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?'"

Comments

Is this guy for real?

[barc0001]

"There will always be a need for storage, but when was the last time you tapped out a drive"

Last week at the parents' place. Two days ago at work. Probably tonight as well at home. You were saying?

No matter how much storage you put in a given system, it will eventually be not enough. I've seen it a million times.

Also, flash memory is way too slow to be used as primary storage. Putting 512MB of MP3s on my SD card takes almost a three minutes. Drive to drive, that's under 10 seconds.

And let's not even mention how quickly a cache partition would die with the 100,000 writes before failure standard of current flash drives...

Re:Filled up a drive?

[Wisgary]

I sometimes look at my download folder in awe, it's full of so much useless SHIT that I have no use for (or ever will have a use for, since there are new versions of just about ANYTHING in there) but... sometimes... it's hard to hit that delete key. It really is, I think we have a new symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder. I wonder how long until psychologists start to ask... "How long has it been since you deleted stuff from your download folder?"

Re:Slow

[adrianmonk]

Most solid-state memory is pretty darn slow, and the stuff that's fast costs major $$$ ... I'll buy it when it gets faster & cheaper

As a guy who works on apps for Palm OS for a living, I've learned that flash memory has two really nice properties that hard drives don't have:

1. Its access time is pretty much negligible. There is no head that has to be moved across the disk. Sure, there are bound to be advantages to one large read (or write) compared to several smaller ones, but the penalty for reading from (or writing to) different spots all over the place is way, way smaller than it is on a hard drive.
2. Probably more importantly, flash devices can come out of power saving mode much faster than hard drives can. This is for one simple reason: when a hard drive goes into power saving mode, it has to make a big change in angular momentum of the platter in order to come out of power saving mode. Since the penalty is so high, you have to make a compromise: either you must use more energy and keep the drive powered on longer, or you must wait for sometimes 5 or 10 seconds just to get a single byte off the disk. With flash, you don't have this problem, because it takes more like 1/2 second or less to bring the thing out of power saving mode to full functionality.

#2 is such a big benefit that I'd really like to have a laptop with a few GB of flash memory that acts as a read and write cache for the hard drive. With a good caching algorithm, it should be possible to keep the hard drive spun down most of the time and save a ton of energy.

Deja Vu (again)

[Anne Thwacks]

How long is it before the notebook has solid state memory? Five or six years,

I think I have heard this story ever January since 1970, and it was probably around before that.

A brief revue of the literature will reveal that, although its perefectly true that solid state memory follows More's law. HDs appear to as well.

At the time Bill Gates said "640k should be enough for anyone", a 40MB HD was the size of a Bendix washing machine, and cost about the same as a Ford Galaxie 500 with all the extras. 64k of RAM cost about ten times as much as a PC with no RAM.

In 1974, (check your library for old copies of Dr Dobbs) there was a serious debate as to whether the laws of physics made it impossible for memory to EVER cost less than 1c per bit!

And for those of you stupid enough to think solid sate means slow - ask someone what Google store their data on! People who know nothing about history are condemned to repeat it. The rest of us get shiney new USB thumb drives.