SSD for laptops have high failure rate

Solid-state drive-based laptops are exhibiting alarming failure rates, according to Avian Security, a brokerage firm whose research covers the high-tech and aerospace industries.

Avian said that an unnamed large manufacturer is seeing return rates of 20 to 30 percent on SSD-based laptops, thanks to failures and performance issues.Returns due to technical failure ran at 10 to 20 percent, 10 times higher than failure rates for conventional drives, the report said. Another 10 percent were due to lack of expected performance gains, the report said. Flash-based SSDs are intended to be significantly faster than disk-based drives, due to factors such as the lack of moving parts.

The findings do not reflect well on the current trend toward SSD-based laptops. Offered by manufacturers such as Apple, Dell, Lenovo and Sony, they are significantly more expensive than conventional laptops, with the price tag justified by characteristics such as light weight, silence and fast data access speeds.

Dell, one of the manufacturers pushing SSD laptops most aggressively, declined to comment on failure rates, but a Dell spokeswoman admitted that "SSD technology is new and will have growing pains".

Nevertheless, Dell defended the technology and said its drawbacks are rapidly fading away. Capacity, at first limited to 32GB sizes, has now doubled, with 64GB drives available, and prices are expected to fall as the technology becomes more widely used, the company said.

In addition, while the first generation of SSDs performs near the levels of 5,400 RPM hard-disk drives, Dell last month announced out the faster Dell Flash Ultra Performance SSD, based on Samsung's SATA II-SSD technology, in 32GB and 64GB capacities.

The new drives deliver a 35 percent overall performance gain over a standard 2.5in 5400 RPM laptop hard drive using SYSmark '07, Dell said.

The latest generation of drives shows that manufacturers are improving performance and reliability without adding much to prices, Dell said.

WD launches the 640GB HDD

Western Digital has bumped up the capacity of its two-platter SATA drives to 640GB, an increase of almost a third, and is planning more drives based on its latest 160/320GB disk technology.

The new 640GB Caviar SE16 drive, which lists for £85, follows on from a single-platter 320GB model. WD said that it offers a 3Gbit/s data transfer rate, spins at 7200 RPM, and has 16MB of cache memory.

Although it might look like a 320 with an extra platter - and indeed, the platters and heads are the same - the 640GB drive is actually a separate product with some new parts, such as the motor, said Ted Deffenbaugh, WD's senior director of product marketing.

He explained that single-platter drives are aimed at the entry level market, where "acoustics are critical", so they are tweaked to run almost silently at the expense of a little performance. Two and three-platter drives are "more performance-optimised, even though that means a bit more seek noise."

Deffenbaugh acknowledged that 640GB is a rather unusual capacity point, and said he doesn't expect to sell too many to commercial desktop buyers.

First 1.6TB SSD

BitMicro Networks has launched a 1.6TB solid state drive, the first device based on the Ultra320 SCSI standard to hold more than a terabyte of data.
The 3.5 inch E-Disk Altima E3S320 drive will be shipped to its OEMs for testing in a few months. The product is expected to ship in capacities ranging from 16GB to 1.6TB by late summer, BitMicro said. Pricing was not disclosed.
The new single level cell NAND flash drive will provide sustained data transfer rates of up to 230MB/s with peak speeds reaching 320MB/s in burst mode, Bit Micro said. The device features an I/O rate of up to 30,000 IOPS, 1500Gs operating shock and data write protect and secure erase data security controls.
Storage experts believe that solid-state drive offerings will become more amenable to end-users in 2008 as costs for flash storage drops. BitMicro has aggressively pursued larger storage capacities for its solid-state drive product portfolio in recent months.
"These upcoming E-Disk Altima solid state drive equipped with the latest in FC technology will benefit users who need to beef up their data recorders, scientific equipment, and networked storage systems with the fastest, densest, and most reliable solid state drives," said Rudy Bruce, Executive VP for Marketing and Sales and CMO at BiTMICRO Networks. He further added, “The 4 Gb FC 3.5-inch E-Disk Altima E3F4FL flash disk delivers high-speed, enterprise-class performance in rugged and compact form factors, ensuring unparalleled data processing capabilities even in extreme operating conditions."
"Some segments of the enterprise storage market require very high performance and reliability. Increasingly, datacenters will look to SSDs to satisfy these requirements.” says Jeff Janukowicz, Research Manager for Solid State Drives at IDC. “Solutions like BiTMICRO’s 4Gbit Fibre Channel flash SSDs powered by its high performance EDSA and LUNETA ASICs will help to enable this fast-growing market sector for SSDs. IDC expects worldwide enterprise SSD revenues to grow by 76% annually from 2006 to 2011."

