flash replacing hard disks?

[Keith R. Williams]

This sounds more like 3.5" desktop HDs. 2.5" laptop remains
more expensive (lower sales volume & lower unit capacity).

Yes, I was thinking about desktop drives. Laptop drives are about 30% more/GB
($.67/GB vs $.50/GB) so that's only 70 times. ;-)

 

[HenryNettles]

"Click of Death" was a Zip drive failure mode, wasn't it? IMO they were
useless without being unreliable.

I never found much use for zip drives. A few years ago I was really hoping
that zip or ls120 drives would replace floppy drives, as I really, really
hate floppy drives -- too slow, too many errors, etc. But the price on the
media remained high, and the market never took off. I see many new PCs on
the store shelves at Best Buy without a floppy drive, but I always include
a floppy when I build a PC. Have you ever tried to install XP onto a SATA
or SCSI drive without a floppy drive present? How about burning a CDR just
to flash the motherboard BIOS?

I spent quite a bit of time/effort trying to come up with a better floppy
drive for my own use, including trying out both the IDE and SCSI versions
of the LS-120 drive. But their operation was always weird and unreliable.

End of off-topic rant, we now return you to your regularly scheduled
programming....

 

[Gnu_Raiz]

I never found much use for zip drives. A few years ago I was really hoping
that zip or ls120 drives would replace floppy drives, as I really, really
hate floppy drives -- too slow, too many errors, etc. But the price on the
media remained high, and the market never took off. I see many new PCs on
the store shelves at Best Buy without a floppy drive, but I always include
a floppy when I build a PC. Have you ever tried to install XP onto a SATA
or SCSI drive without a floppy drive present? How about burning a CDR just
to flash the motherboard BIOS?

I spent quite a bit of time/effort trying to come up with a better floppy
drive for my own use, including trying out both the IDE and SCSI versions
of the LS-120 drive. But their operation was always weird and unreliable.

End of off-topic rant, we now return you to your regularly scheduled
programming....

I built a matx pvr a while ago, and thought that a regular internal
cd-rom, dvd-rom would fit, as the case said it would. But it turns out
that the drive would hit the top of my cpu heatsink. Now all that is in
that machine is a floppy, and a 120 gig harddrive. If I want to reinstall
windows I will have to pull out a cd-rom drive, and put it on the
motherboard.

As a side note has anyone tried the boot floppy window xp installs, I seen
the directions and its a nightmare. Whereas the Gnu/Linux floppy install
can be still found at various distro's. I still threaten my wife if the
OS craps out or needs a reinstall, I will put linux on it. She does not
like that idea one bit, even though she uses my linux desktop all the time
for various things, she is afraid that she won't understand how to use it.

What gets me is I have an external dvd burner that for the life of me I
cannot get my motherboard to boot off the device. I have tried every
option in the mb bios and I am still unable to get a boot off a external
drive. Regardless of how much I want to put linux on that machine I
probably will not be able to due to my wife not wanting it.

So I very much might end up with a usb stick such as 512 or 1 gig just to
install and have as a backup device for certain files that need to be
saved.

A few months ago after a lengthy RMA process on a motherboard my zip drive
stopped working, and I thought it was dead. It turns out that the MB had a
voltage problem, and no matter what zip disk I tried it would not read it
but offered me to erase the disk. It was very weird, so when I switched
MB's I went through my zip disks again and everyone was able to be read
like normal, very weird. Nothing was changed other than connecting it to
the new board, no jumper settings or anything else happened. I guess zip
drives do not like low voltages, it was reading like 3.7 on the +5 volt
line, so it was not much of a surprise.

I am surprised that no one mentions the psp, it seems that one of the cool
things about the psp is if you have the right amount of flash you can
watch movies on it and play games. I know you could of done it years ago
with pda's but for some reason it never took off. I only know a few people
that do it, for some reason watching the latest Sony movie on a psp is
ironic to some people.

I just wonder when will the the MPAA allow such things as a Video ipod.
Make the screen a little bigger allow mpeg, divx, xvid codec's to be
played, as well as the current crop of music, you could have the next cool
must have device. Put wifi on it, to allow browsing, or watching streaming
media and maybe have a voip client it could be the device that changes
everything.

