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Hynix 48-GB Flash MCP
Hal_Porter writes to let us know that the third-largest NAND chip maker, Hynix, has announced they have stacked 24 flash chips in a 1.4mm thick multi-chip package. It's not entirely clear from the article whether the resulting 48-GB device is a proof of concept or a product. The article extrapolates to 384 GB of storage in a single package, sometime. Hal_Porter adds: "It's not clear if it's possible to write to them in parallel — if so the device should be pretty damn fast. The usual objection to NAND flash as a hard drive replacement is lifetime. NAND sectors can only be written 100,000 times or so before they wear out, but wear leveling can be done to spread writes evenly over at least each chip. I worked out that the lifetime should be much longer than a typical magnetic hard disk. There's no information on costs yet frankly and it sounds like an expensive proof of concept, but it shows you the sort of device that will take over from small hard disks in the next few years."
Random seek is probably one of the biggest bottlenecks in large databases. There are even databases that optimize reads/writes to be more consecutive on the disk. A drive like that would throw that problem out of the window.
The article does not extrapolate to 384 GB of storage- they extrapolate to 384 Gb of storage which is 48 GB of storage. bits != bytes.
Given the low price of RAM these days (1 or 2 gigs being standard) minimising the need for swapping, and availability of tmpfs in the Linux kernel, I'm surprised there are not more flashdrive based linux boxes available these days.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
The NAND gate is a union worker, also entitled to a smoke break every 3,000 write cycles.
It's due to the way Flash works. A flash bit is basically a conductor surrounded by an insulator. To store a bit, you apply a large charge to the insulator to increase the charge of the conductor, basically your burning through the insulator to get your charge though. Once it is on there, to read the charge you have to apply another large charge to the insulator and see if the resultant charge is n or n + m. The m factor comes from latent charge on the conductor.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that because you have to constantly burn charge through the insulator to use the part, eventually you basically burn out the insulator and cause it to leak charge. Once it starts leaking, you lose your stored bits and the part is useless.
I read the internet for the articles.
Even at only 1,000 writes of reliable lifespan, 48 GB could handle 48 TB of writes or over 4,000 hours of continuous writing of compressed HD video (or about 2 years of 40 hr/week writes of a video stream). Checking my average usage of disk I/O finds that I only average about 2 GB of writes per day which would suggest that this device would last me 24,000 days (or 65 years). And if the life is 10,000 or 100,000, then I'd see 10X or 100X that lifespan.
Your mileage may vary, but I'd bet that 99% of users would never keep their computer (especially a laptop that is the more likely application for flash-based drives) for long enough to see the disk fail from wear.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It's wholly one of mechanical endurance of the components, AFAIK. The gate is wedged, for lack of a better term. Everything physical wears out. It was much worse in the early 1990s, but whole orders of magnitude in improved performance have been made since then.
I've never seen a study conclude that the write limitation on NAND flash-based devices is a significant impact. Some of the studies have cited worst case scenarios of 50 years of continuous operation. It is far more likely that the device will physically fail due to other means rather than fail due to NAND erasing wear. In any case, I've never seen anyone claim that a solid state disk is going to fail before a mechanical magnetic disk simply due to NAND erasing wear. Indeed, the articles that actually go into it make pretty strong claims that the endurance of flash media is far above that of current mechanical-electromagnetic designs. Three or four times the lifespan.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
iPod Touch, meet Hynix 48-GB Flash MCP!
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
It is just writing that is limited right? Myself, I'd love to have the space to host all my media, most of which just sits archived on dvd-r. I'd only need to write to the disk once. Seems most people, aside from those who do video production, really only need large amounts of space to serve/store media. Be cool to just keep a 200 gig SATA for regular use and just keep buying these suckers and fillin' them up for all that media. Later, when they're cheap that is.
Commercial products in the high-end flash space are promising 500,000+ writes.
We are not talking about glorified thumb-drive flash memory here, but decent chips with good wear leveling and high quality construction.
...would you really want to buy something from a company named Hynix? At worst it sounds like a Unix that smells like ass. At best it sounds like a bunch of stoned Unix devels.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Ouch that's expensive. And big (in physical dimensions) compared to:i d=5623741&affid=10000483
http://www.computers4sure.com/product.asp?product
I guess it may be somewhat faster, but both are approaching the limits of what you can push through a sata interface.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Recently, this whole flash drive business has been popping up in the news, with announcements of a whole gob of commercial solid-state drives based on flash technology and the like. Nonetheless, there is a big void in the flash drive world that, at least at first glance, could be easily filled with trivial technology and off the shelf products but no one seems to be paying any attention.
I'm talking about RAID + flash cards.
Flash cards are everywhere and, although their cost per GB is rather high, a 1GB card is easily affordable (1GB microSD card for less than 10 euros) and prices are dropping constantly. If someone decided to build a RAID card reader, we could easily get a foot in the door. For about 60 euros it would be possible to get something between a slowish but reliable 6GB flash drive or a speedy and snappy 1GB flash drive.
So why exactly didn't anyone thought of this? We already have IDE CF card readers, some models supporting 2 drives, that can be had for about 6 euros. Why not a RAID flash card reader?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Hynix, has announced they have stacked 24 flash chips in a 1.4mm thick multi-chip package
According to NASA, it may even be possible to stack 48 chips in a 2.8mm package. Scientists also speculate someday we may be able to achieve up to 240 chips in a 14mm thick package.
Flash Cell stackup (same for NOR and NAND, the interconnection of cells determines what type of array it is): G - gate (metal)
ONO - Oxide/Nitride/Oxide layer
FG - Floating Gate (Poly)
tOx - Tunnel Oxide (very thin)
Si - wafer (NPN/PNP wells) -nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump