“Apple Computer has reportedly turned down an offer to incorporate new flash-enhanced hybrid hard drives from Samsung into its Mac computer line, likely proceeding with plans to use technology from Intel Corp. instead,” AppleInsider reports.
AppleInsider reports, “Like several other PC manufacturers, the Cupertino, Calif.-based Mac maker has been working on a next-generation notebook design that will incorporate NAND flash memory to enhance the speed of some operations while simultaneously delivering longer battery life. Apple, as AppleInsider reported this past September, is said to be working closely with Intel on the matter, leveraging a feature of the chipmaker’s upcoming Santa Rosa notebook platform dubbed Robson.”
“However, a report over at APC claims that somewhere along the way Apple was approached by Samsung, which pitched its own proprietary solution called flash-enhanced hybrid hard drive… ‘We did propose the HDD (hybrid disk drive) concept to Apple,’ said Chuck Kang, an engineer from Samsung’s the Flash Memory Planning Group, ‘but Apple’s opinion is that they’re not going to use HDD for their systems… they won’t support it.’ The report, rather speculatively, implies that Apple will instead introduce systems with Intel’s Robson technology “one year from the introduction” of its first Intel-based notebook, the MacBook Pro Core Duo,” AppleInsider reports.
Full article here.
Related article:
RUMOR: Apple to employ Intel’s ‘Robson’ NAND flash tech to create ‘instant-on’ Macs – November 22, 2005
Within three years portable computers with hard drives will be an oddity.
Everybody…..
Sam Sung blue
weeping like a willow!
If Flash is sooooo fast… how come it takes 20+ minutes to unload my 2GB Nikon camera flash drive?
Hmmmmm…. Does this mean Flash based Hard drives?
“Samsung Blue”
You simply got no choice!
Question Guy: What type of port are you connecting to, what speed card are you using. My 4GB Sandisk Ultra II unloads in about 2-5 minutes through a USB 2.0 connection.
Question Guy…
I just got a 2GB Lexar Professional 133x flash card one to replace a 1GB SanDisk Ultra II, which are only 60x, and there’s a big difference in download speeds. You’ll notice that write speeds are faster than “normal” cards, which helps save a bit of camera battery life.
Also, get a FireWire or USB II card reader.
Iogear makes a line of Pocket Card Readers, thumb drive size, that are quite compact and flexible.
http://www.iogear.com/main.php?loc=product_category&category=usb
Right, so where do I keep my 3000Gigs of movies?
Don’t expect Flash to completely replace your hard drive just yet. Flash has a limited number of write cycles, so eventually it just wears out with use. If it were used for seldom updated data such as system code or applications, fine, but if it’s used for your entire drive it will get hammered to death in a relatively short period of time. I certainly wouldn’t want a 100% Flash drive, not yet.
“If Flash is sooooo fast… how come it takes 20+ minutes to unload my 2GB Nikon camera flash drive?”
This might be do to the connection and not the drive(flash) itself. Also, it take me 2-3 minutes to unload a 4g San Disk(regular, not extreme) into Aperture(9600 video stock card).
pjanders and ApplePi, I don’t see Flash actually replacing Hard Drives in the near future. Not for the vast majority of uses. Look at Mopheus‘ comment (tongue in cheek?) for an explanation ‘why’. GB on Flash still cost over $10 per while they are often under $1 per on a HDD. Thus “Hybrid”. Use expensive Flash to provide a few GB of storage for the ‘most-used’ stuff and as a buffer for the HDD and suddenly the HDD is spinning a lot less, using less energy, creating less heat, making less noise, and (the pair) responding faster – especially when waking up or launching.
DLMeyer – the Voice of G.L.Horton’s Stage Page
Hey Neil,
Me and you
Are subject to
The blues now and then.
Also, Samsung burned me years ago in a class action lawsuit for a sh!∏y DVD player. They never followed up, repaired or replaced, or cash valued it.
It’s hard, but I try to avoid them.
“DOWN WITH THE MAN!!!!”
MW:choice, as in “Between Samsung and Intel, I choice Intel.” I know that ain’t right, but Darvoset® makes it better…
You would think Apple would be kind of leery of tying itself to one vendor for so much critical stuff. If Intel goes to sleep again (on innovation) it could be Mr Moto all over again.
Magic Word
indeed
☮
It’s not just the port you use or the speed rating of the card that you use, either. Download speed also depends upon the camera that you are using. If you go to dpreview.com, they post the download speeds of many cameras.
There has been a lot of disinformation about the use of Flash as a replacement for Hard Drives. Let me put this in context for you.
The mean time to failure (MTF) of flash is usually given as 100,000 read/write cycles. This does NOT mean that reading a section of flash 100,000 times destroys is ability to work. On the contrary, a reading does not affect the integrity of the flash memory in any significant way. What DOES affect the flash drive is a write.
Since flash is based on a common ferroelectric cyrstal phenomena called a dipole moment, Flash is nothing more than a collection of ferroelectric memory cells that exhibit a dipole moment change upon a write cycle.
Now putting aside all the details, what this means to you as the consumer is simply you can only write to a given flash cell so many times. In fact, if you put the average life of a hard drive at 5 years, and the average number of days of use at 365 days per year, that means you would have to write to a given flash memory cell 55 times per day for it to fail.