About EDSA™ and LUNETA™

The Enhanced Datamover and Storage Accelerator (EDSA) DMC is a proprietary controller that succeeds the highly successful disk controller chipset of BiTMICRO’s electronic disk technology. The EDSA DMC supports large block NAND flash as well as single, dual, quad-die flash devices, allowing BiTMICRO to hike E-Disk solid state disk capacities to terabytes of pure flash memory.
EDSA goes hand in hand with the Logical Unifier of Extensive Transfer Arrays (LUNETA) MFI, BiTMICRO’s proprietary flash memory management interface controller that is designed to orchestrate massively parallel and multi-block I/O operations on large arrays of flash devices. LUNETA supports both NAND (SLC or MLC) and AND types of flash memory and is typically used in designs to complement the EDSA DMC in applications that require scalability and management of larger amounts of flash devices.

About BiTMICRO Networks

BiTMICRO Networks (http://www.bitmicro.com) is the leading provider of high performance non-volatile solid state disk and semiconductor solutions. The Company's flagship product, the E-Disk SSD, is offered with SATA, SCSI Narrow and Wide, IDE/ATA and Fibre Channel interfaces in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch hard disk drive footprints, and 19-inch rack mount configurations scalable up to several terabytes of pure solid state storage.

Intel's Silverthorne Chip Could Power Apple's Future

Intel's new Silverthorne chip is ideal for ultra-portable laptops like Apple, Inc.'s MacBook Air, but Intel may be laying the foundation for future Apple processors. Intel gave a hint of Apple's future in one of 14 papers it will present at the International Solid-State Circuit Conference in San Francisco.
Just because a paper is technical doesn't mean marketing wasn't involved. A good example is Intel's presentation Monday at the International Solid-State Circuit Conference in San Francisco on its upcoming Silverthorne mobile processor. The title: "A Sub-1W to 2W Low-Power IA Processor for Mobile Internet Devices in 45nm High-ÊMetal-Gate CMOS."
Sounds geeky, but consider the phrase "mobile Internet devices." That appears to align with Apple's vision of the iPhone and iPod Touch as "the first mainstream Wi-Fi mobile platform, running all kinds of mobile applications."
But while Silverthorne draws 10 to 15 times less power than Intel's Centrino laptop processor and is "easily the lowest-power laptop-style processor that Intel has produced," Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, said in a telephone interview that the new chip is far better suited to ultra-portable laptop computers than handheld devices.

Air, Not iPhone

So for Apple, one of several manufacturers committed to adopting Silverthorne, think MacBook Air, not iPhone, King said.
Indeed, Intel is aiming the first version of Silverthorne at the ultra-portable market -- "potentially a very interesting market, but one that's still evolving," King said. "Hats off to Intel. It's a very interesting development, potentially very valuable" for the next generation of mobile devices.
The problem is that price and battery constraints have made ultra-portables of limited interest for most consumers. And while Silverthorne may dramatically reduce a laptop's power consumption, it's just part of the problem.
"Processor power consumption pales in comparison to display and hard-drive power consumption," King said. Silverthorne "is not a magic bullet," he added.

Foundation for Smartphones

That's not to say that Intel won't deliver smaller and more powerful versions. "Maybe Silverthorne is a step toward a hybrid device that would blend mobile-phone capabilities with tablet or laptop capabilities," King said.
Exactly the point, Intel says. Silverthorne is not just a chip for new laptops, it's an architecture that gets Intel on track to compete in the smartphone market.
"The low-power microarchitecture we're going to be rolling out next week is establishing a foundation that will spawn multiple processors in different segments," Pankaj Kedia, a director at Intel, told Computerworld. "We believe mobile Internet devices is a big market -- a high-growth market."
He added, "We think more and more consumers will want to carry the Internet with them in their pocket. Silverthorne will be the heartbeat of this category. From a growth perspective, Silverthorne is very important."
So Apple's interest in Silverthorne is intriguing. The iPhone, like other smart phones, uses an architecture from ARM. If the Silverthorne platform can eventually compete with that architecture, Intel may be able to get much more business from Apple.

