News Samsung shows off flash-based laptop

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/03/13/samsung_flash_laptop/

 

And hopefully with mass production the price will drop, groovy

 

So finally we are going to solid state after years of hdds. I can't see hdd being completely phased out for a while yet due to the masses amount of storage it can hold, but it's definatly a way forward.

Wonder what game loading times would be like!

 

But doesnt flash only have a limited life?? Espeically for pagefile?

 

Should be an awesome technology when it gets going, can't wait!

Edit:

Really? In that case, not so good.

 

Say each price halflife is one year (entirely possible) and that's five years for flash to match the current magnetic prices. It's gonna be pricey for a while people!

Although if it's market and economy of scale driven rather than fabbing tech driven, it could be way faster than that...

It'll be cool when it gets here!

ch424

 

Wicked idea for laptops - I can really see this going far.

 

this is really good news for laptops, not just the stability, and access times you got less heat, less power being used, less noise......

it will be interesting to see what can happen, cant wait till the really big (150GB+) solid state HDD start rolling out.

 

i bet that would cost one pretty penney but hey that is the most exciting news ive seen in a while. I hope this tech really picks up with samsung bringing out prototypes as it would be great just to have even a 10-20gb drive just for windows if possible.

 

Wikipedia says there's a read/write lifespan of between 10 and 100 thousand cycles.

- H.

 

And how long will that take to achieve on a pagefile?

 

What ever happened to the compromise of using magnetic memory? 2 years ago, one couldn't pick up a tech/science magazine and not see an article about it.

For those of you that don't know, mag memory is solid state, has practically unlimited write cycles, and had a pricepoint similar to HDDs.

 

Saw an article a long time ago when i was thinking of using a fast CF card to boot XP, the page file litteraly killed the card in 4 minutes from the welcome screen

Obviously, this new tech will have a far superior way of operating, it's probably some form of ram that gets written to flash on shutdown perhaps?


Either way, seeing this technology become mainstream is very exciting stuff

 

Cool. It'll be a long way off still though I think.

 

Unless they plan on intergrating several Gb of normal ram into the drives just for pagefile usage, then its not really realistic to use it as a hdd on a laptop.

 

That's what I'm thinking, there must be some clever trickery going on under the hood, because flash and windows just don't mix

 

Well lets say that theres 32Gb of 'flash' for general storage.
I dont think its out of the realms of possibility to see 2Gb or so of low cost SDR ram being intergrated into the drive for the exclusive usage of the pagefile. SDR memory in those quantitys must be peanuts now in price, and would still keep the 'low power' aspect of the drive, and even with it being SDR ram, it'd still be faster than the flash drive.

 

Exactly