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."

Comments

Awesome

[NoobixCube]

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.

Re:Awesome

[utopianfiat]

10nm get you anyting you want baby, me so info-dense, baby, me so info-dense. Me store you long time.

Re:Awesome

[Fred_A]

Bah... Me think you sucky sucky

What is the point?

[damburger]

Given that we tend to dump flash memory whenever a larger and more compact one comes along, and transfer our data, what use is there for a flash chip that will keep data for 100 years but be obsolete in 2?

Re:What is the point?

[dintech]

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.

Re:What is the point?

[jacquesm]

it's to facilitate the new profession of 'data archaeologist'. People that will be sifting through the digital detritus of the pre-AI era two hundred years from now.

Looking for the rosetta's stone that will enable them to translate 'flash' into 'realmedia' ;)

Re:What is the point?

[damburger]

I would hardly call 100 years archival. In some exceptional cases its within the memory span of a single human individual.

Re:What is the point?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

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.

Re:What is the point?

[Firefalcon]

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.

Re:What is the point?

[A beautiful mind]

Looking for the rosetta's stone that will enable them to translate 'flash' into 'realmedia' ;)

Oh, snap!

Re:What is the point?

[A beautiful mind]

I can think of a lot of reasons why this would be very useful. If SSDs come out with a large enough tolerance for writes, then applications open up for server usage.

A database for example would profit a lot from the huge random I/O speed boosts. The problem is of course that under any serious write load coupled with fsync, unless you're using BBWC, you're writing frequently to disk.

Also, with SSD going mainstream, the MTBF should increase for harddrives - I hope to see 5+ years of guarantees after the third or fourth generation of SSDs come out. If all goes well, we'll have a problem of destroying data, instead of the problem of preserving data.

Re:What is the point?

[jamesh]

If all goes well, we'll have a problem of destroying data, instead of the problem of preserving data.

Hmmm... that's an interesting one... What is the procedure for securely erasing a flash disk? 30 seconds in the microwave?

Re:What is the point?

[MyLongNickName]

I would hardly call 100 years archival. In some exceptional cases its within the memory span of a single human individual.

Ummmm. Yea. I am going to have granny memorize my last ten years of photos, movies and financial records.

Fact is, I have struggled with a good method for backing up all of this. I've basically settled on mirroring with a remote FTP site. It works, but with my horrible upload speed, initial synchronization took 48 hours plus. Quarterly updates take a couple hours. And the other pain in the butt is I have to encrypt my financial info as I don't trust it being in the hands of a third party.

Now if I had a medium that were 99% successful at retaining info for 20 years, I would backup to two manufacturer's media, and stick it in my safety deposit box.

I don't have that degree of confidence in any low cost storage media yet.

So for archival, yes, this is a wonderful advance.

Re:What is the point?

[A beautiful mind]

It's more of a social problem - to educate people that if they throw their old SSD away, someone can still easily grab data off of it.

Re:What is the point?

[Swizec]

Oh gawd, you're gonna torture your grandchildren through ALL that archived stuff? Crazy, I can hardly deal with the tens of old-school analogue photos that have survived through the ages, let alone having a grand parent silly enough to think archiving all of their photos was a good idea.

Re:What is the point?

[jimicus]

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.

At least until the technology changes so much that you can no longer buy anything that will read it, cf. the BBC's Doomsday project:

http://www.iconbar.com/forums/viewthread.php?newsid=937

Re:What is the point?

[MyLongNickName]

I'm assuming you are under 30 and haven't lost a grandparent. Now that I have lost a few family members, I wish I had more photos, more memories to look through. Perhaps it is a case of you don't miss something till it is gone.

I will pull up the digital photo album of old vacations, and my kids love to remember what we did. At some point, my kids will become uninterested as I did when I was younger. But as some point, I know they will enjoy revisiting them.

I sure as hell don't want that to not be possible because my hard drive crashed.

Re:What is the point?

[Free the Cowards]

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.

Re:What is the point?

[jim.hansson]

maybe there is a market for MO-disk after all, i heard sony MD now are up to 1gb per disk. maybe a little to small.

Re:What is the point?

[jim.hansson]

i have heard stories from universities that they sometimes get help requests from people that have data stored on mediastypes that nobody has readers for anymore, and after a little hunt in basements and other places they find the hardware, then there is the problem of software. There is already companies specializing in this sort of things

Re:What is the point?

