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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?"
volkswagons are small, right?
Blarf.
Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?"
less than 6 inches?
"Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?"
LoC \ cm^2 ?
Make it small enough to power a gameboy sized device and run GLQuake and then get back to me. I've already lost my current cellphone in my pocket. Anyone ever seen that show "Trigger Happy TV" with the guy with the overly ginormous phone? THATS the phone for me.
You know, after I pushed submit to the story, I wondered, "will this get posted because it is an interesting read" or "will this get posted because the Slashdot crowd wants to talk about thier penis size". 6 comments down, and I've got my answer.
--sig fault--
Oh, howstuffworks.com, not The Way Things Work. I was looking forward to a good explanation involving mammoths.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Until all these companies find a standard that they can agree upon, we'll never see the supposed benefits of the advances in this technology. Just look at compact flash/memory stick/ MMC/SD/ whatever else is out there to plug into your camera/phone/palm. There's too many for any of them to have any real universal utility.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
I used to like SmartMedia. Until I folded one in a backpack accidentally. It's too thin. The SD chits are almost too small for convenient use. There's a useful size for media, and not everyone can deal with fragile postage-stamp parts that need to get handled occasionally.
I like CompactFlash. It's virtually indestructable, big enough to see on a messy desk, small enough to fit in a PDA nicely, and just the right form-factor for carrying a few with me on a digicam expedition. Replacing a flash card with a hard drive in the same form factor and bus connection, now that's cool. There are multiple vendors, each trying to push the boundaries of access speed and capacity. I know the addressing space is nearing a limit.
And principally, it's not peppered with pounds of private proprietary protected patented perversions.
[
Billions of dollars ride on the challenge. Industry estimates forecast that flash revenue will hit $13 billion this year, up from $7.7 billion in 2002, according to Jim Handy, a memory services executive with Semico Research. By 2007, flash memory is expected to be a $43 billion industry.
Despite the limitations of Flash memory that the article states, it appears that there will still be room for a lot of money in this industry. Given the current amount of products with flash memory, I doubt we'll see a big shift to a new technology. I'm guessing it'll be more like DVD-Rs. CDrs are still good, but in a few years I'm sure we'll all be burning on DVDs.
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Free your mind.
The flash mentioned here is NOR flash. The rising star in Flash is NAND flash which is cheaper (30c per MB), more dense (256MB in a single chip) and is faster for file system usage than NOR flash. NAND is used in SmartMedia etc storage devices and is supported in Linux by journaling file systems (JFFS2 and YAFFS).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well the article does seem to be slighly out of date since CF is now available in 4 GIG sizes.
Pretty amazing, and when i think about it probably the best contender to actually replacing the floppy standard.
Hard to belive that a few years ago the huge and easily destructible jaz disks were the alternative at 1 gig and slooooow speeds.
What the article didn't mention is the write times which are also improving, but cost slighly more. And lastly the newbigg cards require devices (ie cameras) that support a 32 bit file system, most consumer digi cams can't write on those cards (2 gig and up although one of lareger ones is still 16 bit)
Maciek
I don't spell check and i can't type
Why not use a small 20GB 1.8" hard-drive like the iPod does? I have a 3 Megapixel digital camera that uses a 64 MegaByte flash memory card. I'd much rather have a 20GB hard-drive in the the thing even if it did add 2 oz. of weight. Not an option for cell phones though obviously.
Mine...
oh... hmm wait... scratch that... arg! I mean nevermind..
Definitely CompactFlash for me, ever since I accidentally put one in the washing machine on hot and it not only survived but didn't seem to be damaged in any way.
It's small enough to fit into cameras and the like, yet big enough to be a "sensible size". It's only common sense that a slightly larger form factor will (in the future) allow greater storage than the smaller ones, at a lower price, with higher reliability.
Furthermore, it doesn't seem to be as bogged down with patents as the other formats, different companies can make CompactFlash cards, while things like the Sony Memory Stick are made by... well... Sony.
Oh, and lastly, unlike Secure-Digital and another one which I've temporarily forgotten the name of - it has no built-in Digital Rights Management - at least not that I've come across. I avoid anything to do with DRM on principle, even if I'm missing out by doing so.
IEEE Spectrum also has an article dealing with the future flash technologies in the current issue
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
I would say that the application will dictate the size needed. For mp3s you will need larger sized flash memory (with this I went with a 20Gb Hard Drive mp3 play because all the flash memory ones were to small). With a PDA that is used only as an organizer, you can get away with a cheaper smaller one. (Here I have only 32Mb total storage on my pda, but I also use it for a bit more then just an organizer, I also have a map, ebooks on it[see below] and internet applications on it[web, email and aim] ). For an ebook reader you probably can get way with 8Mb (I use my palm pilot for my ebook reader, but still prefer a paper book much better then an ebook, The only books I have are books that I don't read as a book but are there for reference, and use only 5Mb) So I would say the function will dictate what size will be needed.
Currently Flash memory in CompactFlash Form-Factor is available up to 4 GB. The article discusses the future of flash memory mainly in regards to Cell Phones. If we can easily fit 4 GB of flash RAM into a cell phone today, and can keep miniaturizing flash technology until at least 2005, then what is the problem? Cell phones will be limited to 12 GB of flash RAM? That's 3,000 4MB MP3s, or at least 24 full-length movies at a cell phone-ish resolution (say 320x240 pixels by 2005).
