StorageMojo

A fine article in the latest Macworld describes how to create a thumb drive loaded with portable apps - including some that work with Windows - for use on the road. It is the first I’ve seen how-to article that actually describes the process in sufficient detail for mere mortals.

No matter what platform you use
When you are out and about you never know what platform might present itself, so it pays to be prepared. That’s why the article discusses more than just Mac.

Some pointers:

• Use a 2-4 GB thumb drive to ensure space for Mac/Windows/Linux versions of needed programs, like browsers and email clients
• Built-in security is a good idea as thumb drives are small and losable - and fingerprint-based authentication means you don’t have to rely on a cross-platform utility
• Format the drive with Microsoft’s FAT32 file system for cross platform compatibility - both Mac and recent versions of Linux recognize it
• Pick your apps. For me cross platform versions of
• Firefox for web browsing
• Thunderbird for an email client
• OpenOffice for productivity
• Anything else, like image editors, media players, FTP clients, chat
• I’d also want an on-screen keyboard for entering passwords to defeat hardware keyloggers

I don’t travel nearly as much as I used to, so lugging my laptop isn’t bad. Yet on a vacation to Europe or the third world - Kuala Lampur is quite the bargain these days - it would be nice to leave it at home. With three versions of my main apps (Windows, Mac & Linux) I’d be good to go anywhere.

Comments welcome, of course.

After I hit the “publish” button for yesterday’s SSD article I started thinking of additional things to add:

• I sent a note off to Texas Memory Systems asking them to respond if they’d like. They graciously said they would, so I’m waiting. Clearly though, their product, with multiple FC interfaces, is designed to be a SAN RAM-disk. I hope they look at the Gear6 article as well and respond there too.
• The good folks at Tom’s Hardware tested the Samsung flash SSD and found that it could handle about 2200 IOPS. But that may have been the laptop they were testing it on and not the drive’s in-your-dreams theoretical maximum.
• Another source wrote in to me and said that the cells are actually good for closer to a million read/write cycles. If true, Samsung is silly not to adjust their spec upwards, even to 250k. Engineers can be their own worst enemies sometimes when it comes to promoting a cool new product.

This could be big - if I could just figure out how
I’m still pondering how flash SSDs will play out. Replacing RAM disks - or more likely dramatically extending the market downward - is the low-hanging fruit. Making cheap (relatively) SSDs available will have a lot of folks thinking about their I/O architecture that hadn’t before. A VAR who can figure out the right services that are highly replicable might be able to do well turbocharging certain database and webserver apps.

Comments welcome, of course, as I’m trying to puzzle out what fast cheap SSDs mean for more common computing infrastructures. Moderation on to combat comment spam (10k plus and counting) but registration not required.

Flash memory does most of what current RAM-based Solid State Disks (SSD) do, and it does it without requiring battery-backup, big power supplies or noisy fans. Plus it is cheaper. So, I started to wonder, with the advent of Samsung’s 32GB SSD are we seeing the beginning of the end of the always marginal RAM disk niche?

SSDs have one overwhelming advantage: speed. Data I/O rates of many thousands of random IOPS because access times are measured in microseconds (millionths) instead of milliseconds (thousandths). They leave short stroked 15k FC drives in the dust.

Repeat 5 times quickly: RAM NOR NAND
Yep, sounds like something the Coneheads would say. My first encounter with RAM disks was at DEC, where the engineers came up with a clever design that used low-quality binned DRAM and disk-like error correcting codes (ECC) to create a lower-cost, higher-margin SCSI RAM disk. Which sold about as well as most SSDs, which is to say, not very well at all. The problem: even though performance is terrific, the price is staggering on a per GB basis. Take this pricing from the StorageMojo.com Price Lists for a Texas Memory SSD:

RS-320-FC2-64 Texas Memory Systems Hardware
RS 320 64GB 2Gigabit Fibre-Channel solid-state disc w/2 FC2 ports, upgrade-able to 8 FC2 ports and 64GB. Has 3 UPS’s and 3 backup disc drives.
$83,783

At over $1k per GB these SSDs are strictly for the Gucci alligator-skin pocket protector crowd.

Enter the Dragon
Not all flash is created equal. There are two main types, NOR and NAND. Here is a handy table that scopes out the differences between the two:

So what is that Multi-level capacity? Glad you asked. Both NOR and NAND are available in Single Level (SL) and Multi-level (ML). SL stores one bit per cell, while ML stores two - and I’m hearing, maybe even four RSN. ML is cheaper for a given capacity, but not that much cheaper: only about 15 - 20% less. The really big difference is that ML is only good for about 10,000 read/write (RW) cycles, which is plenty in a camera, but not so great for a disk drive.

