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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?
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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*
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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.
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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?
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.
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