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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."
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:
And from the article referenced above:
Sorry to be picky, but I'm a stickler for detail.
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Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
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?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
This article indicates that Windows Vista won't fit on a 16 Gigabit drive? And I thought MS was disk space hungry today. I used to use a gigabyte partition for Mandrake Linux - including applications and configuration - but not user data. Windows XP needs a gigabyte without applications. MS is crazy.
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i dont know about long lifed, since a flash memory card has a limited number of writes anyway. This is because each one of the memory holding transistors has an extra insulating layer between the gate and the emitter, so electrons are "forced" throug, trapping the bit and therefore the data. There is only so many times (in the 10s of thousands) you can do this, and then is toast. If you use it as a hard drive with crappy memory paging, it will die soon.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
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.
Good job Samsung. I've got to NAND it to you...
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
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.
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.
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).
Ummm.... prolly not.
:-)
I don't know any specifics (but neither did your post, so we are even) but I build computer controlled devices that need to work in a fairly high vibration environment. Our current product runs off Win2K, and boots relatively quickly off a 2GB solid state Laptop size HDD.
We are building a new product that will be running Linux off a 256MB CF card. We are not quite done development, but it seems to run OK. It isn't working that hard though, just polling a USB control panel and outputting control commands based on what the user wants to do with a small amount of very simple graphics.
(disclaimer: I know very little about OS's and software. I am mostly solder jockey, circuit design, system installer, and a little bit of sales. I have been struggling to get my MythTV box working for over a year now
How is a 2GB flash drive with only 100,000 erase cycles supposed to rival a much faster 500GB hard drive with a much, much longer life span? I think someone just wants to push their product...
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"
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
I think it's worth mentioning that the bottleneck in reading/writing large files is an interface problem (usb et.al.) and not actually an issue with the ram. Currently the thing spinning drives have going for them is cost per GB.
Remember your first Nintendo "Mario's"? Plug em in n out, not enough gold on the contacts, but the chips still play if you blow on the contacts.How many disk games have worn out since? How many Hard drives still work with the old games on em? Maybe optical storage or quantum computers will come along., but I can see what has lasted the longest so far.
MYSTERY
As much as I prefer flash for an MP3 player over a HDD I admit that funny stuff happens to it. I have had some camera CF cards do peculiar things. Especially if there is a power problem when they are writing. Remember the mars rover was hamstrung for awhile with a flash problem. They sorted it though.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
When I see some more knowledgable people here talking about putting the OS on flash, reading it to active memory, etc. the first thing that comes to mind (especially given the limited writes) is that it's the right technology to introduce the "trusted" OS - you don't want to write to the OS unless it's a patch, you don't let the user change much if anything, it's in a stable form that is quickly loadable, probably faster that OS on harddrive now that is the technologic foot in the door to entice people to upgrade to it. If they limit the writability with some sort or authorization scheme that is changable with the update, ANY writing can be limited to over a connection to the home server. Sure, a business wouldn't like/allow/purchase that, but I think that the whole trusted computing idea is aimed at controlling home computers, not the business machines, yes? It would seem to be an elegant fit with (my understanding of) trusted computing.
>Newegg, Maxtor 300 GIGABYTE sata $125. Available NOW.
>Vapordeals, Mysterymem, 16GB(?) $90. Available ???
No, it is 16Gb (2GB), not 16GB. That is an order of magnitude larger... making your argument even more correct. Flash memory will probably never (in the foreseeable future) overtake or even come close to what you can do with rotating magnetic media.
Someday there might just be a 20GB flash drive for $200, and at that point in time, there will probably be a 20TB hard drive that is 10 times faster for $200, or a 2TB hard drive that is 10 times smaller and uses 10 times less power than the 20TB for $200.
Still, seeing higher densities of flash is a wonderful thing, especially for portable/pocketable devices. I am AMAZED when I see how inexpensive a 1GB tiny SD card is! It would just blow my mind away 10 years ago... Bring it on!
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.
I'd rather add that much RAM on my PC, since they are faster with a similar price.
You definitely should consider that RAM price is dropping as fast as flash memory price.
If you were a pilot, you wouldn't just have the mechanic swap out the propeller for a Rolls Royce jet engine.
Well done, you have truly lived up to your username.
Sure the Flash memory are growing in size at some rate r per year, but at the same time the need for more and more disk space is also growing at some rate r'. ... I doubt it.
I can't say if r > r' so much that in the course of the next few years we'll see HD disapear
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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The traditional flash devices are NOR flash devices. They are by nature more reliable than NAND flash but are expensive to amnufacture. NOR flash devices can withstand more write write cycles than a NAND flash. BIOS flash are NOR, as are most of the solid state flash drives used in telecom and aerospace. This is why NOR flash is marketed to embedded/industrial customers and NAND flash is marketed to the consumer market.
6000 networked desktops at my place of work, Windows XP notwithstanding, almost all 40G+ hard drives, most probably 90% empty, >200,000G of empty disk, bumps up the $/useful G somewhat, must be some market for 4-8G "drives" right now [again]!
NOR flash is extremely slow for writes. This Samsung appnoteo ry/appnote/onenand_features_performance_051104.pdf
http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/Mem
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.
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
the number of transistors required to make a nand gate is less than the number required to make a nor gate. Therefore, nor would offer no benefit, while requiring more tx's (higher power consumption and less chip density)
For me it was very helpful to see it posted -- I'm very much aware of the differences but missed the word gigabit in the article when I quickly read it. Reading that post was in fact "inciteful" to me and if I'd had mod points at the moment I'd have marked it so.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
"Flash! Flash! I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the earth!"