SL though is rated for 100,000 RW cycles, which means that each bit of storage is cheaper than ML on a total lifecycle basis.

100,000 bottles of beer on the wall. . .
So, I know what you are thinking: Robin, how could you ever replace a RAM SSD with a flash SSD - the thing would wear out in a heartbeat. And you’d be almost right.

All flash drives contain wear-leveling algorithms to ensure that all cells get similar usage. So the way to think about flash drive usage is to look at your average I/O size, and figure out how many many times that I/O will fit in that size drive times the number of RW cycles.

99,999 bottles of beer on the wall. . .
Take the new Samsung 32 GB SL flash drive. Even though it is being spec’d for the notebook market, it makes a wonderful server drive because it is so fast. But how long would it last?

Let’s say you want to use it for a log file running 2k I/Os (question: do systems still do 2k I/Os? readers please help). So a 32 GB drive has 16,384,000 2k locations, which multiplied by 100,000 equals 1.64 trillion 2k I/Os. So if your server is updating the log file 500 times per second, which would be a reasonably busy server, you’d be doing 1,800,000 RW cycles per hour. So your 32 GB flash drive would last 910,222 hours or almost 104 years of 24 hour a day operation.

At 1,000 IOPS, then 52 years. 1,000 8k IOPS, then 12 years and change. 10,000 8k IOPS then 14 months. All for, I estimate, based on chip prices for about $1k per drive, or about 1/40th the price of a standard RAM-based SSD. So call me crazy, but I say flash is set to conquer the esoteric world of high-performance SSDs.

As ever, comments welcome. Moderation is turned on to defeat comment spam, but no registration required. And please, someone, check my arithmetic. I ran it several times through a calculator and can hardly believe it myself.

Several companies are in the business of providing software that turns a USB thumb drive, or iPod, into a simple way to carry your own data and programs for use on any PC. Today, one of them Ringcube, hit the PR jackpot with a largely favorable review in the Wall Street Journal’s Mossberg Solution (paid subscription required) column.

A Brilliant Name, A Good Product
Ringcube’s product, MojoPac, is software that enables you to load a drive with your data and your favorite programs and take them on the road. As Mossberg put it:

MojoPac sounded too good to be true, but for the most part, it actually worked as promised. Privacy is a big plus for MojoPac, as your files remain on your thumb drive or iPod, and never transfer to the host PC’s hard disk. Similarly, your entire browsing history and all cookies remain on the portable device.

There is a catch, however: A few aspects of this program are a little too geeky for the average person, it is slow to perform some tasks, and it crashed one of our computers during a test. Also, it doesn’t support making Microsoft Office portable, unless you have a corporate or institutional license.

But the company claims it is hoping to make the geekier parts of MojoPac more user-friendly in its next software update, and is working on allowing average consumers to carry their copies of Office with them. MojoPac only works with Windows XP programs as of now.

What about Ceedo, U3 and Migo?
I noted Ceedo a few months ago, and looked at but didn’t write about U3 as well. Both of these have similar functionality to MojoPac with one major exception: they require use of specially adapted programs or a special, extra-cost software adapter. Many of these programs are free, but many are not, and that would be a deal breaker for me. U3 also requires a U3-logo’d USB drive. And Migo doesn’t run programs, just stores data.

So far, MojoPac seems to be the best PC on a stick product out there. It allows you use the applications you are used to, costs less than U3 and Ceedo, runs on any USB storage device and, according to Mossberg, seems to have the easiest UI for many of its functions. On the downside, Mossberg did report some bugs, so it probably isn’t as well wrung-out as the older solutions.

Comments welcome, as always. Moderation is turned on to deter comment spam and registration is turned off to simplify commenting.

Almost two years ago I wrote about the catfight between disk and flash (see The Limits of Flash). It’s an entertaining market because we get to see the cut and thrust of the disk vs. semiconductor brawl at its rawest. I marveled then at thumb drive prices that were only $70 per GB down from $1000 per GB a few years earlier versus a disk drive at $40 per GB.

Rescan The Market
So this morning, when I saw that Buy.com is offering a 4GB USB disk for $45 after rebate, I decided to check out the low-end of the thumb drive market. And sure enough, I found some end-of-life 4 GB flash drives online for $38, or $9.50 per GB. I marveled anew.

Flash’s Downside
Flash drives are much smaller, more rugged, lighter and, their downside for the cheapest drives, slower. High-performance flash drives use dual-channel controllers and two flash chips in a RAID-0 configuration to get higher performance and, since two chips cost more than one, are a little more expensive. What surprises me is what a lousy job the vendors do of educating people about these differences.

