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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
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.
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.
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.^
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