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Flash Memory to Rival Hard Drives

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the solidly-stated dept.

Skal Tura writes "Samsung will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year, nudging the memory technology towards use in notebook PCs and maybe even edging out hard drives in some products in the next few years."

10 of 407 comments (clear)

  1. Gb or GB? by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 5, Informative

    Some more information about the NAND flash memory can be found here.

    One nice thing about this article is that it clearly explains the difference between a gigabit (Gb) and a gigabyte (GB)...something the article referenced in the story seems confused about.

    From the article referenced in the story:
    Samsung will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year...

    Gartner estimates that 16GB Flash drives will cost from about $90...

    And from the article referenced above:
    Memory chips are measured in gigabits, or Gb, but consumer electronics manufacturers talk about how many gigabytes, or GB, are in their products. Eight gigabits make a gigabyte, so one 8Gb chip is the equivalent of 1GB.

    Sorry to be picky, but I'm a stickler for detail.
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    1. Re:Gb or GB? by dnoyeb · · Score: 4, Informative

      Of course there is also that 'number of writes' issue.

    2. Re:Gb or GB? by Belseth · · Score: 4, Informative

      There's other uses than computers for large flash drives. I'm getting ready to pick up a Panasonic HVX200. They use a P2 memory cards as their primary recording medium. For 1080 your only other option is external hard drives. It's about 1 gig a minute at 1080/60. That translates out at 8 minutes for the largest card availible the 8 gig P2 which uses 4 2gig cards. Right now the cards are running around $2,000 but they'll drop fast as capacity goes up. They really start getting interesting when you can get a 32 gig card for $500. Even in today's market it isn't a competitive price for a hard drive but for video use given the advantges it would be very attractive. Cameras will help get capacity up and prices down so may be one day they'll make sense for computer hard drives. Everytime some one says we don't need more memory another use is found and need goes up. Terrabytes will start maxing out need for most traditional uses though. The problem will start to be organizing files since in the terrabytes most people wouldn't need to delete files. Video and graphics people are the only ones that may never be happy. Storing a single full res feature would still take quite a few terrabytes to store so if you do it professionally or are simply a serious film fanatic there's no practical limit to the storage that could be used.

    3. Re:Gb or GB? by nacturation · · Score: 4, Informative

      Samsung will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year...

      Gartner estimates that 16GB Flash drives will cost from about $90...

      Where's the conflict? Flash chip != flash drive. Flash drives can often comprise multiple chips. Let's say we stack 8 of those 16Gb chips into one drive. How big is the flash drive going to be?

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  2. gigawhat? by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seems like they're playing fast and loose with capacity: "will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year" vs. " currently in products such as USB drives and digital cameras in capacities of up to 8GB." Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't 16 gigabits = 2GB?

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  3. Re:One Thought... by BadassJesus · · Score: 5, Informative

    Flashdisks are much more reliable then any conventional harddrive. They claim >5,000,000 write/erase cycles and unlimited reads. Unites States defence department is using them for reliability issue alone.

    M-Systems (top flash disk producer) states this:
    (copied from the website)

    Top Reliability & Endurance
    ** 99.999% reliability
    ** >1,400,000 hours of actual (in the field) MTBF
    ** Embedded EDC/ECC, based on BCH Algorithm
    ** Data integrity under power-cycling
    ** TrueFFS® technology: bad blocks mapping-out and dynamic wear-leveling algorithms
    ** >5,000,000 Write/Erase cycles; Read unlimited
    5-year warranty


    Source link:
    http://www.m-systems.com/site/en-US/Products/IDESC SIFFD/IDESCSIFFD

  4. Re:One Thought... by cdrudge · · Score: 5, Informative

    MTBF isn't absolute. It's a statistical estimate. A hard drive may have a 500,000 hour MTBF. That particular model of drive wasn't tested for 57 years to see if it failed.

    Any type of failure rate is also representive of the collection of all products being tested, not a single one.

    Read the Failure Rate Wiki entry for more information.

  5. 10,000 writes/second for 13 years by morcheeba · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's 100k per block, not for the entire drive. The wear-leveling algorithms will make sure that even if you constantly re-write the same file, that part of the memory won't get worn out.

    With a 512-byte erase block size, that is 419 billion writes. With a 4K erase block size, that's 52 billion writes. Use a 20GB drive instead of 2GB, and you'll get 10x the writes. And, the computer can warn you before the memory stops re-writing.

    5 trillion writes is 10,000 writes/second for 13 years.

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  6. Re:How bout NOR Flash? by hyc · · Score: 4, Informative

    NOR flash is extremely slow for writes. This Samsung appnote
    http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/Memo ry/appnote/onenand_features_performance_051104.pdf
    compares I/O performance of the various technologies (the chart is on page 28, so scroll down...)

    For their test rig, NAND flash yields 8.8MB/sec writes vs NOR at 0.14MB/sec. That's why NOR flash is only used for BIOS memory and other things you don't have to rewrite very often. On the flip side, NAND flash gets reads at 16.5MB/sec vs NOR at 23.9MB/sec (or 108MB/sec, presumably in some kind of burst mode - that part isn't explained).

    If their OneNAND performs as well as they claim, I could see using it for a boot drive; 68MB/sec read would be fine there, 9.3MB/sec write would be ok as long as you weren't paging to it or doing much of anything else. Linux would run pretty well with those parameters, its buffer cache is good at absorbing and deferring writes; Windows 2K/XP's memory manager/cache manager purges pages too aggressively though, which would make the write throughput a serious system bottleneck.

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  7. Re:One Thought... by gnasher719 · · Score: 4, Informative

    '' MTBF isn't absolute. It's a statistical estimate. A hard drive may have a 500,000 hour MTBF. That particular model of drive wasn't tested for 57 years to see if it failed. ''

    Also important: Products like harddisk have a limited life. That harddisk with 500,000 hour MTBF will wear out after five years or 50,000 hours; no way will it last 500,000 hours. The MTBF only means: If you buy 500 harddisks and run them for 1000 hours, you can expect one to fail.