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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?'"
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 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.