jervis961: Welcome to Direct2Dell. I've heard that you spend a lot of time on IdeaStorm and we appreciate it.

Regarding your comment... it was a mistake on my part. I had meant to highlight the Solid State Drive as option in Notebooks by user tablet205. I inadvertently reversed the two links.

Rather than do a strikethrough and update, I decided to leave it as is.  

Hello,

I thought that Flash memory could only be rewritten 100.000 to 1.000.000 times. The part of the flash memory that will be used for swap will be rewritten far more often than this in the lifetime of the disk. Isn't there a reliability problem? Does this Flash memory use an other technology than early memory cards?

Thanks,

Nicolas 

This talks about the solid state hard drive.  Apparently it states its 156x faster in data access than normal hard drives (times, not %) and about 2x the lifespan of a normal hard drive.  if only the price would fall... 

http://huddledmasses.org/jaykul/solid-state-drives/

I am also very curious about the suggested lifespan of these drives. All flash drives have a limited number of writes as Nicolas points out. I wonder what kind of specs these ScanDisk drives have.

The hybrid approach (HD + flash RAM) could use the flash as a cache. If the flash fails then you may at least have the bulk of your data on HD.

For example, running any current Windows OS and a development environment, you would be doing thousands of writes per day. This technology could speed up compiles, but how long will it last?

And when it fails, there is probably no method of data retrieval. Unlike HD technology, there is no hard record to access. And it will likely fail without warning.

Perhaps a RAID system is indicated?

Great move by Dell! I can't wait to see the new line of notebooks, I'm looking for a 17-inch laptop with the highest performance and battery life, Solid State disk is the way to go. Hopefully you can quickly offer 64GB and 128GB capacities as well.

Anything Dell can do to significantly improve system performance is an excellent move.

 
Nick
 

There's a solid state advertised on the M4300... but you can't configure it with one!

I thought that Flash memory could only be rewritten 100.000 to 1.000.000 times. The part of the flash memory that will be used for swap will be rewritten far more often than this in the lifetime of the disk. Isn't there a reliability problem? Does this Flash memory use an other technology than early memory cards?

BTW,  I have one of these units from Dell and I would NOT recommend it.  They have a problem with latency with this drive they can't resolve. 

 To address the write limitation (which is true) Dell and others created a process to map the number of writes so as to spread out the writes across the entire device.  This is suppose to maximize the life span of the Flash.

We just sent back our try & buy Latitude 630 w/ SSD.

Boot up was great, battery life was great, trying to run Outlook in cached mode (outlook Anywhere) was terrible. The laptop frequently froze when Outlook was open. the drive light stayed on solidly for 1 - 6 minutes and did so constantly.

I spoke with Dell support but they were of little help and said they had no way of working on the Outlook issue. I was hoping that with Dell's ties to MS, we could work out the issue or at least verify that outlook in cached mode does not work well with SSD.

Anyway, we're back to SATA drives... 

Relating to the comment made by arywillis: Can you be more specific about the latency issue? And the "life" of the device (reads and writes) is managed by the software embedded in the disks controller circuitry, Dell has nothing to do with that. The software spreads the "wear" of the memory devices out so no one section receives more wear and tear than the others. All manufacturers of SSD devices have something similar.

Dave's comment relating to the D630 with a SSD and Outlook in cached mode. ? What? I'm not sure what great boot-up time, long battery life, yet an inability of Outlook to run in cached mode have to do with each other. There are so many different things that could make Outlook stall (I support 250 Latitude D620 users running Office 2003) that I can tell you that if you returned that D630 with the SSD because Outlook didn't work correctly it most likely had nothing to do with the SSD drive! Apples? Say hello to Oranges!

As an owner of a D430 w/ SSD drive I can tell you that Outlook cached mode suffers A LOT.  I'm with an IT consulting firm and we've done testing with laptops where the only difference was the SSD drive vs. a traditional drive.  With the SSD everything was faster except for Outlook.  It has to do with how Outlook reads / writes to the OST file that the drive really doesn't like.  We've had clients buy a bunch of laptops with SS drives only to exchange the drives for standard ATA drives.

i guess taht would mean less weight and less battery consumption i guess??

hey, i'm glad i'm not the only one to have experienced this.  we have 4 qty D430 with SSD drives.  3 of which had users with mailboxes ranging from 2 - 5 GB which creates the cached OST file.  the fourth user is a new employee with a relative small mailbox to start but i'm sure we'll be hearing from her soon as her mailbox size increases.  at first we couldn't figure out the issue did the normal hardware diag, firmware and drivers patching and ended up rebuilding the laptops serveral times with XP pro.  then it dawned on me that these were the similarities: outlook 2003 in cached mode with users who had rather large mailboxes.  when outlook froze it would take the system along with it. it would take a while to come back online (i.e. even get task mgr to come up)  as far as the comment from Schmagagled that it's highly unlikely an issue with SSD drives, can you comment on this:  one user who had a c400 said system performance on this was faster than his upgraded D430.  another user said the same thing when he compared his C640 against his upgraded D430.  my option now is to beat up on Dell support.  I'm glad I found this link.

Latency of an SSD in Outlook cache mode is definitely a serious problem. Microsoft will have to fix it but it will likely be a long time. I fell in love with the 1.7# Toshiba but it is almost unusable when online through a VPN and I will have to revert to the heavier Lenovo with a HD.

There is a problem with Outlook and SSD drives. No question about it. I replaced the SSD with a sata and there are no problems at all. I installed on Vista and XP. I also tried with office 2003 and 2007 on both platforms. The results were always the same ( with large ost's).

 Other than Outlook, this drive made the system noticealby quicker. Boot up for XP was 10 secs vs 20-30 secs. All applications open quicker and responded quicker. Too bad about Outlook. Hope the can correct the problem.

I support several d430s with SSD drives using Outlook 2007 in cached mode, and have yet to experience the issues you're mentioning.  Also support a few MacBook Airs with SSD drives running Entourage *and* Outlook 2003 (under WinXP Pro Parallels vm), still no issues.  When you switched back to SATA, did you perform a clean install, clone, what?  Just curious, because I haven't seen a single user experience the craptacularities you're describing, with apparantly similar setups...and I doubt it is SSD-related.

We had 5 Dell laptop with SSD using Outlook 2007 and about 2GB mailboxes. We have to turn cache mode off as the systems were freezing every few minutes. Of course employing this solution, while it makes the laptop perform well, it also makes this hw unsuitable for doing email offline while traveling. We stopped therfore ordering new SSD based units until MS and DELL will officially provide a roadmap with dates for a fix