[postbigbang]

There are already patented schemes that use locational indirection tables to offset the write problem. Reducing volatility is yet another advance. Woody Norris, the crazed inventor, contributed to one of the patented methods, and there are more. Still, the advanced number of write cycles (and the fact that writes must be blocks rather than discrete mallocs) is a wonderful thing.

Re:What is the point?

[justthinkit]

How about copying file(s) equal in size to the capacity of the drive, deleting them and repeating a couple more times to be belt-n-suspenders safe? Hint: It is only the most recent data that is preserved -- no stray magnetic particles to snoop for data on a memory stick.

Re:What is the point?

[jacquesm]

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.

Re:What is the point?

[nmg196]

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.

Re:What is the point?

[mgblst]

Really? Do you really consider the memory span of a human to be 100 years, even if they hit that age? And are we going to judge all our data to this process?

Re:What is the point?

[nmg196]

> 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.

Re:What is the point?

[Ant P.]

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.

Says who?

Re:What is the point?

[Free the Cowards]

The extremely long duration comes from using wear leveling algorithms to spread the writes across the entire device. An individual cell, written to continuously, can be blown very rapidly, it's just that the controller hardware won't let you do that. So yes, I imagine that they have tested the lifetime of the individual cell, and then from that figure it's a simple calculation.

Re:What is the point?

[thrillseeker]

What do you think "archive" folders in Outlook are for? Emails older than 100 years?

You never worked for my old boss.

Re:What is the point?

[Hal_Porter]

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.

Re:What is the point?

[Free the Cowards]

I honestly don't know. If I were implementing it, I would use an algorithm that thrashed on the limited free space for a while, then moved unchanging files into it to create a different block of free space, which could then be thrashed on for a while as well. But I have no idea if that's what they actually do.

Re:What is the point?

[Free the Cowards]

It doesn't matter what you write, because the logical sectors are not linked to the physical sectors on any reasonable flash drive. The controller circuitry holds a mapping which it adjusts as time goes by to evenly use the entire device no matter what your write patterns are.

As for "not much cheaper", this must be a new meaning of "not much" that I was previously unaware of. Taking a quick sample on newegg.com, I find an 8GB flash drive for $32, and 8GB of RAM going for around five to six times that. The flash drive, in addition to being vastly cheaper, is also much smaller and consumes much less power.

Re:What is the point?

[Free the Cowards]

Thanks for that information, I had no idea about MLC or its considerably reduced write cycle.

I would posit that in most real-world situations it still won't matter, though. That 6 months is at a 100% duty cycle doing nothing but writes. Even in a heavy-duty application, you'll come nowhere near, so that 6 months will be multiplied by a lot. But still, you're absolutely right that the theoretical limit is much lower than I said.

Of course SLC still exists, and still lasts essentially forever. For this new technology to be worthwhile, it would have to not only beat MLC on lifetime, but also beat SLC on price.

Re:What is the point?

[Hal_Porter]

Thanks for that information, I had no idea about MLC or its considerably reduced write cycle.

I would posit that in most real-world situations it still won't matter, though. That 6 months is at a 100% duty cycle doing nothing but writes. Even in a heavy-duty application, you'll come nowhere near, so that 6 months will be multiplied by a lot. But still, you're absolutely right that the theoretical limit is much lower than I said.

Of course SLC still exists, and still lasts essentially forever. For this new technology to be worthwhile, it would have to not only beat MLC on lifetime, but also beat SLC on price.

I dunno. I still suspect that when flash drives are launched there will be some odd use case (media centres maybe? I don't know what it would be but I can't guarantee it doesn't exist) where the drive is written very frequently. So some people will end up paying a massive premium for a drive with lousy sustained write performance and a short life. From what I've read the power consumption is not impressive either.

Of course in time these issues will be worked out somehow. But I think some early adopters might get a nasty shock.

Re:What is the point?

[drjoe1e6]

>There is very little you'd want to archive for much longer than this [5-10 years] in the business world. Archived data is simply anything you don't foresee needing to use again [...]

In the pharmaceutical biz, we have data from clinical studies that needs to last 30 years or more. It is a challenge to have both an electronic medium and format that you can use after that length of time.

