Macopinion

Maybe Flash Drives Aren’t The Answer After All, At Least Yet

In my somewhat quixotic quest for the return of silent computing, I've been tentatively pinning my hopes on flash memory technology hitting the tipping point of capacity and price. So far flash drives come up short on both counts compared with the conventional rotating electro-mechanical hard disk. Sony markets a Flash-based Vaio UX ultra-mobile PC, a compact tablet form-factor notebook a 32GB capacity Flash drive in place of a hard drive but it is very expensive, and 32 GB is not really adequate in this day and age.

Still, the flash drive concept tantalizes, with the prospect of no moving parts, presumed lower power consumption, and hopefully cooler running, and earlier this year, Adtron announced new Flashpak IDE and SATA 2.5-inch flash disks up to 160 GB capacity.

"New geometries and chip densities in SLC NAND enable Adtron to significantly expand the capacities of its industry leading high performance products," commented Alan Fitzgerald, Adtron Chief Technology Officer. "In addition, the economics of these new flash drives combined with the increased capacities in standard form factors, greatly expand the applications among our historic flash disk customers in the industrial and defense markets, as well as addressing bandwidth intensive server and storage acceleration applications in a much broader emerging market previously the domain of HDD products".

Sounds pretty cool, and lately the rumor mills have been churning with predictions of a new subcompact MacBook Pro nano to be introduced at Macworld in January, with, taa-daa! - flash memory - instead of a hard disk. Makes your mouth water a bit doesn't it? Of course rumors are rumors, and they've been floated about a replacement for the erstwhile 12" PowerBook almost since the latter was discontinued in May, 2006, but this time they seem to have a fair bit of probity, with Wall Street as well as the rumor sites joining in the anticipatory speculation.

An end to hard drive noise is of course a given with flash memory, which is completely solid-state with no moving parts. However, with contemporary Apple notebooks, a much more egregious sound generator is cooling fans howling in the background in their effort to keep those powerful Core 2 Duo Intel processor chips from self-immolating. One of the biggest theoretical advantages of flash memory for me would be lower power consumption combined with superior speed, sot of like running off a RAM disk on the "Old World ROM" PowerBooks up to and including the PowerBook G3 Series WallStreet. I used to work on a RAM disk with my old PowerBook 5300 back in the day, and it was a realization of silent computing with the added bonus of being faster than running the 'Book off its hard drive.

RAM disk support ended with the introduction of Apple's "New World ROM" architecture on the Lombard PowerBook G3 and the original clamshell iBook, and there was irony in the fact that the RAM Disk's demise happened at the same time as substantial amounts of RAM became affordable. With their RAM upgrade ceiling of 4 GB, modern MacBook's and MacBook Pro's could run an awesome RAM disk if the MAc OS still supported RAM disks and there was a practical way to quickly install a minimal OS X system folder on them. However, it doesn't and there isn't, so that's that, although flash memory sounds somewhat analogous to running off a RAM disk, only more practical and convenient - at least in theory.

Disappointingly, reality may be something other.

Last week, ZNet's Robin Harris posted an article entitled "How much does a flash disk increase battery life?," documenting a test conducted using a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook, and found that notebook power use is a little more complex than anticipated. Robin used a Kill-a-watt power meter inline between the wall outlet and the MacBook’s power adapter, plus the MenuMeters utility, which shows CPU, memory, disk and network usage.

You can click over to Robin's article for the details of the test configuration and procedure, but the bottom-line conclusions were, in a nutshell, that the maximum power difference between a flash drive and a 2.5" disk drive is a modest 3 watts, which would net you under the most favorable circumstances a useful, but not all that exciting 29 minutes of runtime with a 55 wh battery (but probably less than that, real-world).

Robin notes that "the biggest power sink in my notebook is the "everything else" that stays on when nothing is happening - 13 watts. Next is the CPU when it is busy. Then the display if you keep it above minimum brightness, the DVD/CD player and finally, just above Wi-Fi, a busy disk," and concludes that: "Flash drives have a real advantage in shock resistance over disks. But the performance is about the same as a disk, the power savings minimal and the cost disadvantage huge. They make the most sense for premium ultra-light notebooks with low power CPUs and small screens as well as hand-held devices."

As I said, disappointing.

Based on that analysis, I would have to say that at this stage of their development, flash drives don't sound like any panacea. Robin Harris did not address the issue of heat generation, but a measly 3 watt reduction in power consumption is not likely to silence those caterwauling cooling fans, which is the factor that most interests me on the context of flash memory.

Consequently, the prospect of Mac notebooks with flash drives is less enticing than it was,before I read Robin Harris's article. Even the greater inherent resistance to shock damage of flash drives is less of an advantage since the last generations of PowerBooks and iBooks, and all MacBooks have been equipped with Apple's Sudden Motion Sensor technology.

Although I'm still intensely interested as to what Apple will come up with in the subnotebook category. I'm sure it will be a desirable piece of work, but probably not what I need. I like small computers, but realistically, a bigger, more conventional machine is better suited to my requirements, and the MacBook Pro nano (or whatever such a product ends up being called) will presumably carry a premium price, especially if it actually does ship with flash memory. It's tough to beat the mid-range MacBook on value for your money.

So, the quest for silent computing is likely to continue. My first-ever Mac, a compact Mac Plus, had no internal cooling fan, and one of the things I loved about it was that you could boot from a floppy disk, turn the (external) hard drive off, and bask in the blessed silence, other than keyboard clicking and the occasional grunt from the floppy drive. The old, convection-cooled Plus probably suffered from a shorter lifespan on some internal components (video inverters were especially prone to early failure in the Plus), but personally I would be willing to sacrifice some potential service life for peace and quiet. The second-generation G3 iMacs were also convection cooled. I don't have any scientific data, but anecdotally, my impression is that they also suffered a bit in terms of longevity due to the absence of a fan, but again, I contend that it's worth the trade-off.

My first PowerBook, a 5300, had no cooling fan either, but with its puny 100 MHz 603e processor, it didn't need one and never got more than comfortably warm even under heavy use ( and essentially any use was heavy use for a 5300). My WallStreet and Pismo PowerBooks, and my G3 iBook all have fans, but they almost never cut in - only on the hottest days of summer under heavy load. At this point I haven't heard a peep out of any of them for well over a year. Not so my 17" PowerBook G4, whose fan cycles frequently, and I understand that MacBook Pros and MacBooks with their hot in more ways than one Intel processors are even worse.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but it sounds like flash memory isn't it, at least at this stage of the technology's development.


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cmoore@macopinion.com


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