Apple Cuts iPhone, iPod Touch Production

Mac sales appear to be rising, but Craig Berger of FBR Research says Apple, Inc. has reduced orders for iPhones and iPods for the second time in two months. Apple's iPod Touch may have the weakest sales since it is less than an Apple iPhone. Another report finds that Apple iPhone calls are coming from countries without Apple contracts.
Are Apple sales in trouble? Two research analysts have reported in recent days that Apple is aggressively cutting back production on iPods and iPhones, while increasing production on Mac computers.
Craig Berger, an analyst with FBR Research, told clients in a research note this week that Apple has reduced orders for iPhones and iPods for the second time in two months. Berger concludes that Apple is experiencing weak sell-through in the fourth calendar quarter of 2007 or in the early going this year.
"For both iPods and iPhones, we believe Apple was previously targeting a roughly 50 percent quarter-over-quarter decline for first quarter units, whereas we now think the firm is targeting a 60 percent quarter-over-quarter unit decline for first-quarter units," he wrote.

iPod Touch Weakness

It seems that the iPod Touch may have seen the weakest sales. Berger reported production orders for the Touch have fallen the most. The device may suffer from being less than an iPhone, since it has no phone capabilities but is substantially more expensive than Apple's music-playing iPhones. The touch relies on Wi-Fi for connectivity, so users who aren't in range of a Wi-Fi connection simply can't get online.
Berger also said MacBook chip orders in the first quarter look to be down 50 percent compared with the fourth quarter of 2007. But iMac orders are up 35 percent compared with previous checks.
Apple just announced new, higher-capacity versions of both the iPhone and iPod Touch, so the production cutbacks may have been in preparation for the new models. Another possibility, more remote, is that Apple is scaling down production of the current iPhone in preparation for a 3G version. AT&T, Apple's exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the U.S., announced it is building out its 3G network to more locations around the country.

Mac Production Up

Meanwhile, Banc of America said its checks of Asian production facilities indicate that production is going up for Macs, down for iPods, and the iPhone situation is volatile.
For MacBooks and iMacs, production has moved up more than 20 percent so far this quarter, Banc of America said, which indicates Apple is replenishing inventory and seeing solid demand. Banc of America predicts continued growth through March.
But Banc of America agrees with FBR that iPod production has been cut some 10 percent to 20 percent since January and 30 percent since December. Where the firm had been predicting 5 percent year-over-year growth, it now looks like Apple will see as much as a 10 percent decline in iPod sales.

iPhone Usage Is Global

After severe production cuts in December and early January, production is now up for iPhones. Banc of America expressed concern that production and demand for the innovative phone remain lackluster.
Meanwhile, Net Applications released new numbers on its operating-system statistics, which revealed that Macs accounted for the largest percentage of Internet traffic ever -- 7.57 percent. iPhone-based traffic nudged up from 0.12 percent in December to 0.13 percent in January. More importantly, Net Applications' numbers show that iPhone traffic is coming from many more countries than have official wireless carriers for the phones, indicating substantial gray-market sales.
"We've heard the rumours that many iPhones are being used outside the officially sanctioned countries. So we decided to check it out and surprise, surprise, it's true. The iPhone has a presence in almost every country on Earth," Net Applications wrote in its report.

Apple MacBook Air

Yesterday's Macworld 2008 Keynote by Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air, Apple's attempt to move into the greener computing sphere. Up to now, despite a pared-down aesthetic that would appear to lend itself well to an environmental approach, Apple hasn't appeared to be too concerned over green--they took some criticism from environmentalists for using toxic chemicals in the iPhone.

But they're getting to it now, with the introduction of this superthin, 13-inch laptop. The $1,800 MacBook Air feature a recyclable, mercury-free aluminum frame; a mercury- and arsenic-free display; PVC-free cables; and it comes in recyclable, pared-down packaging. Coming in at just three pounds means, presumably, fewer materials used in manufacture. It's also ENERGY STAR-rated and earned a silver rating from EPEAT. And energy efficiency means longer battery life--a single charge will get you five hours of worktime.

More info is available at the Apple website and at PC Magazine's review. I found an interesting tutorial here: MacInTouch

Macbook Air ends the war between Apple and Greenpeace

Only a few months ago the relationship between Greenpeace and Apple was a frosty one. The leading environmental watchdog even commissioned a study that slammed the faddish iPhone for its high count of harmful PVC and BFRs. But now the tune seems to be changing as Greenpeace washes away the bad blood with its positive reception of the eco-friendly MacBook Air laptop. According to Endgadget, here is what Greenpeace had to say about Apple's new notebook. "The MacBook Air is a strong entry in the race to build a green PC. As a mercury and arsenic free laptop it exceeds European Standards (RoHS directive exemptions) and raises the bar for the rest of the industry."