-Joe

Re:What is the point?

[spectre_240sx]

It could be argued that due to changes to layers above the physical storage medium, no physical storage solution can currently be considered archival. At this point in time, data needs to be constantly migrated.

Re:What is the point?

[Free the Cowards]

Well, flash drives are already launched, have been for quite a long time. They're not all that common for use as a boot drive, but it's pretty frequent. As an obvious example, the MacBook Air has an SSD option, and it will swap to that drive. I have no idea if it's MLC or SLC flash, although my money would be on MLC just because it's cheaper.

I'm sure you're right about early adopters getting burned. That's true of just about any time you have new technology, so it's to be expected. Hopefully people who need fast and heavy sustained writes will do their research beforehand.

Re:What is the point?

[bluefoxlucid]

Flash can't see files. It sees bare data blocks. Think on the hardware level; it can't read FAT.

Re:What is the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guarantee you that the $32 8GB flash drive is not what you call 'reasonable'. Flash drives which actually do distribute wear across the whole drive no matter what your write pattern is are considerably more expensive. As a general rule, if it's a cheap USB flash key, it's built using MLC flash chips (only about 10K erase/write cycles per erase block), is slow (MLC is slow), and implements a fancy form of defect remapping rather than real wear leveling.

The problem a lot of people have is that they hear about the concept of wear leveling and then assume it's cheap and easy to implement properly, since it sounds so simple. It's not. Try thinking about how you actually have to do it sometime. For example, how do you store the table or list which maps logical sectors to physical sectors? That alone is a very thorny problem, because if you store it in some of the physical sectors, you have to make the table itself subject to the wear-leveling algorithm, as the table is going to be the most frequently-written data of all. So you end up needing to store the table (and probably user data too) using some kind of log-structured file system. Now you have to chase pointers just to figure out where user data is located, and as high-density flash is not quite as random-access as people sometimes think it is (it's very oriented towards reading/writing large blocks rather than random access to individual bytes), you'd better have a controller with a lot of RAM so you can cache large chunks of the table; otherwise performance goes in the toilet.

TLDR version: true wear-leveling flash disk controllers tend to need lots of RAM and/or a second nonvolatile solid state memory with better lifespan than the main flash array. These things are expensive and therefore not found in most flash drives other than the SSDs built to the same form factor as hard disks.

Re:What is the point?

[Free the Cowards]

How do they work then? Obviously wear leveling is a reality, and unless it's going to perform two physical writes for every logical write (to swap blocks) it must have some concept of what areas are free.

Re:What is the point?

[bluefoxlucid]

5 billion blocks.

4.998 billion supply space.

0.002 billion are for error recovery.

0.0001 billion don't work right out of the factory.

if you write real small

[jacquesm]

Stone tablets will last even longer!

Re:if you write real small

[somersault]

Unfortunately, even God can only fit 5 commands on a single stone tablet.

Re:if you write real small

[jacquesm]

the fact that any three year old can do better is probably one of the stronger proofs that god, indeed, does not exist.

Re:if you write real small

[Chrisq]

Unfortunately, even God can only fit 5 commands on a single stone tablet.

Its just as well. Imagine what Sunday School would have been like if Moses hat taken a PDA up mount Sinai and come back with the 65,536 commandments.

Re:if you write real small

[Kreigaffe]

Actually, if you write really big, those stone tablets will last even *longer*. With stone it's a trade-off -- density of information vs. reading it 5,0000 years from now.

Re:if you write real small

[Anpheus]

People would still covet each other's wives and oxen?

Re:if you write real small

[Chrisq]

People would still covet each other's wives and oxen?

... And their manservert and their madeservernt, their laptop, high speed internet connection, their low digit slashdot ID and karma rating......

.... Thou shalt not use someone elses wifi where it diminisheth his download speed....

.... Thou shalt not post to Slashdot on the sabbath

It could go on.........

Re:if you write real small

[jacquesm]

google to the rescue:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%223+year+old+mason%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

I make no warranties as to their skills though, caveat emptor.

Re:if you write real small

[asylumx]

Chuck Norris can fit more than five commands on a stone tablet.

Re:if you write real small

[Thanshin]

It's not just like 'thou shalt not kill', each command is quite verbose.