It probably will not happen for many years, due to the power of the MPAA,
and with all the copyright issues. Apple could due it kind of like a
Vidtune let people download movies to their vpod, or something, or even
have vpod casting let people tune in to homemade movies streaming over the
internet. Yeah I know you can do this now with a laptop, but most people
will want a small device to do it with.

Gnu_Raiz

 

[YKhan]

Still, that being said, I just don't see too many people buying the
latest and greatest 500GB drives. In fact, the largest drives I see
that are at all common are 250GB drives which made their debut a full
two and a half years ago (as a bit of a sidenote to go along with
that, it's taken us 2 1/2 years to get from 250GB drives to 500GB
drives, 6 months longer than one extended Moore period).

I just bought a 200GB a week back to replace my old 60GB boot drive.
200GB was near the top of the range of drives I was seeing at most
Ottawa computer stores. You'd see the very topmost ones being about
250GB or 300GB.

Yousuf Khan

 

[YKhan]

I never found much use for zip drives. A few years ago I was really hoping
that zip or ls120 drives would replace floppy drives, as I really, really
hate floppy drives -- too slow, too many errors, etc. But the price on the
media remained high, and the market never took off. I see many new PCs on
the store shelves at Best Buy without a floppy drive, but I always include
a floppy when I build a PC. Have you ever tried to install XP onto a SATA
or SCSI drive without a floppy drive present? How about burning a CDR just
to flash the motherboard BIOS?

I'm going through that problem right now on a friend's computer. Trying
to burn a CD-RW to flash a BIOS. It looks like Nero 6 now has a
pre-packaged version of DR-DOS included now, that can even read NTFS
partitions. However, all of that user-friendliness results in a DOS
environment with only 396KB memory available to it. That results in a
not-enough memory error (ironic these days, considering he's got 1GB of
memory installed).

We can't even edit the autoexec or config.sys because that environment
is put into a section of the CD that is inaccessible by the writer
software.

We then tried to install a real floppy drive but we found all floppies
we had available to be non-operational.


Yousuf Khan

 

[Del Cecchi]

snip

"Click of Death" was a Zip drive failure mode, wasn't it? IMO they
were
useless without being unreliable.

Laptop drives seem to be pretty robust, at least when not in operation.
OTOH,
if flash were free it would be nice, yes. The write cycle limitation
worries
me in this application though.

I heard it with respect to thinkpad drives. And it certainly describes
the way the drive in my t23 died.

del

 

[George Macdonald]

I never found much use for zip drives. A few years ago I was really hoping
that zip or ls120 drives would replace floppy drives, as I really, really
hate floppy drives -- too slow, too many errors, etc. But the price on the
media remained high, and the market never took off. I see many new PCs on
the store shelves at Best Buy without a floppy drive, but I always include
a floppy when I build a PC.

I always include a floppy too but I'm getting fed-up with them; I also
expect floppy disks to start increasing in price fairly soon. The big
names all seem to have given up even marketing them and the last time I
went to CompUSA, they had only store brand.

Have you ever tried to install XP onto a SATA
or SCSI drive without a floppy drive present? How about burning a CDR just
to flash the motherboard BIOS?

There are a couple of solutions here: buy a USB floppy drive or use a USB
flash drive. All BIOSs I've seen in the last 2 years are capable of
booting off both - might need to specify some USB "legacy" option in BIOS
Setup... and set the drive boot order correctly... and have a way to make a
USB flash drive bootable.

BTW, IME the nForce3/4 chipsets do not need a SATA driver loaded to get
WinXP to install to the HDD and then boot off it - the nForce chipset seems
to be compatible enough to run with the generic IDE driver. You still have
to load the specific nForce driver later to get the performance of course.

 

[George Macdonald]

Well, there are some cost issues. IIRC, flash is still around
$50/GB while HD is a fifth or tenth that.

According to this article
http://www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews/article/CA6259244.html Apple
is paying $54. for 2 x 8Gb parts for the iPod Nano, with a *big* discount
from Samsung so the $50/GB seems reasonable (lowish ?) for retail pricing?
Samsung is expecting to have 16Gb parts 2H06 and 32Gb some time in 2007,
which should change things somewhat.

A longer term issue is around filesystem design. Flash has a
limited number of re-write cycles (10k?) and some designs (FAT*)
or usages (access times) may concentrate writes enough to cause
critical failures.

