Samsung shows off flash laptop drive at CeBIT

That long-dreamed-of product, the solid-state laptop, is one step closer to reality, as Samsung is showing off a flash-powered laptop at CeBIT. The demo box uses a 32GB 1.8-inch solid-state drive created by Samsung, to show off the company's flash chops. Unfortunately, at $30 per gigabyte, the 32GB drive would cost over $900. However, with flash prices continuing to decline, and companies like Intel predicting that flash laptops are on their way, we may not have to wait too much longer for this to be feasible -- though, even at over $900, that flash laptop drive sounds mighty tempting.

[ron dwn2earth @ Apr 15th 2008 6:21AM]

1st, flash provides no data storage security or recovery, as it is sensitive to magnetic waves, 2nd, flash os and hdd combo are not good sense, as the hdd consumes more power in a stop/start/stop/start cycle than it would when spinning all the time is the case now, 3rd hdd are sensitive to shocks but resistant to bends and presure whereas flash is only resistant to shocks. and last, why extend battery life by sacrificing GB, when you can get an external bat pack that lasts up to 10 hrs, and electricity anywhere in the world. samsung is just using this as a market strategy.

[NerdzCo @ Mar 10th 2006 10:05PM]

(First Post!!!!)

Cool, ive been waiting for one of these solid state laptops!

[100 ipod movies @ Mar 10th 2006 10:10PM]

We have all been waiting for this. It'll be pretty fast...but the price would definately have to come down.

[distantbody @ Mar 10th 2006 10:14PM]

I, like many other tech people WOULD pay that much for a 32 gig flash drive. But it probably wouldn't sell enough quantities or be profitible (enough) for them to mass produce yet.

[joe @ Mar 10th 2006 10:26PM]

32 GB is overkill, I would be be happy with a laptop with a 4GB drive for the OS and 120 GB SATA drive for everything else.

[Joop Zonnet @ Jun 29th 2007 11:02AM]

Go and get yourself Mandriva Flash now. (http://www.mandriva.com/en/linux/node_3827)

[invaderluj @ Mar 10th 2006 10:27PM]

when the price on flash falls enough I can kiss my mechanical hard drives goodbye

[Richard L @ Jun 16th 2007 1:06PM]

I agree all. I would wait for those SSD price goes down as today on convensional hard drives. Do you know when, a year or two later?

[Tmortn @ Mar 10th 2006 10:49PM]

Agreed with above... I would shell out the money for one of these if it were available. It would do wonders for laptop durability not to mention aleviating general hard drive failure problems. If needed you Could easily have a 100+gb external drive for access to larger file repositories.

The UMPC needs something like this badly. I imagine gen 2 will see it available and gen 3 will see it affordable. If someone can just figure out a way to make a touchscreen hardened to abuse you could then have a very rough and tumble device.

[Aalaap @ Mar 10th 2006 11:06PM]

There's some dedicated CeBIT 06 coverage happening right here at http://tech.moneycontrol.com/ .. head on over and check it out!

[matt jones @ Mar 10th 2006 11:10PM]

Agree with above, I thought they were going ahead with a smaller flash for the OS, fast boot up, and a conventional drive for other software and data.

Always on laptop, low power, and if you have to really fast starts.

[MikeCerm @ Mar 10th 2006 11:27PM]

I don't really get the push for solid state laptops. In MP3 players that you take jogging it makes sense, but what do you people do with your laptops that has you so paranoid about HD crashes?

Newer 2.5", 1.8" and 1" drives are virtually shock-free, and they're an order of magnitude cheaper than flash. Compare the 60 gig iPod to the 4 gig Nano. Per gigabyte, the Nano is 10 times more expensive.

Magnetic storage (disk drive) technology is almost a century old, and much more mature than flash. It will be at least a decade before flash is price competitive with hard drives. So, for my portable storage needs, I'd rather have a 160 gig Seagate HD than 4 gigs of Samsung flash in my laptop. Actually, I'm fine with 40 gigs in my laptop, and that only cost me $50, which would only buy me 1 gig of flash.

Flash is the future... the distant future.

[Sobask @ Feb 10th 2007 11:56PM]

I don't really get the push for combustion engines. In small cars that you take around the town it makes sense, but what do you people do with your carriages that has you so paranoid about damage to your horses?

The newest purebred horses are virtually healthy, and they're an order of magnitude cheaper than combustion engines. Compare the purebred horse to a small combustion engine. Per horsepower, the combustion engine is 10 times more expensive.