Thou, hereby referred to as THE SINNER, shall not, under any circumstance, unless with the express permission of thy god, hereby referred as GOD, attempt to willfully, negligently or otherwise end the life of another...

Re:if you write real small

[Stooshie]

... or why you think that if a god does exist ...

I'm a polytheist you insensitive clod!

Re:if you write real small

[Stooshie]

+5 Coffee on new suit funny

Re:if you write real small

[Stooshie]

... Thou shalt not post to Slashdot on the sabbath ...

... unless thou firstly count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Post of Slashdot towards thy foe ...

Re:if you write real small

[jacquesm]

the George Carlin version fits on a much smaller space. Probably a good instance of data compression by removing redundancies (is there any other kind ?).

Re:if you write real small

[Dragonslicer]

Have you even seen the original 10 commandments? It's not just like 'thou shalt not kill', each command is quite verbose.

Actually, the Hebrew for "thou shalt not murder" is even shorter- it's only two words ("No murder"). Most of the second half is like that; it's really only the first few that are longer sentences.

Oh, as for the topic, better flash memory == good.

Re:if you write real small

[somersault]

Just because one exists doesn't mean that more can't exist too ;)

Re:if you write real small

[somersault]

I see. Let me provide some conditions then:

Unfortunately, even God can only fit an average of 5 commands onto a stone tablet, depending on compression techniques and the data to be recorded.

Re:if you write real small

[Redrover5545]

come back with the 65,536 commandments.

Somebody hasn't read Leviticus or Deuteronomy.

Re:if you write real small

[bluefoxlucid]

WARNING: The above poster's life may contain inconsistency, hypocrisy, or white ninjas

... it snows a lot there?

Re:if you write real small

[somersault]

Only when its cold. Some guy said I was a 'white ninja' for doing occasional martial arts, then mentioning how I did "a lot of martial arts" last year, and how my 2 classes a week were nothing in comparison to his mighty number of hours a week that he did martial arts, and the times when he went away on long weekends with wu-shu masters to learn the secrets of long weekend martial art training. I'm not sure he was white, but I'm not sure who is more of a "white ninja".. the one who was training twice a week for a fun method of exercise, or the one who is taking it seriously enough to go on weekend retreats (but still reckons he'll have to stop by the time he's 36 because he won't be in the absolute peak physical condition required for balance and poise in the arts he's studying.. pfft..). Aside from the racist undertones, I just found the whole thing pretty offensive. Doing any activity in a club twice a week, and then home practice in between, is 'a lot' to me, but obviously not to self-proclaimed hardcore martial artists who get offended when someone says they did 'martial arts' instead of 'exercise'. *sigh* That guy really pissed me off

Re:if you write real small

[bluefoxlucid]

(but still reckons he'll have to stop by the time he's 36 because he won't be in the absolute peak physical condition required for balance and poise in the arts he's studying.. pfft..)

I threw Okimura Shihan's wife and she rolled out of it, and those two are old. Old old. Ronald Reagan old. There's no way I could take either of them in a fight.

Nice lady. She helped me clean up my freehand technique.

Re:if you write real small

[ProfessionalCookie]

It's your call but I still think "the 10 habits of highly effective people" is a catchier title

-Thaves

Re:if you write real small

[T3Tech]

Seeing as how Okimura Shihan studied under O'Sensei in the 60's, I'd say he's old. He's also rather small and I've seen him throw guys almost three times younger and larger.
Seems that physical condition doesn't matter as much in certain arts. :)

Re:if you write real small

[Chrisq]

come back with the 65,536 commandments.

Somebody hasn't read Leviticus or Deuteronomy.

I thought that they were deprecated when the NT was released. ;-)

Re:if you write real small

[somersault]

I agree. Experience and proper technique can make up for differences in strength and agility, though if you keep your training up then you can maintain good strength and health for quite a while (not counting things like serious arthitis which would make most highly physical activity suck). There have been >70 year olds who run marathons!

I thought that all flash was already long lifed.

[apathy maybe]

If you didn't use it.

Come on, I can put 2 GB of plain text on a USB key, and leave it with how to implement the USB standard on paper, put the things in a thick plastic bag, etc.

In the correct environment, it will last for a long long time.

(Of course, I haven't read the article.)

What good timing...

