A Magnetic Memory Alternative to Hard Disk

Dr Occult writes "Finally, a magnetic memory chip has been manufactured in volume and released by the U.S. company Freescale. Christened MRAM (magnetoresistive random-access memory),this chip will hold information even after power has been switched off. From the BBC news article: 'Unlike flash memory, which also can keep data without power, Mram has faster read and write speeds and does not degrade over time,' and 'MRAM chips could one day be used in PCs to store an operating system, allowing computers to start up faster when switched on.'"

Comments

more vaporware

[NynexNinja]

We've been hearing vaporware mram chip stories for almost a decade now... When is it going to be on the market for people to purchase and use?

Re:Is bootup time really that big of an issue?

[Wizard Drongo]

Yeah. A minute is pretty pathetic. OT I know, but on my Macbook, with a puny 512MB of RAM, OS X loads in 22 seconds (average), yet windowsxp takes on average 1 minute 32 seconds. That's sodding ridiculous. And OS X shuts down, on average in around 12 seconds from the confirm dialog to the hardware off. Windows takes over a minute, varying wildly. Maybe this MRAM will be the magic bullet that makes windows look usable, like the pentium 2 was, then the pentium 3 & 4 were supposed to be, making windows 'faster than ever'. Strangely, just seems as slow as ever. Veering for a moment back on-topic, this MRAM thing does look real cool though, however I'd guess due to fabrication costs and the chip's size vs. capacity, that MRAM will be mostly used in places that flash is today, mp3 players, flash-drives etc. I doubt it'll ever really be used as a hard drive, just as flash chips aren't used as hard drives. Cool if it were though.