Eric, >> Sad how a simple "battery" is not included in such devices, so maybe >> low-power DRAM could be used for faster writes and longer lifetimes. > > Batteries are usually limited to high-end products ...
Get them down into LOW-end products, and I might be more interested! > Hard disks also come in variants for 24/7 use and those for PC. Nice to know, but may not be necessary. My 2003-2006 Maxtor disk ran exactly for its 3 years. My 2006 Western Digital is now over 2 years PAST warranty and giving absolutely NO ill effects, likely due to UIDE that I did not HAVE till late 2006. Not just UIDE, but your LBAcache or ANY constantly-used disk caching program should help make "regular" PC hard disks last a LOT longer! >> But knowing how manufacturers make such disks last EXACTLY >> their "warranty period", I really doubt it! > > I also doubt that they would last that long if HEAVILY used, > maybe just okay for the manufacturers to replace those which > are used more than predicted and thus break during warranty. "We may never know", since even I did not realize how far beyond its 3-year warranty my W.D. disk drive is, till AFTER I wrote the above! "Heavily used" may no-longer exist, if UIDE or LBAcache are present! >> if you use a FLASH based device in an environment with lots of writes >> then you expect to be replacing it on an accelerated schedule. > > The "lots" should probably be "LOTS" there: As mentioned earlier > in this thread, SSD already ship with extra capacity. They keep > track how often which area is used and just use fresh areas when > they predict or sense some area to be over-used. Different from > harddisks, over-used areas are not lost for reads but for writes > so data is normally never lost, just the capacity decreases ... Hard disks almost NEVER "lose" data, as their firmware does much the same as you note above: If a sector/track/whatever seems to be getting unreliable, the disk assigns the area to an alternate and copies its date there, while it still can! Only if a hard- disk runs OUT of alternate areas does it then start posting REAL errors to us "outsiders"! > Also, the sweet spot for SSD sizes, price wise, is 60 to 500 GB > at the moment, much closer to 1 Euro per GB than to two ... Last I heard, a Euro was about $1.33, meaning that a 120-GB hard disk for only $40 (30 Euros) is far more of a bargain. Each of my "30 Euros" buys 4-GB of hard disk, not less than 1-GB of SSD! >> NOT concerned about absolute speed (not with UIDE, anyway!) > > With the sizes of UIDE that you run, you could actually boot from > DVD and then use a RAMDISK, which big UIDE caches are similar to. I could, but I prefer a hard-disk that need not be copied up to a RAMdisk each time I boot. In fact, I do NOT run any "huge" UIDE cache -- I actually run a special variant of UIDE2 using a 500-MB cache, since my system has only 1-GB memory. With V6.22 MS-DOS (19.5K of free HMA re: no FAT32, Win95/98 or long-filename Krud), most of my driver and its search table for 500-MB "fits" into the HMA, and I get a faster UIDE2-style driver for only my normal 944 bytes of upper-memory! >> nor power consumption > > SSD are similar in power consumption to 2.5 inch harddisks ... Nice to know, but does not matter for people like me, who have a "desktop" system with a virtually "unlimited" 400W power-supply! >> but I AM still "concerned" over all noted in this thread >> re: FLASH-disk "cycle limits"! > > There seem to be some notorious SSD models which just break down > completely, but as far as I could tell, none of those was due to > exhausted flash write cycles. It rather seems to be weak firmware > (we both know that firmware is no quality market today) ... "Sucks!" is the "operative" word, there! Re: the rest of your comments, I agree, SSD/FLASH/"whatever" hard disk replacements have their advantages, but at present, the cost of REGULAR hard disks makes SSDs a "niche" market only. Perhaps if SSD costs drop (a LOT!), and most such "reliability" issues go away (COMPLETELY!), they may replace most traditional hard-disks. But, Seagate "et al" keep making their drives cost less, too, and so I expect to "live out MY life" [age 66 now] using a HARD disk! Jack R. Ellis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
