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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."

7 of 407 comments (clear)

  1. Flash is ready even now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There are linux distros that happily run on flash. Damn Small Linux comes first to mind. It's possible, in fact many people have done it, to build a computer with no hard drive; just flash.

    The current problem is that you get only a limited number of writes to flash. TFA doesn't mention that. It is a problem but not an insurmountable one.

  2. Not a total replacement by Shamashmuddamiq · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Hard Drives will be useful for the forseeable future in lots of areas. Hopefully, however, in many applications, we can get rid of them altogether. With the correct wear-leveling algorithms, flash can last a long time. And there aren't big seek penalties like in hard drives, so read performance can be much better. And for applications where seek times dominate, this will boost performance big time. You'll be able to get good performance out of a fully normalized database without requiring nearly as much cache.

    I, for one, welcome... oh never mind.

    As flash drives become more and more popular, more dollars will pour into flash research and development. And applications will learn to accomodate the strengths and weaknesses of flash. I think we'll be seeing some really neat things over the next 10 years. Terabyte flash drive, anyone?

    --
    ...just my 2 gil.
  3. Re:Gb or GB? by Jozer99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem as I see it is not really chip density, but cost. If you think of the size of each of these chips, you could easily fit 60 or so GB into a 2.5" drive shaped device, and 100's of gigs into a device the size of a 3.5" drive. The problem is that these devices would cost astronomical ammounts. If we could make 1GB flash chips that cost $5, then you could have $300 30GB flash drives.

  4. Re:Gb or GB? by Feyr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    in some applications this is actually not a factor.

    i could even see myself replacing my OS disk with a flash based one, and have a secondary larger hard drive for the less-accessed files with gobs of ram. that would be a real blessing to my poor ears! give me a 4gb flash drive and i'll be all over it!

  5. Re:Rival? by pilkul · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Much longer life span in principle, but if you get a lemon it might crash 2 weeks after you buy it... At least the flash memory will be able to warn you before it is close to expiry.

  6. peace and quiet by SimonInOz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No moving parts = no noise.
    No moving parts = tough.
    No activity when quiescent - no heat.

    I, for one, welcome our new NAND overlords

    --
    "Cats like plain crisps"
  7. Re:OFFS! This is stupid. by matt21811 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nice rant but you totally mised the point.
    A 300 Gig IDE drive doesnt fit in a laptop.
    A 300 Gig IDE drive uses loads of power.
    A 300 Gig IDE drive has faster sustained transfer speed but much a longer access times than flash. Horses for courses.
    Wear leveling algorithms can make the write limit of flash irrelevant.
    That the interface (eg, ATA) for accessing storage media usually goes out of date before the media wears out is true for both disks and flash.
    The real story here is that flash is trouncing disk in improvements in Megs per $ and will one day catch up to and overtake disk. And it will be sooner than mmost people expect.