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Samsung Unveils 64-Gbit Flash Memory Chip
Lucas123 writes "The chips can be combined to create a 128-GB flash storage device capable of holding up to 80 DVD movies or 32,000 MP3 music files. The chip was created using 30-nanometer processing technology that was developed with Samsung's self-aligned double patterning technology. Manufacturing will start in 2009; but the article quotes a Gartner analyst who reminds us, 'Samsung has had a difficult time adhering to its timelines for mass production due to the complexity of MLC architectures and ever shrinking process geometries.'"
I don't know if I want storage that can't be addressed in 4 bytes.
So you can combine 16 of these to get 128GB. Can you combine 32 to get 256GB? And what if you combine 128 of them for 1TB!? The possibilities are endless.
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"128-GB flash storage device capable of holding up to 80 DVD movies"
Those must be some pretty small DVDs.
...that provide storage sizes in units easy to relate with, namely pirated media.
Am I missing something about that statement, or is it really as stupid as it sounds?
With some time, I could create a 128-*Peta*byte storage device with those chips. In the worst case scenario, you build a device out of multiple 128-GB flash devices.
So if I can hold all my porn in one hand, and work the keyboard with the other...
How's this supposed to work, again?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
It can only dream though.
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Has Samsung improved on the inherently bad Flash write speeds? If not, then I don't really see too much of a point for anything other than desktops (where much more revenue could be made for server or workstation-based uses).
At least Slashdot have a better summary than the BBC for once http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7057717.stm I contacted them as they originally claimed something similar to "The 64 gigabit (Gb) chips [are] capable of holding the equivalent of 80 DVDs.". They have since corrected it.
This flash based player thingie Samsung's building will extremely probably be way more expensive than it'd be using a 1.8" hard drive. OTOH they can shape it more freely (why would they? Hard drives are shaped quite like widescreen displays. Perfect for portable media players) and probably shave off a few millimeters in thickness while providing the same battery runtime.
While this might turn out to be something awesome, I can't really imagine to be willing to pay double (or more?) just to have a 10-15% slimmer media player. Do you?
I never liked the micro drives for portable devices. I move around a lot and the micro drives tend to die on me. Where as the flash players I have had last well forever so far. The only one that died was one I dropped from 300 feet up while rock climbing.
WTF?
How big are these things? Could Apple fit 16 of them inside a Nano? That seems like an important piece of information that has been left out of the article.
Until they make it possible to rewrite as many times as you can on a traditional hard drive, why would you need one so big?
32,000 MP3 music files Really, that number doesn't mean squat. I have a friend who love punk music, where the songs are on average about 45 seconds long. I have another friend who listens to classical music, where many songs are 5 minutes or more. How could you possibly equate those two?
Wouldn't it just make a lot more sense to say it could hold X hours of music, instead?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
There's probably a limit to the amount of chips you can fit on a controller or in standard flash drive form factors. You'd have to either have custom hardware or stack a thousand 128GB boards together on some kind of bus. So, sure, you could have a 128PB storage device, but you'd need a steamer trunk to keep it in, a full-sized AC unit to keep it cool, and a killowatt power supply to keep it running at any decent speed.
samsung is often off, I will remind you that Gartner is normally always way off. Lets wait and see what happens.
is it gigabits of gigabytes? a lot of news stories don't seem to know the difference.
64Gbit is only 8Gbyte which is still fairly big, but not enough to store 40 DVD movies (hell it could hardly hold two).
Me thinks whomever wrote the summary was a bit off to lunch that day.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Will they be arrested for conspiracy to commit piracy? Let's see 30,000 MP3 songs at $250,000 each time 1,000,000 chips. A lot of zeros means a lot of money! Everyone knows that if you sell a memory device that can hold 20000 MP3 songs that all but a handful will be 'pirated', that is to say copied without permission of their so-called owners. No one except loud-mouth fuckhead billionaire Steven Jobs is actually paying $30000 for 30,000 iTune songs. So if you make a device that facilitates file copying, aren't you guilty of conspiracy to commit intellectual property fraud?
And don't tell me that there are alternative legal uses for hard drives and memory chips. After all, isn't the scope of the intellectual property crisis dire enough to overrule such petty and superficial uses of these devices? Isn't that what the entertainment industry is telling us? Aren't they the most important 'industry' in the USA and the world?
In my town any teenager can have his life ruined by being arrested for having a little piece of blank paper in his pocket. The pigs (excuse me, I meant to say 'the Republicans') here call it 'conspiracy to possess marijuana paraphernalia', and it means just a cigarette rolling paper. And it's a serious crime with serious time.
But every consumer electronics store in the city sells drives and media that are specifically used to commit so-called 'intellectual property theft'. Listening to music, having a little scrap of paper in your pocket, even suggesting that this is all nothing but corrupt,racist, selective law enforcement, it's enough to get you arrested and thrown into the vast American rape-torture gulag.
