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Solid State Memory on the Rise

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the fewer-moving-parts-to-break dept.

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?'"

13 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Filled up a drive? by DietCoke · · Score: 5, Funny

    This guy clearly hasn't ever installed Bittorrent.

    1. Re:Filled up a drive? by Wisgary · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I sometimes look at my download folder in awe, it's full of so much useless SHIT that I have no use for (or ever will have a use for, since there are new versions of just about ANYTHING in there) but... sometimes... it's hard to hit that delete key. It really is, I think we have a new symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder. I wonder how long until psychologists start to ask... "How long has it been since you deleted stuff from your download folder?"

    2. Re:Filled up a drive? by empaler · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. Is this guy for real? by barc0001 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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...

    1. Re:Is this guy for real? by karnal · · Score: 4, Informative

      The whole point of using memory instead of a hdd is because of speed; the long time for your mp3 player to fill is due to the transfer rate of whatever you're hooking it up to (ie usb).

      That's not entirely correct.

      While if you hook up a flash memory to the USB 1 spec, it will be painfully slow, even with a connection to a high-speed USB 2.0 hub, you'll still run into slowdowns. Why? Because most flash (which is most, if not all non-disk related MP3 players) write speeds are averaging around 5-10MB/sec. And even then, that's being generous.

      So, for 10MB/sec, that would be at least 1 minute to fill up a 512MB mp3 player. Of course, real world is never the same as rated specs, so I'd be happy with 2 minutes, to be honest....

      Another neat trick to try with Flash drives is to fill them with a bunch of itty bitty files - it literally takes forever to do so! Maybe someone more insightful than I can enlighten me as to why that is....

      --
      Karnal
    2. Re:Is this guy for real? by CosmeticLobotamy · · Score: 5, Funny

      No matter how much storage you put in a given system, it will eventually be not enough. I've seen it a million times.

      I remember begging my mom to replace our 2MB hard drive with one of the fancy new 20MB ones. "But Mom! That's twenty MILLION letters! You'll NEVER use that much. You don't type that fast."

      Then some jerk went and invented graphics. Bastard.

  3. This has already begun...for desktops too! by meatflower · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:This has already begun...for desktops too! by vux984 · · Score: 4, Informative

      It would be cheaper (and faster) to ditch your current RAM DIMMs, upgrade to some fat >1G chips, and set up a RAM drive.

      You might want to rethink that because it won't work:

      1) Most editions of Windows only support 4GB of RAM in TOTAL. Including XP Pro, Server 2000 and Server 2003. The 95/98/ME line only supports 1GB of RAM. Its going to be pretty hard to dedicate 4GBs of RAM to a software RAM drive if that's all (or more) than your OS will recognize. (Only Enterprise editions of Windows servers will address more than 4GBs.) How many linux distros support more than 4GB of RAM right now "out of the box (ie from the live cd/dvds or precompiled isos)

      2) Most desktop MOTHERBOARDS don't even support >1GB chips or more than 4GB total RAM, including 'gamer' oriented boards like the ASUS A8N32-SLI, for example. You aren't going to have a 4GB RAM drive if you can't put more than 4GBs onto the motherboard. Generally only expensive server boards support more than 4GBs.

      The i-RAM lets you build a 4GB RAM Drive today, and add it onto your system *without* sacrificing any system RAM, without installing a new OS, without getting a new mobo. Plus you can max out your system RAM, and then add an i-RAM on top of that!

      Anandtech kept saying they couldn't see why you'd use an i-RAM over adding more memory; and they are right... except that maxxing out your system RAM is actually pretty easy; and what do you do THEN? What if you've already got 4GBs of RAM and photoshop is still paging on you? You CAN'T just throw more system RAM at it. i-RAM technology could be a solution.

      Finally, another major difference between an i-ram and a software ram drive is that you can't install and boot an OS from a RAM drive.

      (PS I am not affiliated with gigabyte or i-ram in anyway.)

      cheers

  4. Re:Slow by djupedal · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Lifespan by baryon351 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  6. Flashback. 1986 all over again? by pair-a-noyd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. I fill up drives like Wimpy eats burgers by mooncaine · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:Slow by adrianmonk · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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

    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:

    1. Its access time is pretty much negligible. There is no head that has to be moved across the disk. Sure, there are bound to be advantages to one large read (or write) compared to several smaller ones, but the penalty for reading from (or writing to) different spots all over the place is way, way smaller than it is on a hard drive.
    2. Probably more importantly, flash devices can come out of power saving mode much faster than hard drives can. This is for one simple reason: when a hard drive goes into power saving mode, it has to make a big change in angular momentum of the platter in order to come out of power saving mode. Since the penalty is so high, you have to make a compromise: either you must use more energy and keep the drive powered on longer, or you must wait for sometimes 5 or 10 seconds just to get a single byte off the disk. With flash, you don't have this problem, because it takes more like 1/2 second or less to bring the thing out of power saving mode to full functionality.

    #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.