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.

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.

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.

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.