announced prices for their freakishly large SSD drives.

Naturally, these drives will be quite expensive when they are first fly into the market, especially in comparison with platter-based hard drives. The prices of NAND flash (the type of memory these drives use) are dramatically falling, however, which is nifty news.

The benefits of using SSD drives as opposed to standard mechanical hard drives include lower power usage, faster read times, and they don't sound like miniature train sets.

To offset those, of course, are their rocketed price, they are less tolerant of constant read and write access, and have a slower write time. They're also nigh on impossible from which to recover lost data; arguably, that's a security feature.

It's unlikely, however, that 2007 will mark the year we move, en mass, to SSD storage, as mechanical hard drives by far own the capacity crown.


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azs:

All I want is a 4Gb drive, just enough to boot winxp or linux without squeezing. The bulk storage can be on a server.

Finally a really possibility for a slient windows machine, passively cooled cpu, fanless power supply and no spinning disk.



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Anonymous:

azs, just go get yourself a compact flash card and an ATA adaptor for it and stick it inside your machine. Or alternatively, a USB memory key will do if you can boot from one - I bought a 4GB one last week for $130 - and it was the most expensive 4GB one in the shop.

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Atul:

To costly to change at the current rates. i look forward to reduction in weight and costs of laptops. Where has the volume discount gone?

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Lachlan:

Until these SSD's can match mechanical hard drives at both price and storage, then I don't see them replacing them altogether.

Certainly ideal for a laptop though.

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Tom:

It is probably possible to even make much bigger memory-based "drives"then are announced now, but who is willing to pay so much more money compared to a the price of a "regular" (disk)drive? And what about the disadvantage of a maximum number of writes to the memory-based drive? You never read about that anymore. I did not read that this issue is solved, however. So until then, i'll stick to the "normal" disk, for a tenth of the price for the same capacity! SSD drives are great for small capacities for now (up to 8 GB). Any bigger SSD drive is too expensive for now. For now, I'd prefer a notebook with 1 ssd drive for the os, and a "regular" hd for my data. This gives me the best of both worlds!

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Eman:

I'm assuming this hard drive will be less power hungry due to the absence of electric motors. If that is so, then that is a step to maybe a greener type of data storage.

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flycatcherjoe:

My laptop has only a 30GB drive and I'm quite satisfied already. The truth is most people just don't need more storage. So if i had to choose between a 200 gigabyte noisy spinning cylinder and a 30GB silent flash drive, I'd go for the flash. You just can't beat silence, half the power usage and the lower likelihood of the thing just conking out one day (with all the moving parts)

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flycatcherjoe:

IMHO, Sandisk has only announced the 32GB version because they believe that is the only size that currently can have a decent following given the price (adding $600 to a laptop's price). Over the next 3 years, the sizes of these drives will increase almost as rapidly as the price tags they carry drop.

It doesn't matter who puts out what now. They all can make it. It's the price point that will make it or break it for these companies. The prices WILL drop and these WILL be the new hard drives adopted by the market. The only race is who can make the chips in the most cost efficient way. That involves improvements in flash technology and manufacturing techniques.

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Tony:

Phase-change memory (also known as PCRAM or PRAM) is non-volatile memory which changes state as fast as conventional DRAM on the DIMMs in your PC. It also has a lot longer life. The problem with flash (all types) is that it is slow in operation and has a short life which requires clever software to spread the writing/rewriting across the whole device.

As for the hybrid drive hooha going on right now, it is nuts to contemplate marrying up the shorter life flash memory with the longer life and more reliable conventional magnetic platter based hard disk drive. A 100% SSD makes a lot more sense, but only if it uses phase-change memory, or if there is some magical breakthrough (unlikely) in flash technology that improves flash significantly.

My guess is that right now, Apple and Intel are working to get Robson with phase-change memory into the notebook line. Last year new mac notebooks came out in September. So, it could be that such notebooks come out in September (and hopefully 802.11n will have been approved by then too).

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Camandco:

this is fantastic. it doesn't matter about the price at the moment anyway, coz australia probably wont see any till next year like the iphone etc.

i wonder when we will see 128gb pen drives? and what the price would be by the time they are in aus.


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Con:

I dunno I'll be hanging onto my roomy 20 gig WinME machine for a while (not kidding!):)

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