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: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

[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.