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Flash Memory to Rival Hard Drives
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."
Hard disks may be physically larger and slower for random access, but they are faster than Flash for large sequential reads, much in the same way that the hare is faster than the turtle in that old fable.
We'll most likely see Flash storage grow in cell phones and PDAs, not in notebook computers. If you were a pilot, you wouldn't just have the mechanic swap out the propeller for a Rolls Royce jet engine. You'd want the whole plane overhauled to handle the increased stress on it. Better to have a system designed from the ground up that could handle the new engine rather than try to bolt it onto an older, proven design.
The missing element here is that most flash drives, especially something in a hard-drive form factor, will have more than one flash chip. The news here is the new (much?) higher density flash chips.
It's not like it's something new and completely unproven. Solid-state disks (SSDs) have been used for years in server-applications, especially for large databases, where the speed of harddisks or RAID just won't cut it. This is an expensive solution, but if you have gazillions of transactions (think mastercard), it might still be cheaper than more traditional solutions (add more servers, add more disk-cache, make sure things don't fail).
Given that it has worked pretty well at both the server-side as well as in gadgets and appliances, I'd say flash-memory notebooks are going to happen pretty soon. It's just a matter of hitting the right pricepoint. Today you can (theoretically) get a 2GB SSD for the same price as a 200GB HD. This is pretty uncool, although I would believe many enthusiasts would buy it, if there were producers of cheap SSDs (today only high-end SSDs exist).
But if you could get a 20GB SSD for the same price as 200GB HD (which is a sane estimate, given the article), things start to make sense. It would be enough for running MS office on a laptop, and seriously reduce startup-time, as well as battery usage. Given it's performance, it would also be a great add-on for desktop computers (put the OS, most used applications, and swap-space on it, and use traditional harddisks for your videos/music/porn).
You would be supprised. Although linux can be built to use a flash (ie minimum writes to firmware) drive, Windows cant, without using Windows CE. It would be nice if Vista supported such ideas. The problem with windows is that many programs install system files. I installed XP on a 9.1 GB scsi disk, with an 80 GB IDE disk for everything but the OS. Even though I installed all programs on the 80GB disk, the 9.1GB disk was full within a year, as MS Office, Photoshop, and other stick stuff into your windows install.
Newegg, Maxtor 300 GIGABYTE sata $125. Available NOW.
Vapordeals, Mysterymem, 16GB(?) $90. Available ???
What's the R/W speed of these things? What's the R/W burnout on these?
How many writes will they take before they fail?
Maxtor is claiming a 1 million MTBF / 5 year warranty on their 300gb drive.
No way in hell flash or any other memory is every going to compete with that,
not in price, performance, capacity or endurance.
Hard drives are so big and so cheap now that they are cheaper than blank DVD media. You're better off to archive to big drives then store them in fireproof safes than ANY other backup method. I have harddrives from the 80's that STILL have data on them that I can STILL retrieve and use, right now and I've made no serious effort to be overly protective of the drives. In other words, they've been kicking around the house in boxes on the floor. And they are still good. 20+ years later.
Flash memory may have an indefinite SHELF lifespan but you can only write to them X number of times before they fail and they are slow.
Someone is trying to sell the neophytes a bill of goods.
When Vista releases there is going to be a rush to sell more silly crap to people. More upgrades.. Oh boy..
In the meantime, I'll make due with my current system and my Linux.
And as hard drives continue to get bigger and faster and cheaper I'll just add em as I need em.
I did a study which estimates that flash will surpass 3.5 inch IDEs in every price by 2017.k .html
Read about it here:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddis
Doesn't stop the article from using the wrong one, though. I always question something that seems a bit out there. So they will indeed be 16 gigabyte flash drives? My uncle keeps going on and on about his "80 Gigabit" hard drive. Boy could I nail him on ebay reselling 4Tb hard drives. And eight gigabits of ram on one module. And... oh, why not... the 11.5 megabit floppy disk.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?