Now, my Mac on startup has a swap file of 64 MB. Lets throw that out the window and say that on any given system your computer writes its temporary files on a 1 GB section (assuming base-10). This is for ease of numbers, I could care less what the real number is. Now if you were to write to that 1 GB section 5*55 times per day, or 225 times (225 GB per day), you would lose 1 GB of your flash drive after 1 year. Assuming you had a 40 GB flash drive you would after 1 year lose 1GB of that, leaving you 39 GB functional. So, assuming you were to actually have a need to write to an entire 40 GB hard drive 225 times per day, or 9 TB per day of writing, you would then lose your HD after roughly 1 year. Of course by this time, you will have written a total of 3,285 TB of information.
I think some of you lose sight over this magical 100,000 read/write cycles. Please note a cycle consists of a read AND a write. Reading a section of flash memory does not in any significant way degrade the information contained in a given flash memory cell. Writing to a flash cell IS a significant change of state of a flash memory cell and does contribute to the eventual degradation of the flash memory cell.
I hope this helps clear up some common misconceptions regarding the use of flash memory over standard hard drives.
Apple are using Intel to do a lot of their R&D in terms of chipset design. It makes no sense for Apple to go for proprietary design since their success will lie in provide high quality product at reasonable prices and with a world class OS.
Apple won’t be fighting a price war with Dell, HP etc since that approach is doomed to failure. Rather they will win by being smarter than everyone else. Apple’s relationship with Intel has been wildly successful so far, so why rock the boat.
What about all this stuff about laptops/Vista/hybrid hard drives. Seems I’ve read that Vista will require such drives. Which technology? “Robson” or Samsung’s? I’m just curious for all the dual-boot users out there.
Of course Apple is going to use Intel’s tech in this area. That’s not news.
What is news here is the fact that the report says that Apple will debut the technology at MWSF ’07. Now, Santa Rosa is to be introduced in “Spring 2007” (last I heard). It isn’t a stretch at all (to me, at least) that Apple may get its little paws on some Santa Rosa motherboards a couple months early. This quite drastically changes the prospects of MWSF this year, if this “report” has any validity.
MWSF ’07:
– Holiday quarter iPod/Mac sales numbers
– Update on retail operations
– New .Mac
– Quick iWork update
– iLife ’07
– Remaining Leopard features debuted, shipping date announced
One more thing:
– Santa Rosa implementation across the Macintosh line (faster boots, OS X cached in flash 24/7, zero wait for many OS and app features)
It IS Macworld after all!
I don’t believe that iTV will be discussed, and I don’t believe that new iPod models will be introduced.
One more thing: If Apple is going to introduce a phone, they aren’t going to do it at MACworld. Period. There will be a special event for the phone, just like there are for major iPod revisions.
–mAc
@ To The Flash Doubters: Good post – thanks for the info.
From the article: “[Samsung’s] technology, due to turn up during the first quarter of next year, essentially takes the approach as Robson but integrates the flash memory into the hard disk assembly rather than on the logic-board.”
I’d rather have this set-up. If you lose any single part of the hybrid drive, it’s still a straightforward HDD replacement. If Intel is going to seperate the flash memory modules from the HDD, and the flash goes bad, your whole board has to be replaced and that’s a real mess.
“We did propose the HDD (hybrid disk drive) concept to Apple” said Chuck Kang, an engineer from Samsung’s the Flash Memory Planning Group, “but Apple’s opinion is that they’re not going to use HDD for their systems … they won’t support it”… Intel will sell Robson to OEMs as a mini-card module or a kit of components which can be mounted directly onto the motherboard,” according to the report. “Santa Rosa’s Crestline chipset will act as traffic cop, coordinating Robson’s flow of bits over the PCI Express bus.”
This also sucks, since if you want to replace a regular HDD from one of Apple’s older laptop products (where putting in a ‘Robson controller board’ won’t be an option) with an all-in-one hybrid drive from Samsung, you’re S.O.O.L. ‘No upgrade for you!’
C’mon Apple – if this in fact the plan, it’s the least consumer friendly thing you could be doing in this circumstance.
“The report, rather speculatively, implies that Apple will instead introduce systems with Intel’s Robson technology “one year from the introduction” of its first Intel-based notebook, the MacBook Pro Core Duo.”
That sounds great – sometime next year – except that the Samsung solution could happen RIGHT NOW. Or at least as fast as their HDDs become available, since no new mobos are necessary. Again, the requirement to have EVERYTHING come form Intel is getting in the way of producing the best product possible (the first example is Intel’s lousy integrated graphics chipset).
Apple has to do this, because the only way to maintain their favorable pricing position with Intel is by buying literally everything they make. However the trend is subtly going towards missing some better, and on their own merits more cost effective, technological opportunities as they present themselves.
“Robson is expected to be available in modules starting at 256MB for around $20 and ranging up to 512MB, 1GB and 2GB.”
From what I understand, Samsung’s modules are in the 2-8GB range at roughly the same price ranges.
Look, since Apple’s thrown their lot in with Intel 100%, I understand that their OEM products are going to favor that company’s technology. But I see nothing good from a consumer standpoint for Apple to start locking out options from other players. And I especially don’t like the idea that my pre-Robson laptop won’t support a hybrid flash drive from a competitor, when everyone in the Windows world won’t have any similar problems.
If some POS old DELL can get an upgrade like this, my Apple product should too. Period.
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When Apple were dependent on Motorola, it turned bad because Motorola weren’t taking Apple seriously enough and didn’t deliver the products that Apple so badly needed.
Contrast this with Intel, where Intel are not only delivering faster chips every few months, but they also whole heartedly welcome input from Apple and are on record saying how much they enjoy working with a partner who pushes them so hard. It’s an arrangement that’s good for Apple, good for Intel and good for customers.
I don’t see any reason to be worried about Apple being so dependent on Intel, it’s an entirely different relationship to Apple and Motorola.