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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."
What is the storage density, and will it still be feasible when this finally comes to market in 10 years?
...... Should start talking about these chips being in iPods in 5-4-3-2.....
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
Interesting read, however I don't see these things holding a useful amount of data by 2010. Even if they can get 4G capacity on these chips it still wont replace hard drives that hold terabytes of data.
Although it could make really cool applications for OS installs. Could you imagine your favorite OS installed on something as fast or faster then today's RAM? I don't want to think about the cost of 4G of this stuff though. *shiver*
if I were able to see further, it was because I stood on the shoulders of Giants -Newton
Today the bottleneck of the whole system lies in the hard drive. This is the only mechanical part (fans excluded) of a computer. It's about time to find a solution for large storage that doesn't depends on an arm swinging and moving back and forward through a fragmented file system....
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Hard Disk Drives now are about $0.50 a Gigabyte. Flash is now about $25.00 a Gigabyte. 3 1/2" Floppy disks about $250.00 per Gigabyte. So it is natural for the Flash Memory cards to replace the floppies as they did. Better speed and better cost/Gigabyte. But right now Hard Drive technology is really cheap. If this new design can match prices/gigabyte of a hard drive then the Disk Drives will need a real challenge. Otherwise This new technology may only be a threat to Flash, or used with drives in hybrid mode for faster disk access. But not until then.
Price is a major driving force in memory.
CPU Registers are the fastest but most expensive (very small amount is used)
Cache is the next fastest and the second most expensive. (4 Megs or so)
Then comes normal RAM Memory Still slower then Cache and cheaper normally systems now have about a Gig or 2 of that.
If price wasn't a case Computers wouldn't have much RAM but all Cache, or huge amount of registers. But in real life price is the final decision.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Marketing departments usually find the _slowest_ competitor to base their stats on. I wouldn't be suprised if the speed was relative to early-generation flash in the hundreds of kB/s range. Not that 100MB/s would be considered slow, but it might not be the GB/s you would expect looking at today's fast flash drives.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
So run out, children, and buy your SD 2.0 standard devices while they're not yet obsolete. That way you can buy your camera again and again for no good reason.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Page 35 of their downloadable pdf shows that each cell can hold multiple bits. Each cell can be set to one of ten states by multiple pulses of current, so comparisons to binary storage don't work. The manufacturing process is not complex, basic CMOS in about 20 stages, but the part of the cell that stores data is only about 20 nanometers wide. Replacement of hard drives is a very trivial application. IBM and Intel are planning to incorporate this tech inside ICs to reduce latency of fetching data. The big news is more highly integrated systems on chip. It doesn't look pie-in-the-sky, somewhere-way-down-the-road to me.