Horse-driven technology is almost five centuries old, and much more mature than combustion engines. It will be at least a decade before combustion engines are more price competitive with horses. So, for traveling needs, I'd rather have a 5 purebred horses than a tiny combustion engine in my vehicle. Actually, I'm fine with 3 horses, and that only cost me $500 which would only buy a tiny combustion engine.

Combustion engines are the future... the distant future.

[Michelle @ Sep 23rd 2007 4:02PM]

Hey what would you recommend for a hp laptop pavillion zv6000, for an external hard drive?

[Darryl @ Mar 10th 2006 11:29PM]

Yes, I wonder what this would do for battery life on a laptop ...

[Tmortn @ Mar 10th 2006 11:55PM]

#9

Its not what we do with them. It is a physical inevitability of the technology of spinning platters. Little platters spinning at xxxxrpms and miniscule clearences subject to mobile use fail. End of story. In a laptop that is truly used as a mobile system (ie daily moves around) it is almost always the component that has the best chance of failing during the usefull life of the device. CD and DVD drives might fail more often. Been a while since I have seen failure rates.

Current HD tech is indeed very mature. And the fact that HD failure is still a fact of life in both the Desktop and Laptop world I think is sufficient proof that magnetic spinning platters have an inherrent reliablity limitation that we have reached.

Even if they were not a reliability weak link they are an almost constant power drain. Spinning platters take energy. And they have to be kept spun up in order to provide swift access. NAND only consumes power while it is being accessed. Faster drives at this point almost always mean faster speeds and / or more cache.. both or wich require power to operate.

I am hoping that the not so distant future sees high capacity flash drives paired with full motion capable E-ink displays that consume almost no power except when making changes. Combine that with the finally appearing fuel cell technology and we might finally see a laptop that goes for days between charges/fuelings.

[js @ Mar 10th 2006 11:56PM]

MikeCerm, you obviously missed the point.

The advantage of Solid State memory is SPEED. With HDD, the drive has to spin first before it accesses data.

Imagine the time saved when booting up an OS with flash memory.

[ede @ Mar 10th 2006 11:58PM]

My understanding was that besides being fast, durable, and silent, flash hard drives would use much less battery. To that end, whatever happened to that combo normal & flash HD that would use the flash memory as a very large cache so that the drive wouldn't have to spin all the time and waster battery power? I thought it was being developed by Samsung...

[Andrew Ray @ Mar 11th 2006 12:04AM]

Why not a Hyrid drive. Say 4 GB of flash for OS/common files and 60 GB of hard drive for storage. You get the storage and the power saving because the drive only has to spin when you want that data. There would be a greater seak time for storage on the drive but I think it would be worth it.

[reno6 @ Mar 11th 2006 12:36AM]

IIRC, the number of rewrite times of a flash device is limited (something like 1 million times). Does that limit still exist?

[evo @ Mar 11th 2006 1:23AM]

Flash memory info at Answers.com (yes, they still have the write-cycle limts):

http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=NAND+memory&gwp=13

[slip @ Mar 11th 2006 1:41AM]

A naive question for you:
I've noticed that the capacities for flash drive seems to double with each new generation, but for new hard drives, it is more incremental. If this generation is 32GB, does that mean that the next generation that will be developed will likely be 64GB? That would be prety darn respectable for a laptop storage device.

[pie @ Mar 11th 2006 2:05AM]

One concern I have:

I a magnetic hard drive crashes, the very worse case you can "still" get some if not most of your data back by sending it off to data recovery service.

For the case of flash memory, when one of the nand chips gone bad, you can pretty much kiss your data bye bye.

[john @ Mar 11th 2006 3:27AM]

I'll almost certainly be getting a laptop pretty soon, and I'll be very tempted to pick up a 4G compact flash card and load / and /home on it. Even now, my current install of Ubuntu (amd64 + i386 chroot!). I could install games to the internal HD and only bother spinning it up when I have power to burn. Movies and music could also be put on the internal HD, and I could just copy what I want at that moment to flash and spin down the drive. There would be no reason to keep a hard drive spinning for 2 hours while watching a movie...

[Derek @ Mar 11th 2006 6:01AM]

The major incentives are basically battery life and size. Speed (so I was told) is not really the issue, as solid state drives really aren't all that fast. In the long run though, speed could certainly be a factor, since getting hard drive platters smaller, spinning faster, and still maintaining shock-resistance really has drive-makers banging their heads.

I think this really is the future, as most laptop users don't need a 120+ GB hard drive, and would sure like to save some space and battery...

[Refik @ Mar 11th 2006 7:56AM]

WOW! I wish I had such a notebook however it is to expensive.

