I had dinner with Geoff tonight, and he mentioned this, of which I had not heard before:
australianitAPPLE may sell notebook computers without hard disks later this year, an analyst said.
The devices would use the same type of fast memory as music players and digital cameras, driving down prices of hard-disk drives.
The maker of the popular iPod music player and Macintosh computers hopes to introduce flash memory in small computers known as sub-notebooks in the second half of 2007, Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research said.
A shift to flash memory in place of slower hard-disk drives would eliminate one headache for consumers: lengthy start-up times when turning on computers.
Apple already uses flash memory in its iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle music players. Flash memory is lighter, uses less power and takes up less space than hard-disk drives.
It makes sense, and from a Sun-insider perspective and as someone who has wondered about this in the past, it also makes a good explanation for the rapid adoption of ZFS in MacOS X.
If you need an explanation as to how this would work, watch this cheesy but educational ZFS demo by some German colleagues (original German version) (Pertinent Blog Article) – all you need to do is to poke the block storage code a bit to avoid hotspotting, and implement some mechanism to rotate idle/unchanged blocks around the Flash RAM so as to not wear-out particular areas, and the result should be good for a decade’s worth of use, according to Geoff.
Hell, I’d buy one. It’s be motorcycle-proof and a Fabulous wardriving tool.
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