Samsung Develops 16Gb Flash Memory

nofrance writes "As promised earlier this year, Samsung has unveiled the world's first 16-gigabit flash memory chip. These chips, when combined in a 16x16 configurations, will allow 32 GigaByte flash cards. Using 50-nanometer manufacturing technology, these chips will be in production by the second half of 2006, with Samsung promising that their 32Gb team will impress next year." From the article: "According to the company, the cell size of the fingernail-sized flash chip has been reduced about 25 percent from that of the 60 nm 8 Gbit NAND: The new 50 nm flash memory contains cells that measure 0.00625 square microns per bit. The 16 Gbit device holds 16.4 billion functional transistors, Samsung said. "

Comments

Thumb drive?

[Kainaw]

Can this be put in an unpowered thumb drive? I feel it would be nice to have large, easily removable, USB storage that does not require external power. Right now, I store my accounting files on a 64MB stick that I can remove and take with me in an emergency much easier than taking my whole computer. The more room for backup, the better.

Re:Thumb drive?

[RapmasterT]

Can this be put in an unpowered thumb drive? I feel it would be nice to have large, easily removable, USB storage that does not require external power. Right now, I store my accounting files on a 64MB stick that I can remove and take with me in an emergency much easier than taking my whole computer.

Let me be the first to scoff at your miniscule sized 64MB stick. scoff, scoff, scoff. Please immediately upgrade to a 1GB (minimum) stick for no reason beyond bragging rights.

But yes, the distinction of "flash" memory is that it is non-volitile, meaning it requires no power to keep the data once written, so it's exactly what is used for these kind of memory sticks/keydrives.

Call me when

[Neo-Rio-101]

Please let me know when we no longer need hard drives, and we no longer need to "boot" our PCs every time we switch them on.

Also drop me a line when we can store the world's music on a small memory cube and download it at the speed of light, virtually killing the RIAA overnight.

Amazing, the tech just keeps getting better and better.

Re:Call me when

[Antique Geekmeister]

Replacing disk with flash RAM is not feasible: flash isn't fast enough, and doesn't survive enough re-writes to the same blocks. Various tmp files, web caches, and frequently written logfiles would destroy the flash quite quickly the same way they used to be the most common failure points on hard drives. But for tunning a live DVD image of a full OS where writing to the drive doesn't normally occur, or doing OS installations from a USB drive instead of from a CD, this is absolutely fabulous.

There are some fascinating megnetic storage technologies in the works that might provide easily preserved live OS's that don't need that lengthy "bootstrap" procedure on every boot, but none have yet hit the commercial market.

Re:Call me when

[wackywendell]

Actually, to nitpick...if you've ever learned much relativity (not that I know all that much), time is a dimension just like space, and you are traveling through it forwards at the speed of light, or if you are moving in space, very, very near to it. I know travelling through time at a speed doesn't make sense, but that is in a strange, glad-I'm-not-a-physicist-because-this-makes-no-sen se way the only measurement there is...

whatever happened to regular RAM?

[peter303]

When I look at local computer parts prices, DRAM has been stuck at the $100 / GB range for three years now. Flash passed its price point earlier this year and is not looking back. I used to marvel at how RAM prices used to drop. (Flash is slower and can only be written a limited number (1E5) of times.)

Re:whatever happened to regular RAM?

[MacGod]

When I look at local computer parts prices, DRAM has been stuck at the $100 / GB range for three years now. Flash passed its price point earlier this year and is not looking back. I used to marvel at how RAM prices used to drop. (Flash is slower and can only be written a limited number (1E5) of times.)

Demand. There just simply isn't the demand for that much RAM. It used to be that you could always use more, because new operating systems required it, and new games needed it, etc. But now, with Longhorn/Vista still en route, and given that Tiger's requirements are not much more than Panther's or even Jaguar's, the OSs aren't driving people to get that much more RAM. And games are becoming less and less of an issue on computers as consoles grab bigger pieces of the marketshare.

In short, without the demand driving the competition, there simply isn't the incentive to drop prices that much. Flash, on the other hand, let's you work toward solid-state hard drives, bigger memory cards and MP3 players and so forth. So the demand still exists in that sector.

Hard drive industry vs Flash card industry

[eebra82]

Maxtor, Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital and all the other storage companies better listen to what Samsung is doing here. Life is good when you are sitting in front of a really fast computer, but it's rather disturbing that the hard drives (and media players i.e. DVD) still operate at milliseconds instead of nanoseconds.

Has anyone thought about why hard drive development is so focused at increasing disk space by using similar technology and nothing beyond that? I mean, come on, this tech has been around for ages and you'd kind of want a solid replacement (read: no moving parts, nanosecond operation times).

Who knows what we'll see next in terms of hard drives AND WHEN?

more seriously however

[goombah99]

Will the Nano be upgradable? that is, was the chip oldered in or is in in there in a stadard flash drive socket. If so did apple or the CPU maker, cripple the nano's address range? if not buy that nano now and upgrade it next year. On the other hand the Nano sells for about $30 bucks more than the retail price of the 4Gb NAND chip. Son unless you can buy it below wholesale like apple, you'll be better off buying a new Nano when the 32 GB ones roll out.

With a 4gb microdrive I get 540 images

[purduephotog]

I shoot weddings. With my 10D I get approximately 540 images, RAW, written to the MD. I'll usually pound thru 4 batteries (2x2) in the course of a day event; I have 6 spares.

Assuming I win the lotto and/or can reinvest some of the wedding profit towards a camera instead of my leaking roof, I would move up to a 1Ds, selling for 3K, which writes out 11mb RAW files.

