Business Tech

Back in the day, Netbooks ran Linux and packed solid-state drives. But Windows XP and big hard disk drives have prevailed.

Toshiba's mini NB200 does not offer a solid-state drive option in featured configurations nor Linux

The early Asus Eee PCs--which almost single-handedly created the Netbook market--came with a Linux operating system and small-capacity solid-state "flash" drives ranging from 2GB to 8GB. Early Acer Aspire Netbooks were also offered with Linux and a solid-state drive.

Those devices bore little resemblance to PC laptops. The Eee PC was a tiny, stripped-to-the-bone device that required minimalist hardware to run an efficient Linux OS. (Will a wave of Google Chrome OS-based devices revive the minimalist Netbook next year?)

Fast forward to today: Windows XP rules, with a Netbook-specific Windows 7 on the way. A glance at the Netbook lineups from any top PC maker--including Hewlett-Packard, Acer, and Toshiba--reveals few, if any, Linux offerings and equally few solid-state drive options.

Rather, beefy hardware configurations sporting 160GB hard disk drives and as much as 2GB of memory are the norm.

And the momentum for solid-state drives on mainstream laptops is waning too. A report from market researcher iSuppli says higher prices for flash memory chips may undermine high-capacity SSDs in laptops.

Average pricing for widely used 16-gigabit flash chips rose to $4.10 in the second quarter of 2009, a steep 127.8 percent increase from $1.80 in the fourth quarter of 2008, said Michael Yang, senior analyst for mobile and emerging memories at iSuppli, in a report released Wednesday.

As for Linux, time will tell if Netbooks return to their roots with Google's Android and/or the Chrome OS next year.

LOS ANGELES--Technology introduced at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference by SanDisk could boost solid-state drive performance in Windows Vista by 100 times.

The largest supplier of flash memory cards unveiled an advanced flash file system for solid-state drives that "has the potential" to accelerate random write speeds by up to 100 times over existing systems.

Despite being generally faster than hard-disk drives (particularly at reading data), solid-state drives fall short of hard disks when they randomly write data. Random writes are generally considered to be the Achilles heel of solid-state drives.

To maximize random write performance, SanDisk developed the ExtremeFFS flash file management system that uses a "page-based algorithm" so when "a sector of data is written, the SSD puts it where it is most convenient and efficient," SanDisk said.

The result is an improvement in random write performance as well as in overall endurance.

"For SSDs to perform optimally in Windows Vista, and thus replicate or surpass the functionality of hard disk drives, a new flash management technology is needed to accelerate SSD write speed and endurance," said Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager for SanDisk's solid-state drive business unit.

SanDisk will present this technology here at WinHEC 2008 on Wednesday. ExtremeFFS will ship in SanDisk products in 2009.

Heye also introduced two metrics that can help users evaluate solid-state drives.

One metric, vRPM, enables comparisons in performance between a solid-state drive and a hard-disk drive or another SSD. The other metric, LDE, calculates the lifespan of a solid-state drive.

Click here for more news on Windows and WinHEC.

Updated at 3:40 p.m.with additional comments and clarifications about solid state drives and ATA commands.

Will solid-state drives thrive on Windows 7? Microsoft is set to address that question at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference this week.

Microsoft will speak to both overall support for solid-state drives and Windows 7 support for Netbooks in Los Angeles at WinHEC 2008, which kicks off Wednesday.

In a conference abstract titled "Windows 7 Enhancements for Solid-State Drives," Microsoft states that "PC systems that have solid-state drives are shipping in increasing volumes" and that it is planning "Windows enhancements that take advantage of the latest updates to standardized command sets, such as ATA."

"Windows7 will be able to identify a SSD uniquely," according to Gregory Wong of Forward Insights. Certain ATA commands will improve the speed that solid state drives write to disk, Wong said.

ATA is most commonly associated with Serial ATA, or SATA, technology, which is the most popular data transfer standard for PC storage devices. Most new hard drives use the SATA-2 standard, and the newest solid-state drives are based on this standard also.

Until recently, solid-state drives used an older--and theoretically slower--PATA (Parallel ATA) standard. But the newest drives shipping with, for example, the Dell Latitude E4200 and HP EliteBook 2530p ultraportable laptops, use SATA-2.

"It is pretty widely held that SSDs are unlikely to meet with much acceptance until Windows undergoes significant tuning to take advantge of all the speed that SSDs have to offer," according to Jim Handy of Los Gatos, Calif.-based Objective Analysis.