[Doug @ Mar 11th 2006 8:58AM]

For me the weak point of virtually all laptops has been related to the motherboard, not the hard drive. I've never had a laptop hard drive problem, but I've had 3 motherboard failures (1 mac, 2 pcs), one power & sound card failure (mac), a couple of AC adapter failures (mac, pc). And in general of course there are overheating issues, esp. with laptop makers who put desktop processors in these things.

I'm all for flash drives, but until they improve the quality of their other components, I'm sticking with desktop + ipaq. Every laptop we've ever owned has failed in one way or another within a couple of years or less.

[Gary @ Mar 11th 2006 9:25AM]

It's easy to get a solid-state laptop. First, find one of the old 486-era HP Omnibooks. They came without a fixed IDE hard drive, but used PC card slots for storage instead. At the time, a 340 megabyte PC card micro hard drive was a standard item, but now you could swap that out with a 512 megabyte flash memory CompactFlash card in a PC adapter. Tada! Really old technology, but solid state all the way!

[Rob @ Mar 11th 2006 10:19AM]

I'm not getting those of you who want OS on flash and mass storage on disk. Sure, that sounds nice for a desktop configuration, but the whole point of a laptop running a flash disk is better reliability, product life, power savings, and (yes) performance. Add an HD to the mix and there isn't much improvement from what we already have.

[yang @ Mar 11th 2006 10:38AM]

I share the same concerns as poster #15 regarding the limited number of write cycles on those NAND chips

[Karel Jansens @ Oct 23rd 2007 3:50PM]

@ Gary:

It's even easier to get a solid state laptop: there are companies who sell CF-to-IDE adapters (such as this one: http://www.cfide.co.uk/compact_flash_ide_adapters.shtml ). Just take the hard drive out of your notebook and plug in a 4 gig CF card. It is recommended not to use it with Windows, and prudently with Linux, as swapfiles can wear out flash memory rather quickly (if you have enough RAM in Linux, you can forego swap entirely, but Windows has some weird ideas of its own).

Also beware that the early HP Omnibooks (I still have a 425 collecting dust) were rather fussy about the kind of PCMCIA memory card you stuck in. I managed to get it to "see" an IBM 40 mb card, but to date no CF card was recognized successfully.

[Martini @ Mar 11th 2006 12:29PM]

I'd really like to have one of these, not only should it be more power effecient, it should be fast as hell.

I won't consider buying any sort of laptop or UMPC until battery life is atleast 50% more than it is now though.

[James Powers @ Mar 11th 2006 12:45PM]

While standard drives may take time to spin, flash drives still ride the same bus as before...IDE or SATA. Therefore, the bus will become saturated long before we see any performance increases associated with flash mem ory. A SATA2 3.0GB/s drive does not even saturate a SATA 150 bus. Seek time may improve, but until bus transfer rates improve, the only benefit from solid-state drives is the fact that they are just that...solid state, no moving parts.

[Chris @ Mar 11th 2006 2:07PM]

RE:18. A naive question for you:

that's because, comparatively speaking, flash drives are a young technology. Hard drives had their bursty time of increases too, way back when.

For myself, I don't particularly like flash anything. It's just about the slowest form of memory, and it has a write/access limit. I want mram. then we can forget about the distinction between memory and long term storage. Think about that: there will no longer be the memory bank/storage medium paradigm. Perhaps for backup, but not for operation.

[Brian @ Mar 11th 2006 2:15PM]

Pricey, but battery life and and reliability would be worth it to me.

[Terry @ Mar 11th 2006 8:07PM]

I've been waiting for something better then the "BUBBLE MEMORY" of my earlier days in IT.

[Kibiyama @ Mar 11th 2006 9:53PM]

19:
I don't know as much about hard drives as I do other hardware, but I believe that is because hard drives use platters. So to increase the memory they just add another xx GB platter.

As for the 2x increase in flash memory, this is because in binary, if you add another digit onto a number, it doubles. So with the addressing of the bytes, it must be a power of 2. (32 MB is NOT exactly 32 MB, it is actually a power if two) I hope that answers your question?

Btw, I'm probably wrong somewhere, I never took a class in any of this or anything.

[Radu @ Mar 12th 2006 1:52AM]

For those who think that a CF to IDE adaptor can be used for the time being, you are in for a surprise.
I tried two of them, with a 4GB FAST CF card. I tried installing various distributions of Linux (didn't try Windows) and nothing really worked. It complained about DMA problems. When I used the nodma flag, it worked better but still had a lot of write errors, timeouts, disk no ready, and so on.

