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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?'"
This guy clearly hasn't ever installed Bittorrent.
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 - but then, flash *is* much faster than the ol' floppy - I was glad to see that go ...
--I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
With solid state memory, won't you never have to reboot the OS? Will I still have to reboot Windows every so often even though the machine is capable of instant on/off? This feature of the hardware will put serious reliability requirements on all OSes. MS will have to finally fix the damn blue screen or its lack of reliability will be a serious henderence.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
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
The average notebook has 30GB (of hard drive storage). How long is it before the notebook has solid state memory?
I havent seen a laptop with less than 40GB in I dont know how long. A long time anyway. Maybe this is out of date.
"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...
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
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?.
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?
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
Most of my hard drives are already full. Let's review.
ShuttlePC Red Hat box: ~120G on a 200G hard drive. (old IDE controller) Full.
G4 Apple Mac, 3 hard drives totalling ~ 620G. Aproximately 60% full, and that's only because I recently added a hard drive.
PC Laptop, 80G hard drive. 25% full. And that's only because the hard drive was recently formatted and reimaged.
120G external hard drive. 75% full
27G external hard drive. Full
60G iPod. Full
So I'm a little shy of a terrabyte of active hard drive space. It would all be full if I didn't have multiple binders full of CD-Rs and DVDs.
But I guess not everyone regularly edits and encodes video on their computers, or routes their entire entertainment system through their computers.
I don't think hard drives will ever be big enough because data files will continue to grow as well. Solid State memory is and will always been a niche technology for areas that suite it best such as high reliability, small packages and extreme environments.
IMHO the market is already awash in solid-state storage microcomputers. They're called PDAs.
That's not what I meant.
My crappy old 900 hmz ibook has 40 gigs and I have to hook up a 120 gig firewire drive to it just to hold my mp3s and various digital video caputures, thousands of pictures and graphics, etc. So the answer is I would "tap out" 30 gigs instantly and you can add another 30 gig on top of that. Anything short of 80 gigs is really pretty laughable by todays standards, talk about years from now when we'll see hd (or blu ray) dvds, 5 channel 24 bit music, etc, etc.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I remember reading that flash memory can only be rewritten only about 10K-1M times. It works Ok for USB memory sticks, but having a page file on a solid state disk would destroy it in no time.
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 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.
Everyone keeps mentioning their personal/private computers. Solid state memory will be big in corporate desktops. I'm a system administrator and where I work most of the computers use less than 2 GB. That's because only Windows and Office goes onto the drive. Very few additional programs are installed and documents are stored on a network mapped drive. This is what it's like at most of the larger workplaces.
I and my users would love to swap those 40-80 GB harddrives for 2 GB solid state drives and enjoy the benefits of a computer using less physical space, making less noise, consuming less energy, being faster and cheaper.
While it's generally accepted that harddrive space is cheap there is a minimum cost to pay. The smallest drives of today are still as expensive as the smallest drives of five years ago. With solid state drives I expect the price of the smallest drive to go away because it will be integrated on the mainboard - something that wull never happen with 3.5" drives.
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
I think this is really interesting.
The role of the home desktop is changing. It used to be the powerhouse. The computer you used when you really wanted to get some work done... but that came at a price: working in an office. Laptops work for me, because when faced with a block the best way of solving it is a change of scenery. Sitting in the same place for hours on end for "fun" is less appealing now I have to do it at work as well.
My G5 is easily twice as powerful as my G4 Powerbook, but I use my laptop 80% of the time. So why have a the G5? It's a home server. I have over 40GB of music, 10GB of photos, 100GB of home movies and PVR, and its incredibly useful to have a single point of access for the whole household, and because its a desktop its always in the same place, always on and permanently connected to the internet meaning that not only does it server the house, it serves us whilst we're on the move as well.
Even if my laptop could match the desktop for storage, I wouldn't want it to be bogged down with running the services, and all the laptops in the house having independant media store is just plain bad management. Also, tasks like media recompression, code compilation and games are still done best on a machine with more RAM than sense and a processor thats designed for performance not low power consumption: you use a push bike to get to work and for fun, you use a car to do the shopping. Sometimes you need the heavy lifting.
In fact I now have a couple of home servers, but thats because I'm a nerd: I have a PIII running debian to provide the low power services like a front end for Azuereus, a few small web apps and LAN facing NFS server. Which is why I can't wait for a 20GB NAND drive that improves the battery life of my laptops. I just don't need that much storage on teh move providing I've got a decent wireless network connection.
As for, when was the last time I topped out a hardisk... yesterday. I hve 300GB of storage available to me and I use all of it. You can never have too much storage, you just don't need all of it, all of the time, providing you can access it from anywhere in the world network latency and speed is more of a barrier than local storage.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
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.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
.. hard disks have a capacity of at least 2 Tera bytes
30 GB looks cool in 5 years but everybody forgets that disks will grow as well.
So forget about solid state.
My question is why we can't make DRAM chips as fast as desired by simply adding more parallelism. With a HDD it's pretty obvious you can't have a dozen independent seeking heads. But with Flash, can't they divide the bank into as many subsets as desired, and access them in parallel? If not, why not?
Um, sorry, but AFAIK system RAM and cache memory does NOT qualify as "solid state memory". When you turn off the power, all the data is gone, so it's not really useful as a long-term storrage.
Now, the same problem bothers me too: every kind of affordable "solid state" memory I've seen -- USB drives, varoious flash memory cards -- is by order of magnitude slower than hard disk, even though they contain no moving parts. And, all of them have limited number if read/write cycles.
So what kind of technology do they have in mind as replacement for hard drives? I guess bunch of DRAM chips with power source does not qualify as practical or affordable.
That's a good point, but I think there's a way around it. Simply put, on a laptop, at any given time, the hard drive is either spun up or it's not. So we have two cases:
However, I do have to admit there is one wrinkle in this idea: the whole purpose of the flash is to be able to keep the hard drive spun down most of the time. Therefore, with this scheme, you will be more likely to need to have the hard drive spin up, because the odds of needing to spin up the hard drive on any given I/O increase as you increase the percentage of time that the hard drive is spun down. So, in situations where you have a cache miss, you will pay a big penalty, and assuming your flash really is slower at writes than the drive, you will pay a bit of a penalty (a smaller one) when your flash can't keep up with the writes and you have to spin up the hard drive to keep pace.
Still, I think for many workloads, the speeds could be quite good, and they'd be better with flash cache in some cases, and it could definitely result in power saving.