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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.
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
"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
Most solid-state memory is pretty darn slow...
I was once asked to demo a solid-state HD...built with nothing but DRAM. This was a decade ago, and it was only proof-of-concept. It was only 2gb, but it would format instantly. Don't confuse SD and CF cards with DRAM. Micron makes DRAM.
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?
This topic arose when people started using flash memory as a hard drive in old Powerbook 1400s. While they're a nice very expandable old powerbook, they have a RAM ceiling of 64MB. a G3/400 CPU expansion in them is one thing, but being limited to 64MB is a pain in the butt.
So popping a flash ram card in and using it as the virtual memory drive let PB1400 owners use 128, 256MB of virtual memory, running off the flash ram which was far quicker than the internal HD for swapping. Many people have also used these cards as the main boot drive so the whole OS boots from RAM, swaps to that same RAM, and gives mostly silent operation and saves on battery life. Critics of doing this noted the drives would last a month or two until suffering write death.
Systems running these cards have been seen working just fine for 3-4 years now. Write limits in the range of tens to low hundreds of thousands may not seem much, but in reality it's working quite well. Apparently part of this is that most newer flash ram drives are set up to attempt evenly distributed writes over cells, and not concentrate hundreds of writes one after another on the same cell
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.
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 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.
What type of buffer (8 & 16mb) is used in those 'fast' new hd's? Solid-state, of course.
No kidding? I thought they used vacuum tubes.
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:
#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.
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 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