SanDisk Releases 32GB Solid State 2.5" Notebook Hard Drive

[Spare Tire]

Anyone know what happens when you put an SSD into a laptop with a drop detector?

And does fragmentation become irrelevant (thus making partitionning irrelevant)?

[Spare Tire]

the biggest disadvantage of all SSDs: the limited durability of clusters that can be rewritten on relative to that of the typical HDD.

I take note that a cluster can be rewritten over itself up to 10,000 times but seeing this SSD is just 32GB it might not be too difficult to accomplish that. Also, it is wise to note that writing on cluster doesn't only take place when you actually write a file to the disk but also for caching and whatnot.

That's what i thought too, until i saw this news:
http://www.tabletpcreview.com/default.asp?newsID=774
"Intel says the drive is also expected to meet an average mean time between failure (MTBF) of five million hours. If the drives meet this expectation, they will be a lot more reliable than their predecessors considering the average MTBF of a hard drive today is between 300,000 to 1,200,000 hours."

Anyways, limited rewrite cycles just like optical disks eh. Well i'm wondering if that's the case then there would be some kind of system control that would spread out the write cycles evenly on all clusters. And i'm wondering if there is such a thing as a varying random access time on a SSD, if fragmentation has any impact on performance.

[cy007]

How much of battery life are these drives supposed to save again? I barely use 15 gigs of storage so 32 gigs are more than enough for me for my new laptop (buying April-May?). Solid-state disk and GMA X3000 on a business laptop... now that'll be interesting.

[squawks]

Hey, Spare Tire - that's a good article (I saw that already) but I didn't really take too much consideration on it regarding SanDisk's latest release because I'm not even sure if the 32GB SSD is based off of NAND! It could be and if it is, then this SSD looks to be very promising!

But there's a lot of different variations in SSD technology (e.g. serial flash) so I couldn't draw the connection.

[Gautam]

I'm in the same boat as DTX's post above--can anything be done to make a PATA connection compatible with a SATA drive? I'm fortunate enough to own the venerable and vaunted ASUS V6VA and would love to add an SDD drive.
Thanks, Ragtopgeek.

No, I'm afraid you are out of luck. AT least to my knowledge.

How much of battery life are these drives supposed to save again? I barely use 15 gigs of storage so 32 gigs are more than enough for me for my new laptop (buying April-May?). Solid-state disk and GMA X3000 on a business laptop... now that'll be interesting.

Well, it's a full 1.0 watt less to run...that could translate into 10-40% more battery life, depending on the things you do.

[usapatriot]

Too expensive, hopefully I'll be picking up a new Seagate Momentous 2.5" 160gb 7,200rpm drive if they're decently priced if not a 2.5" 120gb 7,200.

[ez2remember]

Anyways, limited rewrite cycles just like optical disks eh. Well i'm wondering if that's the case then there would be some kind of system control that would spread out the write cycles evenly on all clusters. And i'm wondering if there is such a thing as a varying random access time on a SSD, if fragmentation has any impact on performance.

Even if it did spread read/write cycles across the disk to extend its durability, which I don't think is the case, it has incredible access & seek times which should alleviate problems associated with fragmentation.

This SSD has 0.11ms access time compared to notebook hard drives 15ms+ (about 150x faster). Mechanical drives struggle with fragmentation but SSD shouldn't have much issues. e.g. a file is fragmented into 10 pieces (blocks). It could take the mechanical HD a total of 1.5 seconds+ just to access the entire file whereas even if a file is fragmented into 100 pieces (blocks), it takes SSD about 0.11s or 11ms. A huge difference...

Please note I have simplified the example. It should be access & seek time used rather than just access time alone but you get the point SSD is lightning FAST.

[wobble987]

if there will be a new apple sub-notebook; i think that the probability that it will include this or has this as an option is high.

i'm still not convinced that this type of drives (flash based) is reliable enough, as it has a limited write capabilities.

[fxrron]

Don't get so hot and steamy over these drives. You have to have the Santa Rosa/Crestline chipset to be able to use these drives. They will not work with existing chipsets.

[Spare Tire]

Are you serious? SSDs has been on the market for a long time. I don't think chipset has anything to do with it. The drive manages it's own internal logic, it just outputs the information like an ordinary HDD.