Flash vs. Hard Drives

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boramk

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Eventually, we all know flash will overtake HDD...

Flash's largest is 256GB and HDD's largest is 1TB.

It has many advantages such as portability, doesnt use moving parts, no sound, speed?

Ok, speed, is flash faster than a hard drive?
I'm speaking now of how a HDD can write can write at 3gbps via SATA2, can a flash do the same? I mean, all I've seen so far is a 480mbps via USB 2.0

Also, when do you think the transition will take place?
 
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It's already taking place, you can order a dell laptop and specify a SATA HDD or Solid State disk, 64gb limit for now.
 
The next question is hoe fast is the software stsrt-up time.

with disk drives there are the pesky matter of sectors but what of solid state drives.

Will OSes boot up immediately and apps start-up instantaneously???
 
The problem is not that flash is limited to 480mbps, it's that USB 2.0 is limited to 480mbps. It's the interface that slows it down. Think of it this way - you have two water tanks each capable of pumping out water at 200 litres per second, but they're connected by a pipe that's only capable of transporting water at 20 litres per second. The tanks are therefore limited to 20 litres per second.

Back on topic - flash drives also have a limited number of read/writes compared to HDDs.
 
Picard said:
The next question is hoe fast is the software stsrt-up time.

with disk drives there are the pesky matter of sectors but what of solid state drives.

Will OSes boot up immediately and apps start-up instantaneously???
Click to expand...

We would first need to do away with the BIOS, or either integrate the OS and BIOS into one unit.
 
If you Youtube this, quite a few of your Questions will be answered instantaneously. Vista, booting with SSD's FTW! (We're talking mere seconds here)

Also check the XP ones :D
 
ld13 said:
If you Youtube this, quite a few of your Questions will be answered instantaneously. Vista, booting with SSD's FTW! (We're talking mere seconds here)

Also check the XP ones :D
Click to expand...

I boot up MacOSX in mere seconds from a 250GB SATA2 HD.
I would imagine a SSD would boot up MacOSX in say one second
or so :).
 
Highflyer_GP said:
The problem is not that flash is limited to 480mbps, it's that USB 2.0 is limited to 480mbps. It's the interface that slows it down. Think of it this way - you have two water tanks each capable of pumping out water at 200 litres per second, but they're connected by a pipe that's only capable of transporting water at 20 litres per second. The tanks are therefore limited to 20 litres per second.

Back on topic - flash drives also have a limited number of read/writes compared to HDDs.
Click to expand...

I think the limit is around 200 000 times for the lowest...:confused:
 
R76000 (yes, that's Seventy Six Thousand ) for a 256GB SSD drive might present a small problem as well...
 
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And this is probably a dumb/unanswerable question, but how many read/write operations, on average, would be performed daily? IE how long could one reasonably expect a flash drive to remain usable?
 
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