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

Is bootup time really that big of an issue?

[Skynet]

XP boots in about a minute, and Linux never needs to be rebooted. :)

What other applications could this have besides boot time?

Re:Price?

[cyfer2000]

The major advantage of MRAM is speed. They are extreme high speed nonvolatile RAM, even faster than DRAM. So if you need such a thing, you need to pay for it. Also, the current structure of MRAM is pretty complicated. It is made of multilayers of different metals. Depositing different metals onto silicon wafer is still something nasty though people have been depositing Aluminium and Copper for some time. There are some groups working on magnetic semiconductors, so they use common fabrication method to produce MRAM. So the price of MRAM can drop dramatically if these groups succeed. However, so far, the magnetic semiconductors are even expensive than the multilayer metals structure.

Slow Bubbles

[Doc Ruby]

I've been hearing about these kinds of devices since "bubble memory.

Why can't I get a motherboard with 500MB Flash for storing an image of system memory exactly after the OS is loaded and initialized, that is blitted over to RAM and then tweaked (system clock, network counters, etc) in a few milliseconds? All the "loading" from storage to RAM includes minutes of computation like a second "compilation" that's practically identical every time I start the machine. How much computing power is wasted on that redundant exercise every day, around the world? I'd like to reinit only when the startup becomes corrupt, which a "known good" ROM instance could avoid better than the current chaotic process.

Re:NOT a hard drive alternative

[Intron]

What wearout? Imagine that you start doing writes continuously spread over a 40GB flash drive for 5-years (typical high-end HD warranty period). How many times will you write to any given sector assume that you have a good load leveling algorithm?

Assume 15 MB/s write. 40 GB will take about 45 mins. So in 5 years, you will only write each block 175,200 times which is within the 1,000,000 writes spec for flash. And this assumes that you do no reads at all.

Wearout is a myth with modern flash filesystem software.