All Flash Drives Are NOT Created Equal
This is a price sensitive market, so many vendors source their chips on the spot market, so they really don’t know what combination of controller and memory chip they’ll have. Thus they don’t make many promises. The more expensive flash drives are lower volume and thus use the same components. You can tell difference because the vendor will usually make explicit performance claims.

Net Net: Disk Is Losing At The Low-End
The economic trends are clear and compelling. In less than two years, low-end flash prices have dropped by more than 85%. In the same period the competitive disk product price per GB dropped “only” a little more than 70%. IC economics vs mechanical device economics. Unless the disk guys figure out something great in the next few years, flash’s 15-20% annual price improvement over disk will keep it winning more business at higher capacities every year.

This is is going to be a long fight and us consumers will benefit enormously.

Comments welcome, as always.

Good dialog between Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales and Encyclopedia Britannica’s Dale Hoiberg in today’s Wall Street Journal (free version, I think). They dance around the subject of massive storage and cheap internet publishing - both of which enable StorageMojo.com - while shadow boxing each other.

The EB is struggling to maintain its economic model - even as a non-profit - against a similarly enabled Wikipedia. Hoiberg appeals to authority, specifically the authority of its 4,000 scholarly and 100 Nobel Prize winning authors. Wales notes that Wikipedia has a lot more authors and a lot more reviewers.

This is not about the wisdom of crowds or wresting keyboards from the dead hands of self-appointed elites. It is simply economics: Wikipedia has enlisted tens of thousands of volunteers to work for free. These volunteers self-select themselves for their contributions (disclosure: I’ve added content to a couple of Wikipedia articles where I have specific knowledge). Wikipedia is about the statistical distribution of knowledge, the simple fact that when millions of people compare notes, there are likely to be a few who know as much as the scholars do.

Hollywood Wants To Outlaw Caching
According to an article in ZDnet Hollywood is well on its way to getting the US Congress (immortalized by Mark Twain as “America’s only native criminal class”) to require licenses for copyrighted works even when the copies exists in a server’s buffer. See more from the EFF’s website. What about the copies inflight across the network? While I believe the RIAA, MPAA and the never-ending copyright lobby are cretins, I do appreciate the wider awareness of storage their work is engendering.

The StorageMojo.com take: when caching is outlawed, only outlaws will have cache.

Tape Encryption: Write-Only Media?
IBM has announced a new, encrypting tape drive. The problem with encryption is what happens if you lose the key? It is like bulk erasing the tapes. Not to fear, IBM has an Encryption Key Manager component for the Java platform. Other than the fact that I can’t find any documentation for it on the IBM website, it looks wonderful. They spend much more time talking about key management on their mainframes, and even have a webpage for it. If security is supposed to make you feel more secure, why does this announcement make me feel less secure?

Samsung Declares Flashtopia
I think I’m more allergic to marketing hype than most, but I love what Samsung is doing with flash. To wit:

• 40 nanometer 32 Gb NAND flash chip. That’s right, Intel is still switching its factories over to 65 nm feature sizes, and Samsung is working with 40 nm to get even higher density - and cheaper - flash. And they are looking ahead to doing it at 20 nm. 64GB SSDs and memory cards aren’t far away now. Very cool
• System-on-chip (SoC) for hybrid disk drives that supports 4 GB of flash. It will be interesting to see how much flash the disk vendors decide to support.
• A new technology - PRAM - that may replace flash because it offers 30x higher speed than flash and 10x the lifespan. The downside: the density is a lot lower - max of 512 Mb device.

Samsung is kicking butt with these announcements. Lets hope they deliver all of them as planned.

Over at InfoWorld, Tom Yager has posted a fascinating article titled Linux will get buried.

It’s Not About Apple
He proposes that Apple’s Unix revenue will overtake commercial Linux factory-install revenue by mid-2008. Which seems reasonable: Apple sales growth is on a roll. Apple OS X revenue per user is twice that of Windows. And Apple ships several million units a year. But StorageMojo.com doesn’t have a dog in that fight, so whatever.

The Linux Backplane
What did catch my eye is Yager’s take on what Linux really means:

. . . Linux is . . . a kernel, not an application platform. Linux is a backplane for device drivers, file systems, protocol stacks and low-level programming interfaces. It is a substructure for application services. The Linux kernel is . . . commercial quality and familiar. It crosses architectural boundaries cleanly. It bulks up and strips down in the time it takes to recompile. . . . It’s a standard. . . . Push a button, you’ve got an enterprise database, configured, loaded with sample data and listening for connections. Want a J2EE server with that? Flip this switch, it’ll unpack itself, sniff out that database you installed and mate with it.

