"Those flash-based laptops we're all dreaming about may be a lot cheaper than we expected. Asus just announced their plans to make five budget, solid state laptops this year priced from USD 199 to USD 549. Each machine will have a 7-inch display, and depending on the model it'll have a flash drive ranging from 1GB to 40GB. The lappies are expected later this year."
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2005-07-06
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Given the statistically calculated mean write cycles before failure for modern flash and the upper bounds for real-world cycle rate (using flash as paging space on a heavily loaded system), one can expect flash media to last at least 2-3 years. Not great, but reasonable, and not too far from the empirical MTBF for hard disks.
It's all fuzzy and statistical math, but suffice it to say that flash is a bit more robust than some have been led to believe. I've had plenty of hard disks fail, especially laptop hard disks.
Edited 2007-04-17 22:27
Member since:2006-09-30
That's because they cheat. HDDs don't move sectors around to lower the stress on the surface.
Also note while USB keys have the remapping logic transparently working, things like SD/pcmcia cards or so require proprietary drivers with patented algorithms that require signing NDAs to get the drivers for Linux, when they exist. Not even speaking about Linux-not-x86 or BeOS or whichever. Some alternative REd driver are floating around, still it's not as transparent of use as hdds.
Edited 2007-04-17 22:30
Member since:2005-07-06
I don't know about Linux, but it is possible to run BeOS/Haiku without a swap area.
This of-course limits you to the amount of real memory that can be installed in your computer, but on the other-hand that can be into the GBytes range now-a-days.
Plus lighter OSes like BeOS, Linux-Lite (right name?), and most hobby OSes run fine in 256 MBytes of ram and rarely need more than 1-2 GBytes of hard drive space to install everything but user data.
Member since:2007-02-22
Member since:2006-01-03
Member since:2006-01-03
Because flash has finite erasability, it is very unwise to use a flash drive for paging, especially on a heavily loaded system.
Other than paging in stressed systems, 1M rewrite cycles per sector plus simple wear leveling algorithms make a flash drive a lot more durable than the fragile mechanics of a hard drive.
Its a bit more complicated than this, but to give a simple example, let's say you write a 1M file every minute to a 1G flash drive. With wear leveling, every time it will be written to a different place, spread around the drive, so flash won't be overwritten until the 1000th time, which gives you 1.000.000.000 file write ops before flash wears out, which at that rate allows 1900 years operation.
Of course, usage patterns are more complex than this, and your mileage may vary, but flash drives can be very, very, very hardy -- unlike many hard drives I've had, from names like IBM and Seagate.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-09-30
Last I remember reading about Flash it was from 100000 to 1M write cycles (no limit on read cycles as it's not destructive) before the cell dies.
Current devices have embedded logic to remap sectors to spread the load around and avoid premature use of very often used sectors (like the superblock and usage bitmaps for an fs...).
Maybe current flash perfs are better and maybe on par with IDE drives... still I wouldn't even try swapping on those.
Member since:
2006-09-30
Before you would only throw your usb key away, now you'll throw the whole thing away when the flash goes past its 1M write cycles.
Nice.
I just hope they use a less buggy chipset than the ATI IXP I have in mine here... (found a bug when trying to get Zeta to boot... seems they couldn't imagine anyone would like to run the timer in mode 0...)
Member since:2005-12-15
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Seven inch screen is far too little. To use modern software you need at least 1024x768 to work efficiently. Even on a 12" screen such as on the Lenovo Thinkpad X series, the text and icons becomes quite small.
Another thing, isn't 1GB a bit too small, there are cell phones that have more memory than that. If the screen had been larger, they could have had a use as portable workstations in office environments where they could act as wireless thin clients.
In this setting it could even be an advantage to have little memory as the information would be safe on company servers, and the risk of information going astray if the laptop was stolen would be lessened.
Employees could still work from home or when visiting customers over a secure VPN connection that perhaps could be protected by some password or biometric authentication method.
I would not mind a 32GB flash drive as a replacement for my hard drive, though.
Member since:2005-12-25
Then don't use modern software. Most of it is crap, anyway.
http://www.suckless.org
Member since:2005-07-08
Member since:2006-01-09
I miss my Sony VAIO that had a 10", 1024x768, all real hardware, and ran BeOS without a problem (yes, modem worked too). Had my wireless card in it and it's all I needed. It didn't have a CD drive, I transferred files wirelessly, or with hardwire LAN if it was available. I got about 10 hours of battery life out of it, and had 3 batteries. :-)
I don't think the screen is too small. I think it's just right, especially at it's price point.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Member since:2006-09-01
Probably. They might have just scaled up a PDA rather then scale down a laptop.
