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Japanese Scientists Develop Long-Life Flash Memory

Posted by kdawson on from the degrades-gracefully-too dept.

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."

5 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What is the point? by dintech · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:What is the point? by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  3. Re:What is the point? by Firefalcon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:I thought that all flash was already long lifed by ZombieWomble · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This is one of those wonderful headlines where they convert the big scary numbers into a nice friendly unit and completely miss the point. What's interesting about this memory is not that it could be locked away and would be stable, but that it's much more stable under repeated use (100 million writes as opposed to tens of thousands). So they've presumably taken some arbitrary number of "writes per year" and divided to get their 100 year figure.

    (Bonus exercise for the reader: Calculate the lifetime of these chips in libraries of congress written!)

  5. Re:What is the point? by jacquesm · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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