There are a number of enterprise software backplane companies, such as Tibco and webMethods. Backplane Linux isn’t in their league, yet the ability to create specialized and optimized appliances from free software sounds very promising. Especially for SMBs and the VARs who serve them.

I got a taste of that wonderfulness with the one-click WordPress and MySQL installation at DreamHost (note: I get a commission if you use the handy “stomojo” coupon under the blinky ad - go ahead, it’s a good deal) which is Linux-based. I have no idea what goes on under the hood at DreamHost, but easy software installation and configuration is very attractive to this “knows all this stuff is there and still doesn’t like messing with it” guy.

The Really Cool Part
Then Yager goes one step further: the freeze-dried appliance on a flash drive.

Imagine that your server room has a bank of USB ports, and that every enterprise application you want to run exists, pre-installed on a stripped, standardized Linux, and in a freeze-dried state, on a flash drive. Plug in a drive, and within a few milliseconds you have a self-contained instance of an enterprise application. If you need more database instances, put in a blank flash drive and tell the existing database instance to replicate itself.

Tom is thinking of a datacenter, yet I could see this working with SOHO/SMB networks as well. The VAR has a variety of freeze-dried apps, like CRM, VoIP phone systems, job-shop resource planning, etc. plugs it into a cheap server and voila, the app is up and the VAR knows exactly how that system is configured for ease of maintenance. User-land configuration, like GUI options, accounts and ACLs get stored on the flash drive. Need application security? Unmount the flash drives and lock them up in a safe.

Please, Pick Holes
in Tom’s or my scenarios - or better yet, extend them with other ideas about applications. It sounds cool, but maybe it is one of those things that sounds cooler than it is. Your comments welcome.

Special Today: this report on last week’s Flash Memory Summit is written by Steve Denegri, a long time observer and analyst of the storage scene. The snarky paragraph heads in bold are mine. Thanks, Steve!

As if the hard disk drive industry didn’t have enough anxiety already. . . .
It appears as though flash memory will expand its target market from cell phones, digital cameras, and iPods to include notebook computers in 2007, coincident with the launch of Microsoft’s ‘Vista’ operating system. This was the obvious conclusion drawn by attendees of the Flash Memory Summit in San Jose last week.

It seems like a big jump for flash, particularly since we, the users of flash, more closely identify this technology with capacity points in the 1 to 8 gigabyte range. And while the capacity of flash is doubling every 6 to 9 months, it certainly doesn’t seem as if we’re ready to toss out the hard drives in our notebooks for flash, does it?

Peaceful Co-existence.
Not yet, it doesn’t, but does appear as though flash has now established for itself a proverbial “foot in the door” of the notebook PC market. As a first step in what appears to be a multi-year evolution, flash will coexist with the hard drive, and the first phase begins next year when a small reservoir of non-volatile memory is implemented for the purpose of more rapid boot of the Windows-based notebook.

The faster-performing flash component will help Microsoft address the mounting problem of progressively slower notebook boot-up as the Windows O/S has advanced. The primary culprit to date has been the reliance upon the slower-performing hard drive relative to system memory for intensive boot tasks. For example, with Windows XP, 80% of system memory is unused at startup, leaving the hard disk to do most of the work.

Windows Bloat: Get Help In A Flash
Each new Windows release entails millions of incremental lines of code that require increasingly-spacious storage capacity, even as notebooks have trended toward more compact, more power-efficient designs. This dichotomy has claimed the disk drive vendor as its victim, primarily because the spatial limitations associated with smaller notebooks has resulted in slower rotational drive speeds. The result is a price premium for notebooks relative to desktops that evidences itself in terms of portability and convenience, but not performance.

Flash Hide and Seek
So the debate in the computing industry is around where to place this flash reservoir. Two approaches have emerged. One is to embed a 256MB or greater write buffer of non-volatile memory directly on the circuit board of the hard disk drive, a program Microsoft has labeled “Piton”. This “hybrid” disk drive essentially bifurcates the storage needs of the notebook, whereby flash is used for random operations and the disk platters are the source of lengthy sequential operaitons. For example, boot and system resume functions would be handled by flash but storage files like MP3’s or video clips will still be stored on the disk drive.

Your Money Or Your Flash
The only issue with the “hybrid” disk drive is the cost of the new memory component. The $5-10 cost might simply be too burdensome for a hard drive industry that’s already plagued with razor-thin profit margins. And some suggest Hewlett-Packard wants a 512MB buffer, at a minimum, for its notebooks. This certainly won’t help the cost equation.

