Posted on 11/14/2007 8:04:43 AM PST by Reaganesque
November 14, 2007 In what could be seen as a stepping stone on the road to the replacement of traditional platter based hard drives with flash based drives, SanDisk has unveiled a solid-state storage solution that works in conjunction with a PC's hard drive to store and launch the computer's operating system and software applications. Presently the cost and size limitations of flash storage prohibit the complete replacement of traditional hard drives in PCs, but the new SanDisk Vaulter Disk offers the performance advantages of flash memory by tag-teaming with a PC’s existing hard drive. Both Vaulter and the hard drive are integrated into the PC and operate simultaneously, while maintaining a low cost per gigabyte.
With SanDisk’s Vaulter Disk, which is a flash-based PCI Express module, both laptop and desktop computer manufacturers are able to harness the speed of embedded flash memory for frequently accessed files while continuing to use a spinning hard drive for bulk storage of less frequently accessed data. The Vaulter Disk requires only enough memory to host the computer’s operating system and selected optional user data that is benefited by the faster access time using flash memory. The hard drive stores files, user-generated content and applications that do not require or benefit from faster seek times.
SanDisk Vaulter Disk accelerates performance by pre-controlling the distribution of storage data between itself and a high-capacity hard drive. This parallel activity increases overall user responsiveness over a hard drive-only configuration. The SanDisk Vaulter Disk’s storage concept, for which patents have been applied, transparently speeds up data retrieval for boot and application load operations, as well as unexpected user access to new files. With SanDisk Vaulter Disk there is a faster response time when a user randomly accesses many small files for repeated operations, such as opening applications, as well as for unexpected behavior such as retrieving new applications or entries on the Internet.
The SanDisk Vaulter Disk will be offered to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) early next year in capacities of from 8 GB to 16GB. “This system solution brings SanDisk’s flash performance benefits to the price-sensitive consumer who needs high-capacity storage,” said Doreet Oren, SanDisk director of product marketing for the computing solutions division.
Judges named the SanDisk Vaulter the Best of Innovations 2008 in the Enabling Technologies category at a press conference at CES Unveiled, where the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) announced its 2008 Innovations Design and Engineering awards for products that will debut at International CES in Las Vegas in January next year.
Hitachi or Seagate had introduced hard-drives that combine flash memory to boost performance, a few days ago. Works similarly, I would guess, except that the whole thing is in one package.
So how fast can a system reboot using this technology? Instantly?
MACs boot and shut down quickly and gracefully...
>> All I can say is...IT’S ABOUT D**N TIME!!! My computer reset because of a Microsoft software update and took nearly 30-40 minutes to reboot including the time it took to reboot from the crash the first reboot generated. Anything that improves that kind of performance is more than welcome in my home!!
Got Linux?
Randog's Rule: Any advances made in computer hardware are immediately neutralized by advances in computer software.
Microsoft.... what do you expect?
What I would like would be a way to put an OS on a bootable drive, and then be able to flip a switch and render the drive unmodifiable by viruses, trojans, and assorted malware. You can't currently do this with Windows because it needs to be able to update its registry, so Windows would need to be modified to be able to segregate writeable parts from parts that you want read-only
But you can do it with Linux.
Carrot: Thanks! I’ll have to check that out.
Tommy: A full flash drive would come up instantly. The article didn’t really mention just how fast this particular drive works that I saw. But, anything is an improvement from my perspective.
I have some business specific software on my computer, would I still be able to use it under Linux?
Using PCI-E slots actually has some advantages regarding datarate and number of pipelines available to move the dita directly to the cpu controller.
Quicken and QuickBooks are still not available as native Linux apps yet, but they can be run under Linux.
I wonder how much this will cost. Right now you can get an internal IDE 16GB SSD for about $220. Of course, I think IDE is slower than PCIe, so I imagine Sandisk’s solution will be faster.
When I’m able to save up enough, I’d like to get a SSD drive for the OS and major applications, with SATA drives for music and other files.
I once had a Panasonic laptop that had a flash drive, and a floppy. It was great for DOS!
Don’t most motherboards have only one PCI-E slot? If so, and your graphics card is PCI-E, you might have a problem.
Assuming its similar to a RAMDRIVE (which are small - 4GB)
Good idea.
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