One thing of interest is that for decades both the storage capacity of computers has grown along with the amount of information we need to store. However we are reaching the threshold where the amount of information we need to store will plateau. A perfect example is audio files. We are now storing audio data at a high enough quality that any additional improvement will not be discernable by a person with normal hearing. Thus in the future the storage required for a typical song will not be any larger. On the contrary, assuming that compression algorithms keep advancing, we may actually need less storage in the future for audio data. We will eventually see video reach a similar plateau, where a high enough resolution will be achieved to satisfy even the most devoted technophiles.
Finally, all aspects of networking are improving (wireless, broadband home internet access, etc). The greater the bandwidth and connectivity, the less information required to be cached on the device ahead of time. Think about it - the carriers would much rather you have a cell phone with limited storage capacity if it means you have to consume more bandwidth accessing information from the network.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Is it anything like this flash?
I happen to find Flash Memory handy to make backups - am I the only one here? They're better than floppies, CD-RWs, CD-Rs and zip disks. They're quick, convienient, reliable, and reuseable.
I write a lot of documents and I find using a flash key chain drive practical. I pop the drive in at school and upload the documents via USB to the keychain drive. I do the same at home to have mulitple backups. I'm paranoid - but - I also haven't lost anything.
I don't know about failure rates on these things but I have enough backups not to worry.
"Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?""
We... don't like to talk about it. Oh... oh you mean the memory thing...
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
There are already a couple of devices around right now that can read most memory card formats (like SD and CF) and copy them to a small HD.
I think a really great product would be at attachment for the iPod to transfer CF card contents onto the iPod - or better yet, let me hook up a camera with a firewire connection and transfer pictures over to the iPod HD just like iPhoto on a Mac would.
Even though the iPod life is not great, it would be fine for several dumps of a 512mb CF card...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I noticed in the article it mentioned:
"So why don't we just use Flash memory for everything? Because the cost per megabyte for a hard disk is drastically cheaper, and the capacity is substantially more. You can buy a 40-gigabyte (40,000-MB) hard drive for less than $200, while a 192-MB CompactFlash card will generally cost you more. "
Notice how they make no mention of long term use, which would seem to support that you can rewrite flash memory to your heart's content, but I've heard otherwise. I've been told that the FM card would only last so long, as it couldn't handle all the writing (like swapping for virtual memory)... anyone have any such experience to back this up? And if so, why would this happen? Do the gates or oxide layer simply wear out? Or is it 'this brand only' problem, such as maybe a problem with the CF micro-contoller?
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.
"(Flash) shouldn't work," said Stefan Lai, a vice president in the technology and manufacturing group at Intel.
What the hell is this? There's no physical reason that voltage can't be stored for years. And flash obviously does work, so to say it 'shouldn't' is stupid.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I remember when i got my first digital camera, an HP 215 and came with a 4mb CF card. It introduced me to flash memory from the get go as a "digital film" medium.
.10 cents per disk.
:)
I also write a fair amount documents myself. I used to put them in a folder on my hard drive because there's a lot of space there to begin with, and I don't really have a need to transport my docs anywhere other than at home. If you upgrade regularly or do a lot of "house cleaning" on your HDD, (as in remove junk stuff you don't need anymore), or if you move files around a lot on your computer, or partition..things start to disappear over time.
My biggest problem was moving files around trying to organize them, and saving documents in different locations on my hard drive. I wound up forgetting where i put certian docs. When i clean up my HDD and remove stuff i don't need anymore, I wound up deleting some documents I wish I still had.
This is where CompactFlash came in for me. I was never a fan of floppy disks to begin with because the data capacity is so small by today's standards. That, and their really horrible with holding data for a extended period of time. Bad sectors are a royal nightmare if you store anything of value on a floppy.
So i got myself a 64meg CF card, a PCMCIA card reader, and a USB card reader, and it's a true lifesaver and a great replacement for floppies. The pendrives are awesome for portability and transporting things from PC to PC, I plan to get one of those as well.
I was never a fan of zip disks etc, either. It's still the same basic idea of a floppy only more modernized. It's not solid-state, and aren't nearly as reliable as other mediums.
CD-Rs are still my main method of backing up data. Their capacity/cost/reliability ratio is great for things like mp3s and video files. However, documents aren't all that big to begin wtih unless you have hordes of them to backup. That and it's read only once you burn. So i find it wasteful to burn a CD-R for a few megs worth of documents, even if CD-Rs are under
CD-RWs are too cumbersome for me to really be worthwhile. If you want to store data at work, school, a friend's house, etc, they have to have a CD-RW burner as well. Not exactly an efficient way to store data on the go like flash is.
So Compactflash was the sweet-spot for me. Good storage compacty for what i want to use it for. Great reliablity, durable, reuseable, portable, and comes in a nice array of capacities from 8MB to 1GB.
The new XD flash cards are way too small for me. Something nearly as small as a dime isn't something i want to store my data on. Odds are I'd lose the card before I got my money's worth of use out of it. SD/SM/MMC cards are too thin and tend to break easy. Compact flash is big enough where you don't have to worry so much about it breaking or losing it, big enough to hold in your hand comfortabily, yet small enough for use in PDAs and cameras. Their great!
To answer your question about failure rates:
If kept in a dry and cool place, and if you take care of it (as in not dropping it on hard surfaces, etc) The average lifespan of a CF card is about *1 million* reads and writes. However, another thing to take into consideration is data retention. A lot of CF cards and pen drives specify data retention up to 10 years.
So they're pretty damn reliable for as small as they are.
***Figure source: http://www.memorywizards.com/pd_flash_usb_drv.cfm
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
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.