There are three options with this,
1) Low power x86 hardware from AMD or Intel (Pentium M or Geode)
2) Via EPIA
3) Arm processor
(They could have also gone with a PowerPC chip but I really doubt that, as cool at that would be.)
Until we have spec it will be hard to tell what route they took. I have a feeling that this isn't a clean sheet design, but rather they are utilizing existing hardware they have a surplus of.
Member since:
2006-01-06
Member since:
2005-08-07
Asus result in a much faster race to the bottom as manufacturing capacity manages to drive down prices. If the two companies manage to feed off each other it could result in much more efficient portable machines at a price point everyone can afford. Not to mention that if Microsoft keeps its word and tries to develop a special distribution of its embedded WinCe.net OS we could see some competition there as well and the trend could lead to less bloat over time...
What? A man can dream, can't he?
--bornagainpenguin
Member since:
2005-07-06
Member since:
2007-02-22
Lesigh. One thing I'd love to learn while I'm still in school is how you go about doing something like this. Just what do you need to do to bring something like this toghether? How can you possibly get the parts cheap enough -- where can you get them -- or is there no chance for anyone but the already rich to pull this sort of thing off?
Member since:
2007-04-14
With the large amounts of memory we can put into computers today .. why swap at all .. linux can run without enabling a swap partition ... so this could increase the lifetime of a flash harddrive even more ..
windows on the other hand has always been a sucker for swap ... 
.. well these are great things asus is doing ... looking forward to having one ... i wont use swap on it thats for sure ..
Cheers
Johnbon
Member since:
2006-02-15
I wouldn't mind having one, even with just a 7" display. It most likely will not have much memory, the graphics card will suck and the processor will be slow.. But it'd be small, weigh less than most laptops, and wouldn't produce nearly as much heat or noise since it uses a flash drive. Oh, and I imagine the battery would last longer. The hdd on laptops is the one part that consumes the most amount of power, so a flash drive will significantly boost the operating time... With low specs I imagine it would still run Gentoo + XFCE quite nicely, I could browse the web, chat, do programming and play some simple games, not forgetting watching movies Not bad, not bad at all
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Todays laptops are still a better deal IMHO.
I bought my Compaq Presario C303NR for $299 ($99 if I were to accept a Vonage subscription--which I didn't).
It came with a 15.4" Brightview LCD, Celeron M 420 1.6 GHz, 512 MB DDR memory (now upgraded to 1.25 GB), 60 GB SATA HDD, Conexent High Definition Stereo, and 128 MB Intel 945GM graphics controller.
I'm assuming the $199 Asus laptop only comes with the 1 GB Flash HD? What a joke, especially since it will die after little more than a million write operations.
$549 for the 40 GB one still isn't a great deal with a 7" screen.
For those who buy this... hopefully it comes with a USB 2.0 or IEEE 1394 port so that they can use an external hard drive when their flash drive dies.
Member since:2005-08-07
Member since:
2006-01-08
Asus gives no specs directly, but the article does say that its based on Intel's ClassmatePC architiecture. The ClassmatePC page indicates specs as a 900mhz Pentium M with 400fsb and no L2 cache (seems to be a "Shelton" core), a 915 chipset, 256mb RAM, and a screen resolution of 800x480.
If the Asus kit meets this, its not too shabby. Its not directly comparable to a cheap-o laptop since its smaller and seems to meant for a more rough-and-tumble lifestyle.
7" is a bit small, it would be nice to have a 10" screen on the more expensive models. But the cost of LCDs has more to do with surface area than any other factor. The 915 IGP is nice though, since the drivers are open and its well supported under linux with, AFAIK, hardware acceleration of OpenGL.
Member since:
2005-06-29
I wonder if this has any connection to the UMPC talk that Intel gave today:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/cpu-memory/news/2007/04/18/IDF-Spring...
From that article:
"Vendors selling them will be from [...] Asus [and others ...], and will be available over the summer. The UMPC that was demoed featured a cool thumbnail based interface called Glide, and there will be version running on Windows and Linux."
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2006-05-11
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2006-10-16
http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/04/intels-eduwise-low-cost-pc-revea...
I just hope they do make a tablet out of it. If it will run a snes emulator, I'll probably buy one.