Yeah that could be worrying: wondering how many writes you have left
though the modern drives claim to have wear-leveling sector management
built into the on-board controller with a stated projected overall product
life of ~10 years with eventual gradual reduction of capacity - detailed
article by SiliconSystems:
http://www.storagesearch.com/siliconsys-art1.html. From what I see there
are drives available for IDE PATA & SATA in 2.5" and 3.5" FF going up to
192GB but prices are hard to pin down - think I saw ~$2000. for one but not
sure of size on that... maybe 60GB.

As an aside, which may interest you, flash-based SSDs are racking up
spectacular successes in pipeline pig accidents.... see "Highly Stressed
Pig" at http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd.html

 

[George Macdonald]

I'm going through that problem right now on a friend's computer. Trying
to burn a CD-RW to flash a BIOS. It looks like Nero 6 now has a
pre-packaged version of DR-DOS included now, that can even read NTFS
partitions. However, all of that user-friendliness results in a DOS
environment with only 396KB memory available to it. That results in a
not-enough memory error (ironic these days, considering he's got 1GB of
memory installed).

We can't even edit the autoexec or config.sys because that environment
is put into a section of the CD that is inaccessible by the writer
software.

We then tried to install a real floppy drive but we found all floppies
we had available to be non-operational.

Have you checked if the BIOS supports booting from a USB flash drive?...
most do now. If you're running WinXP it requires a bit of finagling to
make a USB flash drive bootable - the HP utility available here
http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqdt/us/download/20306.html will
do it but you need to have the DOS files available somewhere. It worked on
my non-HP computer but I still had the old Win98 boot files in C:\.

 

[Tony Hill]

I'm going through that problem right now on a friend's computer. Trying
to burn a CD-RW to flash a BIOS. It looks like Nero 6 now has a
pre-packaged version of DR-DOS included now, that can even read NTFS
partitions. However, all of that user-friendliness results in a DOS
environment with only 396KB memory available to it. That results in a
not-enough memory error (ironic these days, considering he's got 1GB of
memory installed).

We can't even edit the autoexec or config.sys because that environment
is put into a section of the CD that is inaccessible by the writer
software.

Might I recommend www.bootdisk.com. They have several .iso images of
DOS bootable CDs, one of which is specifically intended for flashing a
motherboard BIOS. All you need to do is edit the .iso to add in the
flashing program as well as the latest BIOS and then burn away.

Of course, really this is something that motherboard companies SHOULD
be doing for you. I know of some situations where this can be done
(one that jumps to mind are HP business computers, all of the new ones
have the option to make an .iso image to update the BIOS or even an
image to write to a bootable USB key drive). Sadly most companies
seem to only offer two options, DOS boot floppy or a Windows update
utility. While the latter works fine on my main machine that
dual-boots Linux and Windows, it's rather less functional on my PVR
system that is Linux-only.

We then tried to install a real floppy drive but we found all floppies
we had available to be non-operational.

Been there, done that. If by some strange chance I managed to find a
floppy drive that worked the media had about a 75% failure rate at
best. Floppy drives day is LONG gone IMO, and good riddance!

 

[Tony Hill]

One good usage of a big drive is to enable a dual-boot Linux/Windows
machine, with plenty of space for both.

I have a dual-boot Linux/Windows machine with lots of space left on
the Linux side, though Windows is getting a bit tight (games taking up
space :> ), all on only 120GB of drive space (including one 32GB FAT
partition usable by both OSes). I'll probably upgrade to about 200 or
240GB of drive space on my next upgrade cycle (probably this winter..
funds permitting of course), which should give me quite a fair chunk
of space.

Sure, there are others that need more space than me, but I suspect
that I use a lot more hard drive space than 90% of users out there and
I'm still only looking at what was new 2-3 years ago.

 

[Trent]

I was wondering that too so I pulled up some Spansion datasheets. They claim
100K[*] for their "mirror bit" technology and 1M[*] for the "floating-gate"
parts.

2 million for these:
http://www.simpletech.com/oem/ideflashdrive/index.php

 

[George Macdonald]

snip

I heard it with respect to thinkpad drives. And it certainly describes
the way the drive in my t23 died.

Isn't that a horrible noise - fair brings me out in a cold sweat. With a
Desktar we had, it was more like a (multiple) clunk during POST - it never
actually failed and SMART diags said "healthy drive" but I got that sucker
out of there.

