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

Problem with number of writes.

[spiff42]

I wonder if they have solved the problems with a limited number of writes to flash memory. Most flash-chips only have a 1000 or 10000 cycle write endurance. Sometimes this gets higher because virtual pages are used and the data shuffeled arround on the "disk" each time it is written. But that will still cause problems if you fill up the disk, say 90%, and then keep writing and rewriting the remaining 10%.

I know that 10000 writes seems like a lot, and perhaps it is. Anyone knows how this figure looks for normal harddrives?

Still it seems to me that the limited number of writes sets the biggest limitation.

/spiff

Re:Not that new.

[networkBoy]

As far as I can recall, there ARE people working on alternatives to memory as we know it

Without giving away too much (and getting fired in the process) there is a whole new tech on the horizon. It still uses all the nasty chemicles, but in traditional flash memory, the chip is broken into three major components:

charge punps (to provide the 9.5-12 volts required to program the chip from the punny 1.8 - 3.3 volt supply

the control circuitry (basically a mini CPU)

the flash array
all these elements are "flat", that is they are one structure deep. This new tech coming up, if someone can perfect it, uses multiple layers to make the flash array several layers deep. Thus you could (in theory) shrink your die size while increasing the memory density.
-nB