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Flash Memory And Its future
NETHED writes "C|NET News is running an article about Flash Memory's future. Here is a How Stuff Works link about Flash memory. An interesting read especially considering how small these things are currently. Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?"
IEEE Spectrum also has an article dealing with the future flash technologies in the current issue
Have you seen the XD cards? I have a few and I'm so scared I'll lose them that I've purchased large plastic holders for them just so they don't get overlooked. These things are literally the size of my thumbnail. Too small...
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
I recently bought a Fuji FinePix 2650 digital camera, which uses xD picture cards. They are the smallest standard on the market (i think). Here's a picture of all the different types... xD is on the right. Its small, but unlike smartmedia it is not thin. Its rigid and feels durable. I think capacities can scale up to 1GB with the architecture. The only drawback is that the standard was created by Fuji and Olympus, and I don't know if it will be offered by other manufacturers.
Nope. At least, certainly not for the mainstream consoles.
The NES, SNES, etc used battery-backed RAM to save your game with. Things like flash memory were just too expensive (or didn't exist) back then. This is why a well-used Zelda cartridge doesn't save games very well after a few years, yet some of them still do even today - almost 20 years later. The secret? A simple CR2032 battery, at least in the NES carts. Yup, the same battery that most motherboards now use (do any still use those old battery boxes you hooked on with jumper pins?). Whenever I need to repair an NES cart, I'm sure to have a dead motherboard or 2 to scavenge from.
I can't speak for GameGear, if it WAS batter backed it'd be a much smaller form-factor battery, I'd imagine. Any Slashdotters know?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
No, that was standard RAM kept working by a lithium battery, which in Zelda carts is often long dead. A lot of PC motherboards, even brand-new ones, still store BIOS settings this way. Those few cents of extra profit add up, I guess.
--
est modus in rebus
Hard drives burn to much power to be very pratical in anything portable. The iPod's battery life isn't to great, considering its size
Not to mention the one thing that everyone seems to forget:
/boot partition on linux boxes with a nice rescue installation for when the drive arrays go beserk.
COMPACT FLASH IS THE SAME PINOUT AS IDE
Yes, you can use a compact flash card as an IDE drive. I use them as my
They read slow (~4MB/s) and write slower (~2MB/s) but they're reliable and have no moving parts.
It is for this reason [it is an IDE drive] that I feel compact flash rocks and is far more versitile then the rest of the formats.
install some cf in your system using an ide-cfa adaptor (http://www.acscontrol.com or similar, there is at least one model with a drive bezel for front-panel access) and double-stick tape. use it to boot a kernel that assembles raid volumes from devices it finds. for extra points, do this in a pci sun system (eg, the ultra5) which won't boot from non-openfirmware pci cards like the generic adaptec 2940 or qlogic 1040 -- the bootprom will happily load a bsd kernel from flashdisk, then find a rootfs in RAID_AUTOCONFIG. to avoid needless writes to compactflash, add some boot logic to create mfs /var and /tmp, to be invoked if the rootfs is the cf device (freebsd has this feature, iirc).
Moving parts.
Hard-drives are not as robust as solid state memory devices. Usually the first thing to go on any computer is the hard-drive because the mechanical parts fail, causing data loss. This is especially true for portable devices that may be dropped.
...interesting if true.
Good point.
Flash can usually only be written/erased 100K to 1 million times.
Writing data is inherently destructive to the tunnel oxide layer in each storage transistor.
When you write applications storing data in flash you have to be aware of this or you can burn it out very quickly !
This is also the reason why flash cannot entirely replace hard drives.
FWIW, some of the newer memory formats in development do not have this restrictions (MRAM, ovonic,etc )
Lurking in the desert
Use one of these to connect it to a spare IDE connector. The adaptor also needs power.
Unfortunately, I have not seen any similar adaptors that connect to a laptop style connector (with power) because if there where it would make a cool direct HD replacement for an older laptop.
No, that's not entirely correct. NAND flash is best-suited for high-density applications, but you pay a price in terms of read and write speed because of the array architecture involved. It is NOT faster than NOR flash, which is being used in embedded system applications (Intel being the dominant player with its StrataFlash memory) because of fast read/write time access. All comes back to the array architecture differences in NAND and NOR.