 

[YKhan]

Might I recommend www.bootdisk.com. They have several .iso images of
DOS bootable CDs, one of which is specifically intended for flashing a
motherboard BIOS. All you need to do is edit the .iso to add in the
flashing program as well as the latest BIOS and then burn away.

Actually that was the first place we tried. None of the images we tried
could boot properly or had extremely convoluted editing procedures.
Only the DR-DOS that came with Nero was able to boot and easy enough to
add the flash files.

 

[Felger Carbon]

Been there, done that. If by some strange chance I managed to find
a floppy drive that worked the media had about a 75% failure rate at
best. Floppy drives day is LONG gone IMO, and good riddance!

Perhaps you are both trying to get by with 17-year-old drives _and_
media? Both wear out, you know. A floppy drive is real cheap, and
the new ones work when using recently manufactured media. Honest.

 

[chrisv]

Perhaps you are both trying to get by with 17-year-old drives _and_
media? Both wear out, you know. A floppy drive is real cheap, and
the new ones work when using recently manufactured media. Honest.

Yeah, I've always had excellent performance from floppies, with
failures being uncommon, even with very old disks.

 

[George Macdonald]

Perhaps you are both trying to get by with 17-year-old drives _and_
media? Both wear out, you know. A floppy drive is real cheap, and
the new ones work when using recently manufactured media. Honest.

I think it's more to do with dirt than wear - any time I've had probs with
a floppy, a quick pass with a cleaner disk has fixed it. With the PC err,
ventilation system the floppy drive is the equivalent of a vacuum cleaner
bag.

 

[GSV Three Minds in a Can]

Bitstring <[email protected]>, from the
wonderful person George Macdonald <fammacd=!SPAM^[email protected]>
said

I think it's more to do with dirt than wear - any time I've had probs with
a floppy, a quick pass with a cleaner disk has fixed it. With the PC err,
ventilation system the floppy drive is the equivalent of a vacuum cleaner
bag.

ObWarStory - I was called out to a minicomputer once that wouldn't
self-reboot (from Floppy) back in the days of 8" floppy disks - had
sucked in some Al foil from a (Cadburys) chocolate bar, got it stuck
under the read head, and worn clean through the disk media .. yeah, the
=hub= was going round nicely, but the media was no longer connected to
the hub (at least the out 2/3rds of the media wasn't).

You might have thought someone would have noticed the grinding noise as
the disk wore through, wouldn't you. 8>.

And I though operators using 8" FDs as coffee saucers was bad ...

 

[nobody]

Might I recommend www.bootdisk.com. They have several .iso images of
DOS bootable CDs, one of which is specifically intended for flashing a
motherboard BIOS. All you need to do is edit the .iso to add in the
flashing program as well as the latest BIOS and then burn away.

Of course, really this is something that motherboard companies SHOULD
be doing for you. I know of some situations where this can be done
(one that jumps to mind are HP business computers, all of the new ones
have the option to make an .iso image to update the BIOS or even an
image to write to a bootable USB key drive). Sadly most companies
seem to only offer two options, DOS boot floppy or a Windows update
utility. While the latter works fine on my main machine that
dual-boots Linux and Windows, it's rather less functional on my PVR
system that is Linux-only.


Been there, done that. If by some strange chance I managed to find a
floppy drive that worked the media had about a 75% failure rate at
best. Floppy drives day is LONG gone IMO, and good riddance!

Might help for BIOS flash. But when you try installing NT/2k/XP/2k3
on a SATA/SCSI drive you have no chance to substitute CD for a floppy.
The installation is looking for the driver in A:\, and no option to
redirect it to D:\ or E:\ or whatever. Will anybody ever come up with
a flash memory reader that connects through floppy cable? I've seen
floppy/universal flash card reader combos, but for flash reader being
operational it had to connect to USB. Agree that the floppy interface
is sloooooooow, but this is where A:\ connects. Or any option in BIOS
to map A:\ to USB interface?

 

[nobody]

Fast write speeds are just as important for lots of small files, in my
experience, because the FAT has to be written to as well - much more
than with a few large files.

Size issues... Speed issues... Limited number of writes... So it will
take quite some while to see 15k rpm SCSI drives dumped in favor of
solid state ;-) Not in the next few (probably quite more than a
few) generations of servers...

NNN