Then there’s the alternative approach, which is to solder the non-volatile memory right on the motherboard. Intel has such an objective with its “Robson” initiative. In its current form, Robson is a PCIe half-minicard equipped with 1GB SLC-based NAND flash, a control ASIC, and a driver. However, by the time it ships in 2007, don’t be surprised if it’s 4GB and motherboard-centric. Some suggest that Intel is presently behind on its plans to bring this motherboard implementation to market, but the good news for Intel is that as long as Vista is the targeted application, they probably have more time than they think to get it ready for launch.

Competition: How Sweet It Is. For Us
So the mere fact that we are discussing a need for flash as a storage option in notebooks must send shivers down the spines of the six providers of mobile disk drives. And now that flash has an entrée, its vendors are raising the rhetoric by prophesying that notebooks will eventually rely solely on flash for storage needs once we cross the 32 or 64GB threshold for NAND. At the current pace of flash innovation, we’re only two or three years from reaching this inflection point.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Disk Drives
Notebook vendors seem willing to test users’ interest in notebooks that are flash-only. At the Summit this week, Samsung was demonstrating the benefits of solid-state drives in Dell notebooks. This might be Dell’s way of using a common notebook ATA socket for whichever the customer chooses, be it a hard disk or a solid state option.

Petite Power Users Rejoice
What might attract users to a notebook PC equipped only with flash as a storage repository? One reason might be power usage and battery life, but there seemed to be little agreement about that at the conference. There was a panel discussion where I asked the question. One guy from a company that makes SSDs said there was a 20-30% savings in battery life with SSD vs HDD, then this guy from mSystems rebutted it was much longer than that….3x as much, which I found absurd. The next panel discussion, someone in the audience threw out the 5% figure, and no one from that panel (including a different mSystems guy and one from Intel) seemed to take issue. Samsung claims its SSD’s power consumption is 5% that of a comparable HDD.

Carry That Weight
How about the weight of the machine? We’re really only talking about two or three ounces, depending upon whether you compare against 2.5″ or 1.8″ mobile drives, so there’s hardly a noticeable difference. Although if you factor in a lighter battery it could start helping.

A Pearl Of Great Price
Might flash be cheaper? Hardly, flash is much more expensive at $13 to $15 per gigabyte. As a comparison, you can pretty much buy as much hard disk capacity that’s available for the price of 32GB flash drive.

End of discussion, some would say. With uncertain improvement in battery life or machine weight, combined with the fact that I’m going to spend more money to get less storage, this makes for an easy decision. Besides, 32GB doesn’t give me much room to continue downloading music and video at my current pace, so why bother? The end user who wants a lot of storage capacity in a smaller, more power-efficient package will likely favor the notebook equipped with the disk drive, particularly once 1.8″ hard disk drives begin shipping in higher quantities.

They Don’t Call It Flash For Nothing
One possible advantage didn’t get much play at the summit: Flash may offer significant performance advantages. The Samsung 32 GB flash drive claims 300% faster reads and 150% faster writes than 1.8″ disks. So systems boot faster, applications load faster and large documents - like big presentations - should appear faster as well.

IT Might Like This
On the other hand, the business user may favor the flash-based notebook over the hard disk alternative. How will this be the case? Ask any help desk or IT support professional how appealing a lower-capacity, disk-free notebook would be in the hands of the corporate user and you may have to mop their drool off the floor. With the rampant pace of disk drive failures and virus attacks, combined with the public relations headache that’s often times associated with notebook theft, the flash-based notebook looks like a terrific alternative. If the user could rely more upon the corporate network for storage, thereby minimizing the amount of data that’s resident on the laptop, there emerges a reduced security concern, a very valuable proposition to the corporate IT department. But is 32 or 64GB sufficient to run Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, and a web browser? In most cases, it probably would be.

See Your Flash Life Before Your Eyes?
These potential customers do have one primary concern, judging by the attitudes of attendees at the Summit, and that’s the endurance parameters of flash memory. Just like those batteries in disk-based iPods could only be recharged so many times, so can flash only erase and write data a finite amount. Furthermore, many at the conference suggested that vendor-provided parameters regarding their own products’ endurance was too generous, and in some cases, it was said to be far too optimistic based upon laboratory tests. At the present time, there do not exist sufficient standards in regard to the establishment and governance of flash performance benchmarks, illustrating the still-immature nature of the market. However, the industry is rapidly moving to solve this issue and, once complete, it will gl a long way to foster the effort to replace disk with flash in notebook PCs.

