16GB IDE Flash Drive / solid state

  • Thread starter Thread starter Justin Brown - SYNACS
  • Start date Start date
Justin said:
I wish I had one of these to boot my Windows XP to:
http://www.meritline.com/super-talent-2-5-inch-ide-flash-micro-drive-16gb.html

Super Talent 2.5 inch 16GB IDE Flash Drive, Micro Drive, Model
Access Time: less than 0.1 ms
Seek Time: less than 0.1 ms

Anybody in the forum done this yet?
Click to expand...

For me, the price is too rich for my blood. Maybe in 5 or 10 years
they'll be affordable.
Right now you can get a terabyte or two in a standard disk(s) for the
price they're asking for that 16 gigabyte drive.
 
Justin said:
here's the spec sheet:
http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/meritline/ide-flash-drive-spec.pdf

One thing I noticed is this:
Write/Erase Cycles: >1,000,000 cycles

How do you storage gurus read that? Is this a non-viable platform for a
Windows XP, due to a limitation in I/O cycles?
Click to expand...

With normal logging turned on, my PCs do >1M writes per day. With logging
turned off, my PCs still do >1M writes per week. I used DiskMon and
FileMon, courtesy of SysInternals.com, to capture write rates.
 
Windows XP cannot be installed on a flash drive.
Flash drives are designed for file storage only.

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows Shell/User

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

:

| I wish I had one of these to boot my Windows XP to:
| http://www.meritline.com/super-talent-2-5-inch-ide-flash-micro-drive-16gb.html
|
| Super Talent 2.5 inch 16GB IDE Flash Drive, Micro Drive, Model
| Access Time: less than 0.1 ms
| Seek Time: less than 0.1 ms
|
| Anybody in the forum done this yet?
 
Justin Brown - SYNACS said:
I wish I had one of these to boot my Windows XP to:
http://www.meritline.com/super-talent-2-5-inch-ide-flash-micro-drive-16gb.html

Super Talent 2.5 inch 16GB IDE Flash Drive, Micro Drive, Model
Access Time: less than 0.1 ms
Seek Time: less than 0.1 ms

Anybody in the forum done this yet?
Click to expand...


Justin:
You do understand, do you not, that this flash drive is designed as a
substitute for the traditional 2 1/2" HDD normally installed in a
laptop/notebook? It is *not* an external device that is simply plugged into
a CardBus or PCcard slot. In short, it's a laptop/notebook HDD with "no
moving parts".

While it does have some advantages, performance is not one of them when
compared with a "normal" 2 1/2" HDD. With a 16 GB capacity and selling in
the $500 range it's certainly not going to replace current laptop/notebook
HDDs any time soon.

We've all been waiting for economically-priced large-capacity solid-state
HDDs with no performance limitations for many years now. We're still
waiting...
Anna
 
Tried that with a 4GB one in a Windows XP based "scale monitoring
system", had wierd problems with data reads and writes, gave up and are
using a laptop drive instead. Odd things happened with all 3 units so it
wasn't just a one time issue.
 
Thanks for your input Bob. Apparently you've considered this
possibility too.

What about: Logging off, Virtual Memory off, %TEMP% and %TMP% system
variables, as well as %HOMEDRIVE% folder(s) changed to a secondary
(rotating) hard drive. Would that bring your writes down to maybe five
or six figures per week? =]
 
Justin said:
Thanks for your input Bob. Apparently you've considered this
possibility too.

What about: Logging off, Virtual Memory off, %TEMP% and %TMP% system
variables, as well as %HOMEDRIVE% folder(s) changed to a secondary
(rotating) hard drive. Would that bring your writes down to maybe five
or six figures per week? =]

Bob said:
With normal logging turned on, my PCs do >1M writes per day. With logging
turned off, my PCs still do >1M writes per week. I used DiskMon and
FileMon, courtesy of SysInternals.com, to capture write rates.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

Nope. It would take a lot of juggling to seriously reduce the write rate on
my PCs -- I'd need to uninstall a bunch of key apps and reinstall them on
non-system HDs, and change their params to write to non-sys HDs, to make
much difference. And it isn't clear that the performance gain would be
positive or even noticeable, other than the joy of a quick reboot.
 
Justin said:
Thanks for your input Bob. Apparently you've considered this
possibility too.

What about: Logging off, Virtual Memory off, %TEMP% and %TMP% system
variables, as well as %HOMEDRIVE% folder(s) changed to a secondary
(rotating) hard drive. Would that bring your writes down to maybe five
Click to expand...

Yes, but what a shame, you've turned off many the features that would be
most at home on this kind of storage. Kinda like chopping off one of your
hands to pay for a pair of gloves...
 
Cannot and should not are two different folks. I've met both of them.
=]

It's been done before, but as you are aware, it's something that XP was
not intended for, and shouldn't in any circumstance be used in
production. With that being said, it *is* a hard disk drive. It has low
latency. Remember that even Microsoft operating systems used to boot
from a floppy disk.