[Firefalcon]

Cool - combine that with the previous article on SSD hard disks, and I think half of the reviewer's complaints would be resolved... Definitely something to look forward to when it reaches the mass market. :-)

How long does today's flash memory last?

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Anyone experts on this subject?

Re:How long does today's flash memory last?

[dannycim]

I have an on-going experiment with a 2GB usb KEY. It's been happily over-written with random data non-stop for 38 days now (it takes 4 and a half minutes for one cycle), then read-checked. It's getting close to 12,000 cycles now and not one error bit detected so far.

If you believe this manufacturer's estimated MTBF, 100,000 cycles, I shouldn't see any errors before over 300 days.

Mind you, in a real-world application, you don't re-write your whole memory non-stop, so with wear-levelling I should expect Flash drives to last a good 10 years, even with swap areas and atime enabled, easily.

Re:How long does today's flash memory last?

[justthinkit]

Given that the better designed keys map out the bad data, you may want to monitor the free space on the drive. If free space decreases, the key has failed. Continuing past the first failure you could measure "failures per day" info and come up with other interesting observables.

Re:How long does today's flash memory last?

[dannycim]

"Free space" on a USB-key is dependant on the file-system used, and the USB flash wear-levelling isn't aware of which blocks are used and which aren't because it can't possibly understand every file-system out there. Indeed, in my test I use the whole device as a raw device without a filesystem on it, that is to say I write to every block starting from 0 to the last one. There is no file-system, there is no "free space".

The key just provides a list of blocks. Internally, it maps those logical blocks numbers to physical block numbers and keep its own list of un-mapped blocks, ready to replace defective ones. In the better wear-levelling algorithms, all this happens "in-firmware", transparently without the host or the user's knowledge.

There's a PDF document pointed by Wikipedia @ http://www.corsairmemory.com/_faq/FAQ_flash_drive_wear_leveling.pdf if you'd like to know more about the topic.

Re:How long does today's flash memory last?

[bluefoxlucid]

Not an issue, unless he has a 2GB cache -- I doubt it. The system will realize the danger of data loss (based on preset algorithms) versus the relative age of the data, and LRU invalidate stuff to prevent it from becoming at-risk. With a 2GB working set, it's going to be 1:1.

Re:I thought that all flash was already long lifed

[ZombieWomble]

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!)

Or...

[DrYak]

god, indeed, does not exist.

...Or is even less skilled than a toddler.

Re:Or...

[Wite_Noiz]

Blimey, you guys are cynical.

The guy (or gal) was etching those stones using a friggin' lightning bolt from his cloud in the sky... that's pretty damned impressive.

Re:Or...

[jacquesm]

that's the first time I've been laughing out loud at moderation... metamods please reward that mod :)

Re:Or...

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 "Informative"

That's pretty damned frightening.

Re:Or...

[srussia]

The guy (or gal) was etching those stones using a friggin' lightning bolt from his cloud in the sky... that's pretty damned impressive.

So it was "flash" memory after all?

Re:Or...

[Ninjie]

God, indeed, does exist =D

Re:Or...

[mjwx]

Blimey, you guys are cynical.
The guy (or gal) was etching those stones using a friggin' lightning bolt from his cloud in the sky... that's pretty damned impressive.

And getting near zero latency.

Excellent work.

[jcr]

I know the day will come when we don't have to have moving parts for bulk storage, and I've been waiting for it ever since the bubble memory failed to kill disks off.

-jcr

If go you REALLY small ...

[Rhabarber]

... it might happen to be a rosetta disc
(which should store 30.000 Pages of text for 10.000 years).

If I remember correctly, one flew to Mars already.

Re:If go you REALLY small ...

[bigstrat2003]

30 pages of text for 10 years? I have books that do better than that! ;)

Re:If go you REALLY small ...

[I'm not really here]

30 pages of text for 10 years? I have books that do better than that! ;)

Um... not everyone uses a comma to separate numbers. For you, perhaps it helps to read that as:

30,000 pages of text for 10,000 years

Re:If go you REALLY small ...

[bigstrat2003]

I understood what was meant. Even if one doesn't know that some people don't use commas to separate numbers, it was perfectly clear from context what was meant. I was just joking. Whoosh, and all that.

Re:If go you REALLY small ...

[Rhabarber]

:)) (Quite late but that's live)

Improvements reading the data?