Predictions
So let’s make a few predictions. First, hybrid disk drives might get the flash movement rolling within notebooks, but these designs won’t likely be around for very long because that non-volatile memory cache will quickly move to the motherboard, perhaps after only one or two product generations. Second, look for the ultra-portable end of the notebook market to favor flash over disk fairly quickly, especially with the business customer given that it simplifies IT support issues and helps sidestep the problems associated with data theft. Third, look for flash to become a lot more affordable once it begins appearing in notebooks in widespread fashion. If there’s anything in computing that can be counted on its dramatically-lower price points as technology is standardized then, eventually, commoditized. The memory market is certainly familiar with the nature of this trend, particularly over the last decade.

Steve Denegri
Independent Data Storage Analyst

Comments welcome.

StorageMojo.com’s Take:
Odd, isn’t it that the flash folks don’t seem to have a clear idea about the power benefits of flash? I’ve done the math so you can see what benefit is - or at least see how it is done - and do a better job of it yourself. If you do, please post your results in the comments here.

Also, I think lots of road warriors will be fine with 32GB, even though Vista weighs in at 14GB. So does Apple’s Mac OS X, but after tossing out several GB of printer drivers, foreign language fonts, trial versions and other gunk, it almost gets svelte. 10 GB for the de-gunked OS, 10 GB worth of applications and 10 GB for documents, means that a 32 GB SSD can easily handle a road warrior’s requirements. Sure, add a lot of music, photos and some movies and you are way beyond that, yet if you are mixing that much pleasure with business you aren’t, in my experience, working with corporate assets. Buy an iPod for the personal stuff.

Finally, it does appear that flash’s $/GB is dropping faster than that of hard drives. As I concluded in Seagate’s CEO Dreams of Big Disk Market & High Stock Price

Flash prices today are only 2.5% of 2001’s prices. Since flash prices are driven by semiconductor technology, primarily larger wafers and smaller features, that trend will continue. So today’s $20/GB flash drive will be a $0.50/GB drive in early 2011.

Assuming Mr. Watkins is correct about hard drives, late 2010 will look like this:

• A 200GB 2.5″ drive will about $40 (applying his reasoning about 1″ drives)
• A 100GB flash drive will be about $50
• Ergo, flash will own everything under 100GB

This will be very good for us consumers - and almost as good for the one or two firms that win the fight for market share.

Comments always welcome

Update: I revisit the power calculations in an addendum below.

Next-gen ultra-light laptops will be a dream come true. Lighter. Dual-core speed. Much faster solid-state disk. 75% better battery life. Combining Intel’s new Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) Core Duo processor - due this month - with the new 32GB Samsung 1.8″ flash drive will dramatically change battery life as we know it.

Laptops Are About Freedom - Not Power Cords
I used an Omnibook 300 with a 9 hour battery life for years, and loved it. I could use it for 2 or 3 days without recharging - although I didn’t have DVDs to watch. My current laptop gets about 3.5 hours, and doesn’t give the Omnibook’s wonderful sense of freedom.

Gory Details
Skip ahead to Feel The Power! if you don’t care where the numbers come from.

Slippery When Wet
These numbers aren’t easy to derive. A few hundred million laptops have been sold, lots of techies buy them, battery life is a problem, so its all been figured out, right? Well, maybe, but the people who know aren’t talking. Coding Horror pointed the way, but much mucking about in datasheets and trade journals was also required.

What Watt?
I measure in watts (W) and watt hours (Wh). Watts = volts x amps. A watt-hour is simply a one watt load for one hour. For example, a 50 Wh battery can sustain a 10 watt load for 5 hours. Since voltages and amperages vary a across batteries, processors and hard drives, watts provide a simple way to compare power usage.

Where Are We Now?
A recent Intel laptop is the new Apple MacBook. Ars Technica reports the 55Wh battery in “medium” use (iTunes streaming music, medium brightness, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on) gets about 4.1 hours of life. Doing the math (55Wh / 4.1 hours) we get a 13.4 watt average power demand. Now we can size how the new ULV Core Duo and the Samsung 32 GB flash drive affect power consumption. Later I look at the v sexy Thinkpad X60s, where its all about the flash.

ULV Gets Down
Intel offers its processors in three power classes:

These power cuts aren’t free: the ULV clock (1.2GHz vs 1.83MHz) is lower and the front-side bus speed (533MHz vs 667MHz) is slower. Yet as we’ll see, the power cuts are more dramatic than these numbers would suggest.