But if the MPAA/RIAA is so smart and so bad, then why aren't they actually going up face-to-face, lawyer-to-lawyer against the manufacturers that make the hard drives and memory chips? Sure they'll go after single mothers making $8/hr and win $250,000 with their $300,000/yr lawyers and hand-written laws. But will they go after the Fry's, Walmarts, and BestBuys for selling the drives, PCs, and modems that make it possible for ordinary people to 'steal' their 'intellectual property'? Why not? They have the money, they have the lawyers, they have the testicles! So where's the beef?
If they won't do this, then the entire music and entertainment global industry (it's what now, four giant companies?) should be taken over by the government as a RICO enterprise. We should make them do it. After all, it's us that are the most embarrassed by this corrupt extortion. Why aren't we doing anything about these assholes? Of course, they will self-destruct on their own, but they will do a lot of damage on the way down. We should put our collective heads together and deliver a coup-de-grace to these pathetic losers. Consider it a mercy killing. Which is legal here, but carrying a little piece of rice paper is not.
At least on their main machine... My work computer, home computer, and laptop are all 64-bit already. And by 2009, so will everyone elses'
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I don't like how the article doesn't state any projected costs. 30nm is on the bleeding edge of process sizes and I'd be surprised if they don't take pretty severe hit to their chip yield as a result. We'll see.
and how long does such storage last before bits go bad ?
Okay, thats enough talk, Simonetta. You will be receiving our "visit". And you can't just throw away all those blank papers and blank dvds.
Regards,mafIAA
How the heck is 128 GBs supposed to hold 80 DVDs?? Even assuming these are single layer DVDs (which I don't think any high quality movie is), 80 DVDs work out to over 320 GBs. If you're talking double-layer, then it is twice this figure.
I won't even start on the 32,000 MP3 figure. That is almost always based on somebody's arbitrary assumption on how big a song is supposed to be..
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I can sell you a certainty policy that guarantees your data is safe, as long as you do not access it.
Low annual premiums available.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Well, it's not just because of *me*, but because so many people encode using different codecs and at different rates. I get frustrated whenever I see an mp3 player saying that it can hold "n Hours of music!," only to see in the fine print that it's in .wma format @ 96kb/s. I'm a fan of just saying how much space, in human-readable format (df -h) in terms of GB. Not Gb, not MB or Mb, but GB....
Unfortunately, I love those 45-minute Yanni jam sessions, so it'll be more like 5000 songs for me.
Every single fucking time a flash memory article is posted some bunch of fucktards asks the same damn bunch of asshat questions or makes the same stupid "observation".
The claim is that flash memory will somehow wear out too quickly to be useful; or "only lasts a few thousand writes" or some other stupid ass comment.
Please please please - look up older articles and read the comments or just read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling and shut up. Flash memory and its controllers have improved to the point where it's reasonable to expect an SSD to last longer than a typical PC or laptop's useful life.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
There was a suit brought by Disney (I think) against Sony for their VHS recorders which could record TV shows and other things "illegally" (namely Disney movies). This case was cited in all the Grokster file sharing legal garbage. They said that Sony wasn't responsible because there were plenty of ways to use the VHS recorders legally. In this case I'm sure Samsung is in the same boat.
Well, you should know that there is an industry standard for MP3 length/size. It's the MTV-empty-pop-heavy-rotation-single. About 3 megabytes in size, about nil worth.
Not only that, but most flash chips nowadays support tens of millions of writes to each block before it will fail. And some blocks can go bad and have their data moved elsewhere and just not be used anymore (just like sectors on a HDD, actually).
Even if you wrote EVERY SINGLE BLOCK 10,000 TIMES EVERY DAY it would probably still take many years before the device was unusable. Under more normal usage conditions, they probably last for decades.
He's taling about poor write speeds in comparison to regular disk drives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_drive#Disadvantages
"Slow random write speeds - as erase blocks on SSDs generally are quite large, they're far slower than conventional disks for random writes."
I collect baseball fields. Currently I can fit 0.0000000012 baseball fields on a flash drive, how many can I fit onto one of these?
I used to collect Libraries of Congress, but after the first one I couldn't find any others.
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MLC NAND flash typically rated for 10000 erase cycles, while SLC NAND flash are rated for 100000 cycles.....
That would be one ph47 stick!
:-P
I'm already envious of it's "size"
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SSD Flash units have been out for years now @ 64GB. I believe there are 128GB units as well. Samsung isn't the only manufacturer that makes the 64gb ones. 2.5", (whatever the normal desktop drive size is) drives have gotten to 256GB under another manufacturer I believe.
P.S. Hah at Gbit vr GByte
Are you including the commentaries? You have to rip those too.
"Well in this scene...wait, weren't you supposed to be in this scene?"
"I think that was the day the catering truck had medditerranian tuna salad wraps. Those were good"
"Oh yah, and they had little eclairs too. I love those."
"Hey, what scene is this now?"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I have machines that are 10-15 years old serving webpages, running databases... and so do many of my employer's customers. Windows98 is not a shock to see on a machine in a production environment. Win95 is much more rare, but still running in the wild. Just a few years ago, I worked on someone's Win3.11 machine, cheerfully doing all that its owner asked it to, on hardware that was at least as old as the OS.
Personally, I like stuff to last long enough to give it to someone else while it still works.
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