I am not talking about this new technology, I am sure Samsung will make sure their solid state drives will work fine. But the CD to IDE adaptors are not viable for general use.

[NordicNINE @ Mar 12th 2006 12:55PM]

Why didn't Samsung put NAND in their Origami.
8GB of NAND & no hard drive would be sufficient for most of the things an Origami would be used for and the battery life would be better than the pitiful 3-4 hours I've been hearing about.

[Dudley @ Mar 12th 2006 4:20PM]

Behold...the solid state laptop...only it was five years ago and was called the Psion Netbook. Oh yeah - it also had all day battery life.
http://www.geek.com/hwswrev/pda/netbook/netbook.htm

[raindog @ Mar 13th 2006 11:57AM]

Yeah, someone made a solid state Commodore 64 laptop in 1997 or thereabouts too, which used ROM and battery backed RAM, ran Windows 3.1 and a C64 emulator. Like the Psion, no one bought it. It seems to me there were DOS-based ones like that in the early 90's too. And if you're gonna say the Netbook was a laptop, you have to say the Sharp Zauruses (Zauri?) with larger keyboards were as well.

As long as we're considering glorified PDA's like these, though, why not just cut to the chase and recommend the Tandy Model 100? Talk about battery life. Talk about rugged. Talk about 32K of RAM.

I think "laptop" really means "an easily portable computer that runs more or less the same OS and applications you can actually buy off the shelf and use on your desktop PC." Even one that ran Linux but not Windows or OSX would barely qualify, never mind one that ran a phone/PDA operating system. Maybe the Atari ST laptops would have qualified at the time if the OS was in ROM, since at the time you could buy ST software off the shelf and use it at home or on the road, though they did use floppy disks a lot back then.

(I know, I know.... "Oh yeah? Well, I run Symbian on my desktop machine too!")

[Karel Jansens @ Mar 13th 2006 7:12PM]

@ raindog:

Inventing definitions that happen to suit you is not exactly a winning strategy in a debate...

[Mohammad @ Mar 24th 2006 12:23AM]

Realisticly thinking, it takes at least 10 years to see this laptop in the market. HDDs for laptop currently cost less than 5% of this 32GB flash-drive. The price of HDD has been also dropping remarkably in the recent years. So, I think we keep seeing laptops with HDD for years.

[Brendon @ Mar 27th 2006 4:05PM]

34. I found the wallpaper on the laptop screen using Google Images.

try the link:
http://images.google.com/images?imgsz=xxlarge&hl=en&lr=&q=+site:www.zaigen.co.kr+samsung+wallpaper

Also, 14. has a good point. Maybe upon startup, a 4gb cache could have the os/applications loaded to it. That way if there were a power failure, all of the information would still be stored on the hdd platter. This would also reduce power consumption, reducing the need for the hdd platter to be spinning.

[David Clubb @ May 4th 2006 2:12PM]

Well, I see that you all like the Solid State Laptop Battery. I am currently in the process of producing some of these solid state laptop hard drives. There are more than just 2 advantages as mentioned above. they consume less energy, produce less heat, and are very durable. It will extend the life of your laptop by 2 to 6 years.

If you want to know more, email me at [e-mail]

[LawrenceOakley.com @ Aug 27th 2006 4:55PM]

Sorry, but with a HDD, you could fit alot more than a measily 32GB in that laptop, also, if you are worried about haveing your HDD data being damaged, then apple have released all of their laptops with a sensor, that automatically shuts off the HDD if a sudden movement is detected. THIS IS CRAP!!

[Erick @ Sep 11th 2006 5:51PM]

1 million read/write cycles...100 times read/write per day is 27 years of usage...Even if you read/wrote 1000 times per day, that would still be nearly 3 years of usage...

I don't see the read/write issue being much of a problem. How often would the system read/write something?

[AyAn4m1 @ Sep 11th 2006 7:35PM]

Every time you play a game for 30 minutes, you read/write a few thousand times. Every time you open a folder in Windows Explorer, you read at least once for every file in that folder. If you torrent, you're reading/writing the same speed you're uploading/downloading, which is probably a lot. It's not 3 years of average usage.

[Moosh @ Sep 11th 2006 10:38PM]

As mentioned above, a Flash-only drive would be completely impractical, as they aren't meant for constant use for hours upon hours at a time. The previously stated hybrid drive, however, seems fairly reasonable, if not a ways off in the future. Access times on 7,200 RPM drives is respectable, and 10,000 RPM drives are price dropping reasonably. I'll give it five years before it's more than a collector's-only item, and eight before it's relatively affordable.

[sub100 @ Sep 21st 2006 1:57PM]

too much cost