T2400 Is Hot!
The MacBook uses the T2400. So what percentage does the processor use? The answer isn’t obvious. Intel’s SpeedStep Technology ruthlessly cuts CPU power consumption wherever it can. So Intel can give you a Core Duomaximum number (31W!) and an “Enhanced Deeper Sleep” number (3.35W). They must have their own standard workload they use for comparing processor power efficiency, but it doesn’t look like it is public.

The Process of Elimination
So we subtract the power consumption of other subsystems to estimate processor power usage. We know an idle 2.5″ 60 GB 5400 RPM hard drive consumes about 3.3W, so with some seeking call it 3.5W. Average screen brightness is another 3 watts. Bluetooth is about 0.3W. Wi-Fi power consumption depends on usage, but moderate usage is about 1W. Graphics hardware is also in the 1W range. Keeping all the other bits powered is probably about .5W. That totals to 9.3W, leaving ~4W for processor consumption in “medium” usage.

ULV U2500 Is Cool!
The newly announced U2500 is spec’d at 9.0W, or just 29% of the T2400. If the U2500 comes in at 29% of the T2500 on our MacBook, the power consumption would drop to 1.2W from 4W, for a 2.8W saving.

32-Gigabyte (GB) NAND flash-based solid state disk (SSD)
Launched in late May on an aging, time-to-market platform, this is the other big win. Using 16 of Samsung’s 16Gb NAND flash chips, this baby is not only faster

The SSD reads 300 percent faster (53MB/s) and writes 150 percent quicker (28MB/s) than normal hard drives.

it is silent, weighs about 25 grams less, and uses way less power. Let’s be conservative and say it uses .5W.

Feel The Power!
Combining 2.8W saved by the ULV Core Duo with 3W saved by the SSD, gives a 5.8W reduction. So power consumption drops from 13.4W to 7.6W. Using the same 55Wh battery, battery life goes from about 4.1 hours to 7.2 hours!

Thinkpad X60s ==> X60Super
Or take the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad 60s, the heart throb of the Platinum Card set. With the 8 cell, 75Wh battery, the L2400 based unit tested at 7 hours battery life. Running the numbers, that is 10.7W average load. Taking off 3W for the hard drive and one watt for the ULV Core Duo, the average load drops to 6.7W and a battery life of over 11 hours!

A Jewel Of Great Price?
Engadget noted Samsung is asking about $900 (in Korea) for the new 32 GB SSD. The street price for the chips today is about $500 and prices are soft, so by the time we see them here Dell will offer them for $600. Not an impulse item, but the combination of ULV Duo’s and SSD will be catnip to road warriors.

Update:I’ve re-estimated the power and weight impact of the SSD. Take the Sony sub-3 pound TX-series laptops. Their standard battery, which they spec at 4 hours, is 58 Watt hours. Reading mail, web-surfing, and document preparation will keep your hard drive working, using - let’s be conservative - 2.5 Wh. Over four hours, that is 10 Wh or 17% of that battery’s capacity.

Samsung claims its SSD’s power consumption is 5% that of a comparable HDD, but let’s say 10% or .25 W per hour. That is 1 Wh over four hours, effectively adding nine Wh of battery capacity, or 15% - another 35 minutes of battery life. Or battery life could remain held constant and battery weight reduced by 40 grams or more. Knock another 30 grams off for the SDD and you’ve dropped almost 3 ounces. That is a lot for an ultra-portable.

The friendly folks over at Kanguru Solutions have announced a $2800 64GB USB flash drive - only $44/GB. Shipments are supposed to begin later this month.

They also offer 16 and 32 GB versions for, respectively, $800 or $50/GB, and $1500 or $47/GB. The 16GB capacity is shipping today.

The 64GB monster would take almost two hours to fully load at a generous write speed of 10MB/sec. But that is beside the point. It’s just having the biggest freaking flash drive. w00t!

Boot Hill
You can configure flash drives to boot Windows XP. Yet since it is most reliable with FAT16, 2GB is the most you can use. Maybe Vista will change that.

Linux users can also boot from USB. 64GB might be overkill, since bootable Linux fits comfortably on 256MB drives, but so what?

Mac users are SOL: OS X only boots from firewire. Kanguru has those too.

Update: Chris points out that the Intel Macs DO boot from USB flash drives. See his comment for the details. Cool!

Chilling story about a security firm’s successful infiltration of a credit union’s infrastructure using old USB flash drives. They wrote a Trojan that would collect “. . . passwords, logins and machine-specific information from the user’s computer, and then email the findings back to us,” put it on the thumb drives and scattered them around the employee parking lot.