Topics covered in the Microsoft SSD talk will include "file system optimizations" and "thoughts on the future of SSDs and their role in Windows," according to a prepared statement by Frank Shu, a senior program manager on the Windows Storage Platform team.

Another session, titled "Designing Flash-Based Netbooks for Windows 7," will cover how to design flash-based Netbooks using Windows 7, according to a statement by Leon Braginski, a senior lead program manager in Microsoft's PC3 team. "We will explain how to calculate the lifetime of a flash-based netbook based on specific workload numbers," a summary states.

The session will also "introduce a revised version of the Flash-Based PC Design Guide, which has been updated for Windows 7."

Other solid-state drive related talks include one by Seagate, titled "Is Your Disk Drive Going Away?" Seagate will talk about solid-state drive platforms and hybrid hard-disk drives (HDDs), among other topics.

Retail flash memory drive giant SanDisk will talk about Multi-level Cell (MLC) NAND in PCs. MLC technology allows solid-state drive suppliers to build higher-capacity drives at lower cost. The latest high-capacity 128GB solid-state drives are based on MLC.

"Analysts uniformly agree that the key challenge to solid-state drive adoption is reducing cost, and the key to reducing cost is advancing to multi-level cell technology," SanDisk said in a statement.

"The PC pushes MLC flash like no other application with its high random write rate, small block size and long life expectations. SanDisk has...introduced the first metric for SSD endurance--Long-term Data Endurance (LDE). LDE allows customers to evaluate the lifespan of an SSD in their application," SanDisk said.

Solid-state drives, if not yet ubiquitous, have arrived. You can find them in laptops big and small and as a high-octane storage option for gaming PCs.

Alienware 128GB SSD option adds $550 but on the Dell XPS M1530 this option adds only $450.

(Credit: Alienware)

SSDs made their mark by appearing in the trendiest ultraportables like the Apple MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC--typically as stratospherically priced options, fashion statements rarely seen in the real world.

These drives are now coming off their rarefied shelf space and appearing across a wider range of laptops and ultraportable computers.

Any new, lightweight enterprise laptop worth its salt comes with a large-capacity solid-state drive option now. Hewlett-Packard recently introduced the 3-pound EliteBook 2530p with an Intel 80GB solid-state drive option and Dell this month announced the 2.2-pound Dell E4200 with a 128GB drive.

Dell E4200 ultraportable can be configured with 128GB SSD

(Credit: Dell Computer)

Dell also offers solid-state drives on more mainstream laptops such as the 15-inch XPS M1530 laptop. The SSD option on the M1530 is twice the capacity and half the price of drives offered to date: 128GB for $450. The first generation of solid-state drives in the MacBook Air, for example, added almost $1,000 to the cost for only 64GB of storage. Dell lists it as an "Ultra Performance" M1530 option.

Solid-state drives are almost synonymous with the new category of tiny laptops called netbooks. And the category continues to grow. Lenovo is the latest high-profile entry. Earlier this month the China-based company introduced the IdeaPad S10 with a 4GB solid-state drive option.

More notable is the 10-inch Asus Eee PC 1000 that comes with a 40GB solid-state drive and that's priced at just under $700.

HP VP Keith LeFebvre holds a new EliteBook 2530p ultraportable. The laptop comes with an Intel 80GB SSD. Larger 160GB drives from Intel are expected in the fourth quarter.

(Credit: Intel)

In the gaming space, solid-state drives are just beginning to be aggressively marketed as the ultimate high-performance storage option. Last week at the Intel Developer Forum, Chris Saleski from Intel's Storage Technologies Group demonstrated an Intel 80GB X25M solid-state drive crushing 7,200-rpm, 500GB Seagate Barracuda drives in benchmarks. The single Intel drive hit 44,000 IOPS (input-output operations per second), while the Seagate array did under 550 IOPS.

If this benchmark holds up in the real world, solid-state drives could catch on at game PC makers like Falcon Northwest, which demonstrated its FragBoxes at the Intel forum also beating high-performance hard-disk drives.

Dell's Alienware game PC unit currently offers a 128GB solid-state option for $550 on its Area-51 M15x laptop. "Solid state drives are the best performance options Alienware offers hardcore gamers," Alienware said in a statement. "These drives offer them shorter load times and faster access rates that put them at a much higher level of performance than traditional hard drives."

Alienware currently offers up to a 256GB SSD in a "RAID 0" configuration.