Internal IDE flash hard drive review

[Saxito Pau]

READ this article

Details a new flash hard drive from Samsung... imagine: no more bad sector scans!!!

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/

[Arcmanov]

Ive read this review.  This seems like the logical progression of hard-drives.  Faster seek times (almost instantaneous), a lot less power draw, totally silent, and can withstand 1000 Gs of force (well, this one anyway).

I could see this getting some usage in a real outdoor, special-forces laptop, that could withstand dirt, water, gunfire, and still play a mean game a FEAR when yuh ready, lol.
I wish I could replace the one in my notebook with onw a those RIGHT NOW!!!  It might actually DOUBLE battery life.

[Beomagi]

flash is actually slower, thuogh it CAN benefit database transactions due to high speed. I want this for my laptop.

playing a dvd - 2hr 30m to 2hr 40m
playing movie off hd - about 3 hours
playing a movie off a 4GB sd flash card, with HD on suspend - 3hr 20m - 3hr 30

movies were encoded 1050MB xvids, based off watching the return of the king

[Crixx_Creww]

beo, you said flash is actually slower? slower than what? certainly not hard drives you mean.
(ok i just read page 2 and saw the ultra ata/66 interface, which i guess is what you meant by being slower)

And from reading the first part of the article, its clear that for now the intended use is to accompany hard drives and not to replace them.

THey will serve as relatively large highspeed caches for hard drives.
Iam guessing a use ful application would be to have a 750 gig hd and a  4 gig flash "hd" to act as a big cache for your storage juggernaut.

Of course if you wanted to you could buy a pair of baracudas and raid them to get speed and storage.
But if you dont want raid, and just want 1 giant drive, this would be a good way to get the best of both worlds, plus alot less power consumption than drives in raid.

Again, just from what is said in the first part of the article with that vista  ready boost thing.
Which imo seems to just be using the windows virtual ram function on a hard drive, which in reality is really ram. so a psuedo virtual drive, cute really.
Hmm, and combined with core 2s prefetching, using prefetching of sorts on this virtual hd would truly give you great performance benefits for the applications yu use most often.

This is one of few new techs that i really like and think has an actual usefull application

[Saxito Pau]

I ready for that to become mainstream, yes.
It shouldn't be any issue for speeds to reach and exceed current HDD transfer rates in a couple years (i just guessing)

 Right now I have BOTH my HDDs looking like they wanna crap out one m3 (80GB IDE + 200GB SATA) getting the dreaded knocking sound and the PC freezin intermittently. If.. no, when they make one oh those in 250GB capacity I would rush to buy one

[Crixx_Creww]

well 250 gigs and at least a ata 100 interface yeah that would be a sweet buy

but i cant even fathom WHY they started at ata 66, is there some technical issue iam missing that is preventing the use of ata 100 or even better sata 150?

[Beomagi]

flash is usually slower - I'm talking transfer rates here - I have not tried those ide flash drives, which may very well be far faster than usbkeys and sd cards i've used, but sd and usb keys are definitely slower than a standard harddrive.

a single harddrive wont max out the bandwidth on ata 66.

The highest transfer rate I've gotten was about 20MBps read and even slower writes with a friend's OCZ rally.

Now the IDE drive CAN use multiple channels to increase the drive's throughput. but unless they're doing that, performance would drop.

[Crixx_Creww]

the tests they did  showed that the flash drive does max out the ata 66 throughput
but pit against ata 100 hds they do seem slower, so my guess is that the flash drives may also be able to max out a ata 100  interface as well

[Beomagi]

Holy crap you're right - that's a zippy solid state drive! I've seen 8GB and 16GB SSD drives before and they sucked in performance WTG samsung!

the results they have seem high - 75MB per sec from a 5400rpm low density platter 100GB drive? that's not real word as in a file copy is it?

I wonder how this deals with swap though - nand memory has a finite number of writes before the cell is closed.