[IBBoard]

Flash memory chips with a potential lifetime of hundreds of years have been developed by Japanese scientists.

All well and good, but what about reading the data? Will we have the connectors and required document parsers in hundreds of years? Or will we be stuck with data on this amazingly long lasting device that we can't read?

Still, at least it seems to boost the number of writes as well, which is a bonus for general usage.

Re:Improvements reading the data?

[bluefoxlucid]

We have Wikipedia... it tells us how the damn thing works and where to see the USB standard. Or the MMC standard. SD. CompactFlash. Etc.

Re:Improvements reading the data?

[IBBoard]

But Wikipedia is still a website, so we still need to support HTTP and HTML in 100 years, which still leaves you in the same situation of maintaining stuff that supports old standards. As well as that it means maintaining the 100+ year old servers that Wikipedia runs on, and all of the data they store.

Either that or you just maintain the data in ever newer formats (replace .txt with .odf with whatever comes next, etc), which means the 100+ year life isn't as useful for archiving purposes as something shorter lived could be used and replaced each time the content is transcribed.

One way or the other you're maintaining something for 100+ years to be able to be able to read the data - either the server with the information about the format, or the data format itself.

Read / write cycles

[Dan East]

The summary does not specify exactly what is meant by "long-life". That refers to the current limitation of flash, where individual bits have a physical limitation to the number of times they can be modified. This "new" flash uses some sort of integrated "wear-leveling", so that all bits are utilized equally. Also, when individual bits (or more likely, groups of bits) are worn out they are retired. So instead of a failure, the capacity of the flash would decrease as write cycles exceed the physical limitations. Of course, if wear leveling was performed perfectly, then pretty much the entire array would fail at once, right?

The article doesn't address other important aspects, like read / write speed.

It does say that current flash memory is limited to 10k writes, which is low by at least a factor of 10. Modern flash should withstand at least 100k writes, and I've seen claims of over a million here and there.

Re:Read / write cycles

[courteaudotbiz]

Of course, if wear leveling was performed perfectly, then pretty much the entire array would fail at once, right?

I have 4 wheels bearings on my Chrysler, and even though all of my wheels rotate with a perfect synchronism, only one of my bearings fails at a time, and the other ones don't follow ther brother in the next few miles...

Remember that at this scale, only an atom of difference could make some of those individual bits fail a year before the other...

Re:Read / write cycles

[xtracto]

A bit of research from the original AIST site bring quite a lot of info.

The from the original tech report:

Shigeki Sakai (Leader) et al. of the Novel Electron Devices Group, the Nanoelectronics Research Institute (Director: Seigo Kanemaru) of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) (President: Hiroyuki Yoshikawa) in collaboration with Ken Takeuchi, Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo (Univ. Tokyo) have demonstrated that the use of ferroelectric gate field-effect transistors (FeFETs) as memory cells dramatically improves the performance of NAND flash memory. The FeFET, the newly developed memory cell, can be programmed and erased as many times as 100 million or more and with programming voltage of less than 6 V, whereas the conventional NAND flash memory cells have ten thousand program/erase endurance cycles with approximately 20 V programming voltage. It has been assumed that conventional NAND flash memory can be downsized to 30 nm at the minimum, whereas this novel memory cell will meet the needs of the next 20-nm and 10-nm technology generations. And thus, this memory cell is expected to be used in a next-generation, high-density, high-capacity nonvolatile memory.

Results of the research was reported at the 23rd Nonvolatile Semiconductor Memory Workshop (the 23rd IEEE NVSMW / the 3rd ICMTD 2008) held in France, May 18â"22, 2008.

Re:Read / write cycles

[Dan East]

True, but if your car had 1 trillion bearings (100 GB at 8 bits per byte) then the probability is that most would fail at the same time.

Re:Read / write cycles

[GargamelSpaceman]

Wear leveling is nothing new. I wish I had the link, but I read that postulating a faster thoughput than is typical today, and a moderately large flash drive, that with current wear leveling, and WORST case use, that is CONSTANTLY writing to the drive ( say if the drive were being used to store data from a security camera feed that the drive would not suffer any decrease in capacity for fifty years. With normal use, that would be hundereds of years easily.

Re:Read / write cycles

[Hal_Porter]

Slashdot makes me laugh. Originally people here worried about flash memory and people worked out the life with wear levelling. And it was indeed fifty years.

