Intel Becomes Lab for Flash Versus Drive Debate

By Michael Kanellos

What's better – flash memory or hard drives?

Intel (INTC) will tell us.

The chipmaking giant has conducted its own internal tests on how solid state drives, made up of flash memory, can be incorporated into a corporate computing environment. Intel makes flash drives, so there is clearly a vested interest here, but the tests were conducted by its own IT group.

The results? Hard drives fail around 5 percent of the time. Flash drives will fail around 0.5 percent of the time, according to Dave Buchholz, the IT technology evangelist at Intel who oversaw the tests. Batteries can also last longer in flash-based notebook and give notebook owners 15 percent better battery life.

Hard drives also run about 40 degrees hotter.

As a result, Intel is starting to get flash-based notebooks for its employees. Eighty percent of Intel employees work on laptops so this will become one of the earliest, largest experiments with flash notebooks. Flash may get incorporated into desktops and servers, but likely won't get used as primary storage vehicles. A lot of the desktops are owned by design engineers and they need the cumbersome space (1 terabyte or so) that standard hard drives can provide. Flash, though, may be used to store the operating system for faster boot-up.

As the flash notebooks proliferate through Intel, the world hopefully will get more data to see what sort of difference solid state storage can make.

Buchholz, by the way, will speak at the Flash Memory Summit in San Jose next week. (Disclosure: So will I.)

Comments

[Lightway:]

I feel it's only a matter of time before all hard drives are replaced by solid state devices. The reason? What breaks the most in computers? Anything with moving parts. What are the slowest devices in computers? Anything with moving parts.

At that point, you just need to be able to deal with power spikes on the boards to be able to protect the data.

Though not yet ready to power enterprise apps, solid state should be the norm within 10 years.

Aug 05 09:31 PM

[JohnB:]

Interesting trend.

I doubt the engineers keep a terabyte of data on their desktops. Probably networked storage with backup. If the business environment relies more on networked storage, then it would be easier to get by with the lesser capacity of flash drives on PCs.

What does "hard disks fail 5% of the time" mean? Sounds terribly high. Maybe 5% over five years or something like that?

Aug 06 12:09 PM