That means a 32gb CF card would store: 2400 images

Your typical wedding/reception lasts 7 hours. Add a couple of the bridesmaids getting dressed (You do NOT want to miss that, HAHAHA) and you're at a 10 hour day.

That means you're taking a frame about every 15 seconds, were you to fill that up.

Cost of film? Let's say you're shooting 35MM instead of medium format (arguably a 1DS is a little less in terms of quality than a Hassy at 16x20, but the customer would probably never see it) then thats 67 rolls of film. A propack of 400NC from BH Photo is 28.45 for 5 rolls, which translates 14 packs at a cost of 400$.

Plus processing, tack on about 10$ per roll and you're at $1000 worth of money.

Where am I going?

No one shoots 3K worth of photos. It's insane. It's insane by even MY standards. But on a trip it's definately worth it to have... and I'm not even adressing the transfer rate issues (my firewire transfer from CF is the fastest in the market at 7MB/sec that would take about 1.25hrs to transfer)

This is an incredible leap forward but the biggest advantage will be the price pressuer on lower sized cards.

After all, drop one of these babies and you're out a pretty penny.

Re:With a 4gb microdrive I get 540 images

[Albanach]

Cost of film? Let's say you're shooting 35MM instead of medium format (arguably a 1DS is a little less in terms of quality than a Hassy at 16x20, but the customer would probably never see it) then thats 67 rolls of film. A propack of 400NC from BH Photo is 28.45 for 5 rolls, which translates 14 packs at a cost of 400$.

But no one would ever shoot that sort of number of shots if they were shooting film - it's crazy. Digital cameras have created shot inflation in the wedding market. Folk advertise 300, 400 or 500 pictures in their wedding packages and the customers who don't know think that more is better.

It's not as if weddings days are fast moving affairs. So you're right, where this will shine is on things like overseas trips, safaris, and maybe even for photo journalists who might not know when they'll next be able to dump the files on their camera to a decent backup medium.

Poor man's solid state hard drive?

[aussersterne]

Has anyone taken a bunch of the already available monster flash drives and built a PC on them?

I'm thinking 4x USB2 card readers (these are down to like $10 on eBay) each containing 8GB compactflash in a RAID-0 configuration = 32GB solid state storage that might not incur too bad a performance penalty.

With something like a 32GB compactflash, you could potentially create a 120GB RAID-0 with them.

Do CF cards have the reliability factor to act as primary storage? How about USB2 as the interface? I don't know enough about either set of specs to make a judgment.

Flash is unusable for a hard drive.

[jasonhamilton]

It's too slow.

It also has a finite number of writes that can be done before it quits working.

If you want your system to run faster, look at the gigabit ramdisk PCI cards that are coming out this month (?). Get four of those, a raid card, and hook them up together. Contents are kept even when the computer is switched off.

Re: Yes & No!

[Thalagyrt]

The person who wrote TFA said it's both 16 GByte and 16 Gbit. Read it, you'll see that both are used throughout the article. So we'll never know which one it is.

where is the Samsung SDD, then??

[Tomasset]

Around the end of May, there were several sites

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23425
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Samsung-is-betting- on-Flash-disk-drives-2222.shtml

reporting that Samsung would be having a 16GB flash hard disk (SDD) available around August 2005. Has anyone seen those? I know for a very good reason that I would be insterested in installing one of those in my Powerbook: the joy of silence.

Re:16x16 configs

[cloudmaster]

Yeah, and when those flash cards are combined with ide-flash adaptors and a 3Ware 12-port raid card, they'll allow for a 384GB flash RAID-0 with no almost no seek time. However, all Samsung has right now are some chips that "could" be used for something.

Besides, the real news is the 50nm process, not the capacity. :)

the poor man can't afford this...

[YesIAmAScript]

You're going to cheap out on the CF readers, when the CF cards themselves will cost you a good $500+?

You're talking about $2000 minimum just to get off the ground here. How does the poor man afford this?

I can't imagine how the write performance would do anything but stink. In theory enough flash in parallel should have decent write performance, but I doubt this setup will manage to extract it.

So, demand lowers prices?

[Create an Account]

WTF?

What are you talking about? Increased demand raises prices, decreased demand lowers prices. Likewise, weak demand in a market causes an increase in competition with its attendant reduction in prices. (Think about airfares after the 9/11 attacks: no demand = rock bottom prices.)

Prices are high due to a lack of excess supply.

A much better answer to the OP's question is that DRAM has reached an equilibrium point where the suppliers are able to charge a price low enough to discourage new entrants, beyond which they have no incentive to lower prices. Once (marginal cost = marginal revenue) you stop looking for increased volume through lower prices because your profit is already maximized. Lowering your price further just decreases your profits.

Make no mistake about it, if demand increased tomorrow for DRAM, prices would rise. If that demand stayed steady, the prices would stay high. They would come down if the demand collapsed because new entrants would be trying to recoup the fixed costs they had incurred to enter the market. That's not a function of a healthy market though, that's a function of poor demand forecasting.

Saying that prices are too high because there's no demand for the product (assuming the production is into efficient economies of scale, which DRAM production is) is like saying all of those people in Africa starved to death because they weren't hungry enough to eat.

Re: Yes & No!

[bhsx]

To clarify: Samsung has developed a process to create 16Gigabit(2GB) chips that when set in a 8(chips)X16(Gigabit) configuration yields a 16GB flash drive. The 16(chip)X16(Gigabit) configuration yields 32GB flash drives.