Ultra Fast Disk Drives With No Moving Parts

saccade.com writes "Let's face it, the slowest part of PC's today is the disk drive. Bit Micro has come up with a nifty solution - flash memory based disk drives available in typical disk form-factors. These e-disks are electrically compatible with ATA, SCSI, etc. but run orders of magnitude faster - access times down to 40 usec and transfer rates over 100 MB/sec. What's the catch? Cost. Currently going for just under $1K/G, a 30G model I recently held in my hand was worth much more than my car. However, as flash memory prices drop, so do the price of these drives. Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way of the floppy and CRT."

Comments

Not that new.

[Oculus Habent]

This isn't exactly new. They've come down substantially in price and gone up in volume, but these have been around for years. It is my understanding that the most significant use was (is?) laptop drives for extremely rugged, shock-resistant portables.

Re:Life time?

[MadRocketScientist]

I dug a bit and found this in the manufacturer's FAQs:

QUESTION: What is the lifespan of the E-Disk® flash drive if wear-leveling algorithm is not utilized? How much improvement will BiTMICRO's wear-leveling algorithms make to this number?

ANSWER:
The wear-out life of an E-Disk® flash drive is directly proportional to the number of flash memory physical blocks in the device. The greater the number of flash memory blocks in the flash drive (and therefore total capacity), the longer the wear-out life of the device. As an example, arithmetic computation will show that a 34GB E-Disk flash drive fitted with flash chips rated at an endurance limit of 1 million erase/write cycles will have an endurance life of 1,024,000,000 seconds (or 32.47 years) when written continuously at 34MB/sec (or 2,937.6GB Erase/Write per day). This is the worst possible scenario where all I/O is 100% write and caching is disabled. E-Disk erase/write endurance can be more than 15 times the computed value if the multiplier effects of full associative caching and the results of BiTMICRO's accelerated erase/write endurance verification and testing are included.

Re:Quality?

[AdamHaun]

Flash uses a so-called "floating gate" to hold charge. The floating gate sits between the control gate and the source/drain/body of the transistor. When electrons are stored on the floating gate, the transistor is prevented from turning on, producing a zero. When there's no charge, the transistor turns on normally, producing a one.

MRAM disks, anyone?

[^Z]

Probably, a better HD-replacement solution would be based on MRAM, which is being steadily developed and is going to become available quite soon (the article linked mentions late 2004).