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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?'"
i dunno...i would rather use hard disks personally. in my ecxperience, they fail in a less catastrophic way. have a few errors....back it up and get a new HDD. with flash memory, when it fails, it FAILS. the end
Yeah, no shit. People talk about how Bit Torrent downloads are consuming some large percentage of the Internet capacity ... but it's also consuming a larger portion of user's hard drives. All RIAA/MPAA bitching aside, downloading is driving the sale of a lot of storage hardware. It's even worse if (like me) you're a packrat and just hate to throw anything away. So, you don't ... you just buy a couple more hard disks and jack them into your RAID array.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think that they're moving in the wrong direction. Yes, solid state is cool (despite its price). Yes, it uses less power (but is noticeably slower). What I want to see as the future of portables is a thin client. Companies try to roll out thin client desktops every few years, but they never seem to think about thin client portables. Imagine a very small portable that is nothing but a thin client with wireless. It wouldn't take much power, could run resource hungry apps via an ssh tunnel to a real box and be and be relatively cheap to produce. Something like what I saw on one of the blogs at Sun a few days ago represents the future. Don't try to take the whole computer with you, just take a small phone to call your computer.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
Agreed. I copy *my* DVD's directly to my HTPC, vobs and all, because I'm too lazy to search through a rack of DVDs to decide what to watch. Sure, I could rip em and repackage 'em using Xvid, but the point is convenience.
Do I *need* more than 30 gigs of space to live on? Well, no. But life sure is more entertaining and easier when you're tapping out at 1 terabyte, rather than 30 gigs.
Another reason this idea won't work, either: imagine the environmental costs. Making chips is dirtier in terms of byproducts and materials, whereas hard disks are relatively easy to break down. I can't see this helping companies trying to attain ISO certification.
You can't be serious. Solid-state memory is MUCH faster than normal hard drives. The read/write speeds of solid-state memory are close to that of RAM due to the fact that there is no hard drive "head" that needs to physically move around the platter.
Assuming that you're referring to Flash Memory. Its getting faster, fast.
Flash memory is currently using the same speed ratings as a CD-ROM does. 1X == 150 Kilobytes per second
Secure Digital Flash memory is commonly available in speeds up to 150x. 22,500 Kilobytes per second.
We're already starting to see 200x: 30,000 Kilobytes per second.
I can boot an operating system, Knoppix Linux, with a full graphical user interface, full hardware support, multi-media, and office applications on an old 24x CD-ROM without "too much" discomfort, I imagine booting it off a 200x flash card would be relatively comfortable.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
What's new about this?
Back about 1985 or 86 I bought a NVRam card for my AT.
I *think* it was called a "BatRam" or "BatDisk" or something like that.
I also had one before that for my 8bit XT machine.
I no longer have the 8bit card but I dug up the 16bit AT card out
of my garage just now, it took me about 30 seconds to find it.
Here's what it looks like, (please be gentle on my bandwidth!)
http://www.systemrecycler.com/misc/dscn0773.jpg
and
http://www.systemrecycler.com/misc/dscn0774.jpg
At the time, this was revolutionary stuff. You could power down and
all your stuff was right where it was before. I think these things were
only about 2 or 4 megabytes (which was HUGE back then).
IIRC, I was using mine as a ram disk. I could put LOTS of programs
on 4 megs. This being in the day when most programs were still being written
to run on 64k IBM PC's.
I believe that's just a normal ramdrive - they've been around forever with software emulation. Of course, the advantage of a hardware add-on is that, otherwise, you have to part with a portion of your system ram to make it into a ramdrive and of course, it was not always economical to add more ram (limited # of slots or too expensive for a huge single stick of ram) - the PCI card effectively just doubles the number of ram slots you have.....
Cenatek also has a Solid State Disk hardware solution available for a long time:
http://www.cenatek.com/
But it's always been ridiculously expensive to me for what basically is ram on a PCI board.
A ramdisk is very nice for any files (or a shitload of small files) that get read and written to a lot but don't get loaded into system memory for some reason. I used to use a software one (emulated another drive as "G:\" back when I used Windows) and pointed my browser there for it's cache folder into it - speeded up the whole surfing experience with already visited webpages...
While 30 GB is a thimble for the Slashdot crowd. I've worked with a lot of lowend users (grandma's , email only) who only use 5-10 GB. A solid state drive would be perfect for them...smaller,less power,more durable (at least mechanically). Those who don't store any multimedia (MP3s, Movies,Photos) wont ever use more than about 5GB (3 for OS,1 for apps and a gig left for a whole ton of recipes and emails). I on the otherhand have two full 200GB drives and need to add more.
I have the same problem but found a fix for it a short while ago - my laptop had to go in for service and I was too lazy to burn more than a single backup CD.
Also, I don't think my downloads directory is any business of the service technicians (and, as we all know, they do look at your stuff, especially if they're bored) - so I wiped the entire Documents folder and generally scrubbed my computer for personal data.
I saw it as a healthy practise, both from the standpoint of my private data but also because I had so much shit.
I work with digital video and audio. I filled up 3 160 GB drives this year with stuff I can't delete for years, and I'll have my new 200 GB FireWire drive filled up by April. Yeah, I keep too much, but I have a lot of really, really large files.
Come tell me when they finally come out with FW3200 10 PetaByte thumb drives -- I'm going to need a few of those.
I've seen combined disk/RAM drives in servers - at work we've got a 140G RAID 1 array with 192M battery-backed write cache. Write performance is so good we've stopped bothering worrying about filesystem optimisation.
That's a great idea for laptops, as you have battery built in, and spinning down disks saves bettery life. So you'd have 2G RAM, 4G slower solid state disk cache on the ATA bus, then 100G hard disk on the same bus with a bit of software to deal with it. Just hope you can fit enough usefull stuff in 4G, what with modern software bloat.
actually booting off of even a "slow" flash memory device, like an older usb drive will be quite quick. Much faster than booting off of a CD-ROM and quite close to the speed of booting off of a hard drive. During a normal boot process you're loading a lot of smallish programs/files, and this plays to the advantages of flash media: no seek times. CD-ROMs have seek times in the tens of milliseconds (maybe even 100 ms for an older unit). Harddrives less than 10 ms these days. Flash media on the other hand is truly random access in the same way that DRAM is, in that there isn't any kind of "seeking" done.
^I'm with stupid.^
I think what we'll be seeing is hard-drive/flash hybrids. Flash to store the OS on for quick energy conserving access and the hard drive for everything else. Flash just isn't ready to handle large amounts of data and it has a limited ammount of writes before it goes bad.
The endurance is much better than 10K-1M because for one, error correction is used recover from the first few bits lost due to endurance failure and secondly, wear leveling is used where a new location is written everytime a sector is modified.
Very observant. Except;
These cards are intended as a hard drive replacement for very demanding applications; for example high-volume transactional systems. Transactional means you want persistence, even in the face of power-outages or OS failure, but high-volume means that you can get quite a boost if random access is nice and fast (near zero seektimes). If your whole database won't fit in a few GB (pretty likely) and you're not distributing this sort of thing, it would still be great for transaction logs, temporary databases, sessions, etc. Or how about using them for message queues? Any message sent is persisted, but not written to a slow hard drive or database.
NAND drives I'm not too sure about. But for demanding applications, battery-back-upped-DRAM-drives are way cool.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I got a 2.5" IDE<>flash adapter and installed a 1GB cf with miniBSD
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter