Disk Drives Face Challenge From Chips

WSJdpatton writes "Researchers are reporting significant progress in perfecting a different way to store data in semiconductors, which could replace one widely used type of memory chip and possibly become a credible competitor to disk drives. The researchers, in a paper being delivered at a technical conference in San Francisco, say they used a novel combination of materials to create prototype phase-change components that are more than 500 times as fast as flash chips, while requiring less than half of the electrical power to record data."

Comments

Technology description

[in2mind]

From the company developing it - Ovonyx:

http://www.ovonyx.com/tech_html.html

http://www.ovonyx.com/ovonyxtech.html

Re:The real challage is price.

[WuphonsReach]

Hard Disk Drives now are about $0.50 a Gigabyte.

You're a bit on the high side there... SATA/PATA drives are down around $0.28-$0.32 per gigabyte and have been for a while. The sweet spot seems to be the 250GB drives for $70, with the 200GB, 300GB, 400GB sizes at around $0.32/GB.

(Which hasn't changed a whole lot in the past few months. But Seagate's 7200.10 series is one of the cheaper $/GB drives on the market even though it's brand new tech.)

Re:Cost is what matters

[kansas1051]

Wikipedia(as always) has a good article on the technology. It looks like the write time is currently about 5ns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_memory What is really interesting is that the technology is generally temperature based.

Re:Formats

[KozmoStevnNaut]

I have a 200GB disk formatted as FAT32...

It is only Microsoft's own cut-rate implementation of a disk manager that insists on making FAT32 volumes a maximum of 32GB in size, and I suspect it is solely because they want people to use NTFS instead.

Re:Formats

[dextromulous]

You may only be able to format FAT32 up to 32GB using the default Windows utilities, but the maximum volume size for FAT32 is 8TiB. However, you are still limited to a maximum 4GB file size and 268,435,437 files. I'm sure you would run into efficiency problems with a gigantic FAT32 drive, but that doesn't mean that 32GB is the limit.

NOT BUNK!

[itlurksbeneath]

While the actual flash technology might be capable of that kind of speed, the entire stack isn't. Compare the MB/s throughput of several hard drives here with the throughput of several USB flash drives here (both benchmarks done with SiSoft's Sandra).

Bottom line: The USB drives are topping out at an average of 8 MB/s, the hard drives are in the 60 MB/s range. That alone puts hard drives an average of 7.5 times faster.

Flash drives have great single block seek times because they don't have to move a head, but most benchmarks show that their ability to move large quantities of data quickly sucks.