Slashdot Mirror
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?
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
From the company developing it - Ovonyx:
http://www.ovonyx.com/tech_html.html
http://www.ovonyx.com/ovonyxtech.html
Wincopy
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.
I can see as this memory becomes faster, cheaper and more reliable to replace system memory, too. I can even see the stuff become so cheap that backing all the info will become cost prohibitive, something like how tape backup systems cost way more today than a 2nd hard drive, but an order of magnatude higher.
The irony is that this would explain why in the future (à-la-Star-Trek), backups of the computer's memory doesn't exist and cause improbable storylines for us system admins.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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.
Can't we just skip ahead to the transparent crystals that glow in various colors and store almost limitless data? We all know that's where this is heading.
Maybe we need to perfect holographic 3D displays first?
"The chips won't work in brown devices."
dirty f'in racist chips.
With or without milk?
Still won't be able to compete with the sheer density of colored symbols on A4 paper.
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?
My first Vax, 22 years ago, had 1GB of disk, in the form of four washing-machine-sized drives which used removable 250MB disk packs. The drives cost about $120K total, and the packs were about $1000 each. There isn't really an exact comparison to that combination; you could either look at DVD-RW ($40 for the drive, $0.50 for the disks, so 8-12000x the price/capacity), or amortize the drive across some number of packs to compare to fixed disks (e.g. 10 packs per drive would be $160K for 10GB, though I think we only bought about 3 packs per drive over before that machine was obsolete), or you could make some unbalanced comparison like $20 for a CF-to-USB adapter and $20/GB for Compact Flash cards, which would be a mere 200:1 on the removable media but 6000:1 for the "drive".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
I'd guess that the data would be highly compressable, though: Dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, star, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, star, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, star, dark, dark, dark...
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Such a thing would probably confuse the customer base, since many would be scared of such a thing. For those of us who really want these things, Windows may be less-than-ideal.
Seriously, though; almost everyone I know who doesn't care about speed nor capacity has a single disk, and would rather not be bothered about it.