It would be interesting to me to take and benchmark operating system
performance in a rotating -versus- solid state comparison, head to
head. Who would win? I'm sure any 7200 RPM rotating disk wins in
throughput. But if you have an OS that doesn't require a great deal of
throughput for operating purposes, then you may be on to something
don't you think?

Just my humble opinion, of course.
 
Anna, did you miss the statistic I quoted? "Seek Time: less than 0.1
ms"

If that's not phenomenal seek performance then I don't know what is.
Seek time is only one of many factors that gauge overall performance, I
understand that. But seek time, also known as seek latency, becomes a
major factor when you acquire heavy file system fragmentation, in my
observation. According to Henry Newman, storage growth "exceeds
Moore's Law by a long shot" in the context of modern computing, which
seems to make fragmentation a very worthy issue when talking about
performance.

Quote taken from:
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/management/features/article.php/11186_3356811_3
 
Justin:
Working with literally thousands of hard drives over the years I have long
since discounted or outright ignored manufacturers' specifications re their
products. It's only when you work with these devices (and the same could be
said of every other component that makes up a PC) on a day-by-day basis that
you can judge its performance in real-life settings.

I have no idea of what you're talking about concerning Mr. Newman's thesis,
but I can tell you this...

At this moment these solid-state hard drive devices currently on the market
are no match performance-wise for a typical 2 1/2" 7200 RPM HDD designed for
a laptop/notebook, their "Seek Time" specifications notwithstanding. And
their astronomical prices in comparison with "normal" notebook 2 1/2" HDDs
certainly doesn't make them any more enticing, do they?

Simply stated - their day has not yet come. Hopefully it will one day. As I
previously indicated we've *all* been waiting for a "no moving parts" HDD
that's reliable, performance-enhanced, and economically feasible. We're
still awaiting their arrival.
Anna
 
Yeah, Rob. I looked at that very closely and almost bought one. I love
the idea, but don't like the 4GB ceiling. I hope they come out with a
16GB SATA II version, maybe even one that sits in a 5 1/4" bay. Run
that with ECC memory, create a backup image every month or two, and
you've got a Windows XP speed demon.


Robert said:
Justin said:
I hope you aren't referring to the virtual memory part.

=]
Click to expand...

Well if you use it at all, it should be on this kind of drive.

OK, got something else you might find interesting in a similar vein:
http://tomshardware.co.uk/2005/09/07/can_gigabyte/

rob
Click to expand...
 
Awesome response, Anna. Thanks.

As far as the Newman quote, he's showing us that storage growth is a
big deal. You can tie this growth to all kinds of considerations, like
type and availability of backups, a growth in dependency on digital
storage, even technical things like file system fragmentation which
used to be a symptom, and now it's an assumption. See where I'm coming
from? Seek latency is directly relate to performance in a fragmented
file system. The value of this discussion is apparent to me because in
the big picture, the real performance bottleneck is in the non-volatile
storage. You're acutely aware of that, I imagine. BTW I love the
7200RPM 2.5" drives. Thank you to Hitachi for pioneering them.


Thanks everyone for your input here. Anna has a perspective that I can
truly appreciate; at the same time I'm a gearhead and I want the best
thing, if I can get my paws on it. For now I'll have to settle for my
Western Digital Raptor. =]
 
Anna said:
Justin:
Working with literally thousands of hard drives over the years I have long
since discounted or outright ignored manufacturers' specifications re their
products. It's only when you work with these devices (and the same could be
said of every other component that makes up a PC) on a day-by-day basis that
you can judge its performance in real-life settings.

I have no idea of what you're talking about concerning Mr. Newman's thesis,
but I can tell you this...

At this moment these solid-state hard drive devices currently on the market
are no match performance-wise for a typical 2 1/2" 7200 RPM HDD designed for
a laptop/notebook, their "Seek Time" specifications notwithstanding. And
their astronomical prices in comparison with "normal" notebook 2 1/2" HDDs
certainly doesn't make them any more enticing, do they?

Simply stated - their day has not yet come. Hopefully it will one day. As I
previously indicated we've *all* been waiting for a "no moving parts" HDD
that's reliable, performance-enhanced, and economically feasible. We're
still awaiting their arrival.
Anna
Click to expand...
Considering that the amount we consider economically feasible changes
every day, the day that solid-state disks becomes economical may never
arrive. When 40 MB hard drives went for over $10 per megabyte memory
went for around $200 per megabyte. Nowadays hard drives are around
$2.50 per GB and memory around $100 per GB.
We can replace $10,000 worth of the drives at the old price with $100
worth of memory at the new price but of course now we don't want just 1
GB of disk. As fast as the prices come down the requirements for
storage go up. The 40 MB drive was adequate when the entire OS fit on a
single floppy, but now you need 1,000 times the storage.
 
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