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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."

3 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.
    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

  2. 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

  3. 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.