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?'"

Comments

Filled up a drive?

[DietCoke]

This guy clearly hasn't ever installed Bittorrent.

Is this guy for real?

[barc0001]

"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...

Re:Is this guy for real?

[CosmeticLobotamy]

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.

This has already begun...for desktops too!

[meatflower]

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

Re:Lifespan

[baryon351]

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 fill up drives like Wimpy eats burgers

[mooncaine]

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.

Re:Slow

[adrianmonk]

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.