The bottom line:

Of the 20 USB drives we planted, 15 were found by employees, and all had been plugged into company computers. The data we obtained helped us to compromise additional systems, and the best part of the whole scheme was its convenience. We never broke a sweat. Everything that needed to happen did, and in a way it was completely transparent to the users, the network, and credit union management.

Of all the social engineering efforts we have performed over the years, I always had to worry about being caught, getting detained by the police, or not getting anything of value. The USB route is really the way to go. With the exception of possibly getting caught when seeding the facility, my chances of having a problem are reduced significantly.

Business Opportunity: Software or Epoxy?”
Do I sense a product opportunity? Software that erases everything on a flash drive that doesn’t have a security certificate? Or how else could one do it?

Or you could sell epoxy glue guns to seal off the USB ports. “Secure Goo” anyone?

Over at Forbes, Seagate Technology Chief Executive William Watkins talks about the future of disk drive capacities and pricing. The money quote:

My best guess is that you will get a 40 gigabyte drive in 2010 for $80 on flash. I think the same device in a one-inch hard drive will cost you $40 to $50. In a 2.5-inch drive for $50, I suspect you can get 400 gigabytes. I don’t see flash being competitive at 40 gigabytes. But I won’t be able to do a 20 gigabyte for much cheaper than [the 40 gigabyte drive], while they will be able to do 10 gigs for $40. Anything below 20 gigabytes, they will own.

. . . Our sense, especially with application sets that want to do a lot of streaming video, is that the minimum requirement will be 50 gigs with a more likely minimum at 100 gigs.

A Close Reading of the Tea Leaves
What is interesting here, four years in the future?

• Flash at $2/GB, 1″ hard drive at $1/GB
• 2.5″ drive at $0.12/GB
• The applications he’s talking about aren’t laptops, which are close to those capacities today, but media players.

Dream On, Mr. Watkins
Flash prices today are only 2.5% of 2001’s prices. Since flash prices are driven by semiconductor technology, primarily larger wafers and smaller features, that trend will continue. So today’s $20/GB flash drive will be a $0.50/GB drive in early 2011.

Assuming Mr. Watkins is correct about hard drives, late 2010 will look like this:

• A 200GB 2.5″ drive will about $40 (applying his reasoning about 1″ drives)
• A 100GB flash drive will be about $50
• Ergo, flash will own everything under 100GB

Remember, you heard it here first. And please, dissenting opinions welcomed.

Wouldn’t be great to stroll into an internet cafe, stick a flash drive in the USB port, and have your desktop, bookmarks and documents immediately available without leaving any traces on the host machine?

That is what Lexar is promising to ship in July with PowerToGo software on high-end 1 and 2 GB flash drives. The software comes from Ceedo Technologies, an Israeli software company, that says

Ceedo Personal is a powerful working environment for portable storage devices such as USB flash-drives and hard drives. It allows users to carry their programs, documents, e-mails and favorite browser with them, accessing them through an easy-access menu once connected to a computer.

The Ceedo [OS] provides Ceedo users with an independent, private working space, created separately from the host computer’s operating system. Ceedo users can run their carried programs on any [Windows] computer, work on their documents and access their e-mails on the go.

You don’t have to wait for Lexar. Go to Ceedo, download the software, and try it yourself.

Be aware that tiny hardware key loggers can capture passwords and messages on public PCs. Use an on-screen keyboard and the mouse for passwords. If the security of your messages is important, stick with a laptop.

You can also load “portable” applications on a thumb drive. Anyone competent to comment on the security of that?

16GB Flash Drive Price Begins Downward Slide

The price of the 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive dropped to $1175 at mWave, an almost $200 drop from less than a month ago. Two data points do not make a trend, but let’s watch this and see if a 15% drop per quarter trend develops.

The online low prices for flash drives tell an interesting story of where the sweet spot for flash is today.

The 4GB flash drive is the sweet spot today.

While a nightmare for security people, very handy for people who don’t have or want a laptop to lug home from the office. Load your documents file into before going home and you’ll have all your work handy on your home machine. Aren’t we getting lazy?

The emergence of a 16GB USB flash drive for $1363 poses an interesting question: will Samsung’s pre-announced 32GB flash drive cost $2600?

Clearly there is some kind of kink in the price curve when a 4GB flash drive costs $19/GB, 8GB costs $32/GB and 16GB version costs $85/GB. Maybe this pricing is designed to skin early adopters recover design costs for the larger packaging. Or maybe they are using the latest and priciest chips, since chip cost is usually about 90% of the device cost.

I’ll be very surprised if the 32GB drive comes in at much more than $20GB. Of course, if Apple is the first customer and its an add-on, they’ll price for big margins. Expect a $1400 price from them.