Adtron's 3.5-inch Flash HD for under 2 grand
By Paul Miller 
posted October 26th 2005 8:00AM
posted October 26th 2005 8:00AM
The golden age is upon us:
Flash HDs on the cheap (um, relatively
speaking). Adtron is busting out a 8GB 3.5-inch SATA drive that should hum along nicely in you tricked out desktop
system, serving up the goods at 80MB a second while keeping quiet and staying cool. Of course, there's not really much
you can fit inside 8GB anymore, but whatever you do cram in there is going to move around all lickity split-like.
They're targeting this at military and industrial applications, and the $1900 price point is for quantity purchases,
but we're sure once we manage the grub with a bake sale or three, we'll find plenty of uses.
Can't fit much in an 8GB drive!? How about making this the system partition!? You can have a standard SATA drive for all your programs and stuff, but having the OS on this thing will FLY!
That's a few minutes of HD quality video, anyway...
but think of the XP boot time!
...and like all technology... it gets better.
Just think... that thing will be sitting on a shelf in a Goodwill somewhere in a few years.
An OEM install of OS X takes up about 10GB, and that includes a fair few applications. I think it won't be long till the OS and apps are on a drive like this whilst home folders remain on regular HDDs.
for $1900 you can buy 7 4GB ipod nanos, which would make for a 28 GB flash drive, something infinately more useful.
i don't see why they are charging so much for this drive. even without Apple's really good flash memory deal, I can't see buying 4 2GB flash chips costing more than $500
I don't think it's right to call these flash devices "hard drives".
Can't fit much in an 8GB drive? A friend of mine who is a lawyer keeps all documents of his entire professional life (about 30 years)plus reference books in less than 100 MB.
Sound, image and other niceties require a lot of space, but pure text and numeric data do not. Why should professionals that only use text and numbers be obliged to carry devices such as hard disks, that are cumbersome, problematic, noisy, energy-consuming? For many, near-to-endless battery time is preferred to sound, image and even color. Pity that few, if any, vendors consider them a market for themselves.
I think four 10000 rpm HDDs raid'ded together would give equal performance...and cheaper too! Can't argue about the less heat and noise though...
I wish someone made something with a PATA or SATA interface that took normal DDR or SDRAM. If it had 8 slots and was filled with 1GB sticks, that'd bring the price down quite a bit.
Of course, this data would have to be battery backed up to hold the data, but that wouldn't be such a chore with a small 4 cell battery pack built in.
Just think of actually getting the theoretical max of the interface for all file transfers.
Hey Cheeze,
Are you referring to something like this?
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480
If you were to install this unit as just space for your 'swap' file (Windows or OS X) you should see great speed improvements. Both OSs use 'swap' no matter how much ram you have. If you use Photoshop and work on small enough files make this your 'scratch' drive. If you use databases use it as sort space.
Really cool and the future looks even brigher.
Why not just rock two 4GB iPod Nanos in a RAID-0 configuration?
Since flash memory cards are getting so cheap, can't they build a device that would use an array of CompactFlash cards and act like a hard drive? It could use a RAID0 type scheme.
They have them in capacities up to 8gb these days, or you can buy 4x2gb cards at $100 each. It wouldn't neccessarily bring on the speed, but it would be silent and cool... and wouldn't cost $2000.
these things arent that much quicker than standard 10k rpm sata drives, there is not 'super fast' windows boot time, the access time of the ram makes it quicker, but not all that much aparently (via the Gigabyte i-Ram or whatever its called these days)
JonnyRocket - you say to install windows on it, and all your apps / games onto a sata...so basicly minesweeper and internet exporeler will run quick, but as soon as you try to load an app or a game it runs at sata speed again? kinda defeats the point if you ask me.
Goob - 4x10k Raptors will give you much faster transfer speeds, as this device is Sata limited anyway to one channel, it still kills the raptors on seek time however, and thats where most of the performance is for most things.
read up on it.
#9 - instead of spending 2 grand on something to make your swap file faster, how about just investing in more ram?....much, much faster than any HDD/Flashdrive out there. that way you dont touch your swap file. (remember, photoshop likes ram more than scratch disks)
Why not use Nanos? Maybe the transfer speeds would be too slow? But for the same price you'd get over 25GB of nano space.
I hope my 5 180+ gig hard drives full of pirated material last another 5-10 years when flash drives become cheap and high-capacity. It will be nice to not have to worry about hard drive crashes.
Oh, and just kidding about the piracy thing. Hmm, is that a swat team outside my house?
#8 yeah, that's what I was thinking about. It didn't really perform as well as I had hoped in the tests though. It looked like the controller chip on the pci card and probably the SATA bus was the limiting factor. I bet if they tested a few loaded cards with raid0 it would have minimised the bottlenecks and scaled up.
All in all, there's gotta be an OEM that's done this before with normal PC100 SDRAM. I know i have a stack of that junk sitting in my closet.
The bottleneck is the speed of the SATA channel and bus the SATA channel is connected to. While 150Mb/s is the max theoretical, actual world speed will not reach this holy grail even with faster connecting hardware.
Having said all that, you can probably get better speed with these using an add-in card instead of motherboard connection and even more in raid mode.
The best usage of a device like this is not for the OS or apps really, but very high seek applications such as a database storage device.
I wonder how quickly you'd reach the erase/write cycle limit of the flash memory and large numbers of cells begin to go bad. I see that as the main limitation/caveat of using a flash drive. Just keeping the OS on a flash drive and any temp/swap files on a physical disk might nullify that problem. The price of this thing is pretty insane though.