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Solid State Memory on the Rise
skaet writes "CNet is reporting that manufacturers of NAND flash memory are expanding the market for their chips - over the next few years - to eventually replace current methods of storage in media capture devices, mobile phones and even some notebooks as well as car navigation systems and large data storage at corporations and government agencies. From the article: 'The average notebook has 30GB (of hard drive storage). How long is it before the notebook has solid state memory? Five or six years,' according to Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron Technology, one of the world's largest memory makers. 'I'm not saying drives will go away. There will always be a need for storage, but when was the last time you tapped out a drive?'"
Gigabyte has something out they call i-RAM. It's a PCI add-in card that allows you to plug regular ram sticks into and then access them as a piece of solid storage space. They say its good for "multimedia applications" and I'm sure it is...if not a little overkill.
Here's a link to a review from Anandtech http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480
Most solid-state memory is pretty darn slow...
I was once asked to demo a solid-state HD...built with nothing but DRAM. This was a decade ago, and it was only proof-of-concept. It was only 2gb, but it would format instantly. Don't confuse SD and CF cards with DRAM. Micron makes DRAM.
What is the expected lifespan (in cycles) for flash memory? I thought it was only good for a few thousand writes.
Has it improved recently?
This topic arose when people started using flash memory as a hard drive in old Powerbook 1400s. While they're a nice very expandable old powerbook, they have a RAM ceiling of 64MB. a G3/400 CPU expansion in them is one thing, but being limited to 64MB is a pain in the butt.
So popping a flash ram card in and using it as the virtual memory drive let PB1400 owners use 128, 256MB of virtual memory, running off the flash ram which was far quicker than the internal HD for swapping. Many people have also used these cards as the main boot drive so the whole OS boots from RAM, swaps to that same RAM, and gives mostly silent operation and saves on battery life. Critics of doing this noted the drives would last a month or two until suffering write death.
Systems running these cards have been seen working just fine for 3-4 years now. Write limits in the range of tens to low hundreds of thousands may not seem much, but in reality it's working quite well. Apparently part of this is that most newer flash ram drives are set up to attempt evenly distributed writes over cells, and not concentrate hundreds of writes one after another on the same cell
The whole point of using memory instead of a hdd is because of speed; the long time for your mp3 player to fill is due to the transfer rate of whatever you're hooking it up to (ie usb).
That's not entirely correct.
While if you hook up a flash memory to the USB 1 spec, it will be painfully slow, even with a connection to a high-speed USB 2.0 hub, you'll still run into slowdowns. Why? Because most flash (which is most, if not all non-disk related MP3 players) write speeds are averaging around 5-10MB/sec. And even then, that's being generous.
So, for 10MB/sec, that would be at least 1 minute to fill up a 512MB mp3 player. Of course, real world is never the same as rated specs, so I'd be happy with 2 minutes, to be honest....
Another neat trick to try with Flash drives is to fill them with a bunch of itty bitty files - it literally takes forever to do so! Maybe someone more insightful than I can enlighten me as to why that is....
Karnal