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

For ages and ages I see people saying "but you can't put swap on flash it will wear out" and I post a link to the above

Now the "it will last for fifty years even if you hammer the shit out of it" meme seems to have penetrated the hive mind. And Intel and Samsung and others have launched flash disks. But those disks are based on MLC flash, not SLC like in the first example. So you need to update the calculation.

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-slc-mlc-notes.html

Oh noes! Your data will disappear in 6 months!

Slashdot being slashdot by the time this meme becomes common, something in the calculation will change since the industry knows that 6 months is too short and the worst case lifetime will go up to a couple of decades again. Or more than the 5 year average life of a hard disk at least.

Re:Read / write cycles

[WithLove]

I think, logically, that left turns would generally be longer than right turns. Though right turns would probably be sharper. I wonder if it makes any difference? Plus, don't front tires travel further over normal use, because of turning and such? Or is that just for bicycles?

Re:Read / write cycles

[loyukfai]

Manufacturers have been claiming different "write cycle" figures but I read somewhere that the inherent write cycles for each address block is 10k (for MLC NAND) and 100k (for SLC NAND) as of now.

Through the use of wear leveling technologies, manufacturers are able to raise the theoretical write cycles by many times through.

So one has to be careful about this "write cycle" thing.

One thing I'm not sure is the shelf life of flash memory. Say if John saves some photos on his USB flash drive, put it in the safe. Assuming John still has a PC which can recognize and use the drive, will the data still be readable after 10 or 20 years...?

Re:Read / write cycles

[shentino]

SMART for flash drives anyone?

Re:I thought that all flash was already long lifed

[dannycim]

I can put 2 GB of plain text on a USB key, and leave it with how to implement the USB standard on paper, put the things in a thick plastic bag, etc.

In the correct environment, it will last for a long long time.

The paper will rot nicely due to its intrinsic acid content, the platic will out-gas and gum up everything near (and inside) it, then crumble into dust, the dielectric material in the key's capacitors will dry up and the resultant change in capacitance will render the circuit non-operative.

Give enough time, everything fails.

Re:I thought that all flash was already long lifed

[apathy maybe]

Acid free paper exists. And if you want, you could write on metal sheets (using a variety of languages), being in a water and air tight container (see below), we would expect them to not corrode.

But more to the point, if you take appropriate precautions, you can make things last a long time.

So, if plastic has problems (which I hadn't heard about), don't use it. Use something equally water and air tight that doesn't have those problems.

And I never said the thing would last forever.

Given enough time, heat death of the universe.

The key might last 100 years...

[Viol8]

... 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!

Re:The key might last 100 years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Libraries are in the business of keeping old tech. I'm sure given a large enough library with the budget to gather and maintain all of our current tech we'd be quite able to access it in 100 years. That doesn't mean people other than librarians and scientists doing archival studies would want to look at it, though. Look at microfilm, which is the current standard for archival of old papery things. Its rate of use is extremely low except for a few college students and researchers. I think most technology is eventually 'forgotten' like this as the technical knowhow to use it falls out of public consciousness to make room for the next new development.

I expect in another 100 years we'll have direct-from-brain transfer of information to and from our implanted minicomputers, which would be connected to an internet-like system so mind-bogglingly huge it contained all the libraries' data already. Who would bother with the slow loading times of a usb key in a clunky old computer? Unless of course, our implants came with the appropriate ports!

Re:The key might last 100 years...

[Viol8]

"I expect in another 100 years we'll have direct-from-brain transfer of information to and from our implanted minicomputers"

Meh , that crops up all the time in sci-fi and futuroligist stuff. I'm not convinced. The technology may become available but I doubt many people apart from a few techno fetischists and body piercing types would really want a machine plugged into their body full time, much less their brains.

Re:The key might last 100 years...

[Amorymeltzer]

You clearly haven't heard of the iPod, it seems.

Re:The key might last 100 years...

[Viol8]

Heh , pity I don't have mod points, that made me smile :) Its so true.

Re:The key might last 100 years...

[Hatta]

The lack of moving parts makes it much easier to implement a reader for these things, rather than floppies, etc.

Re:The key might last 100 years...

[Alioth]

Using electronic memory is far easier than say, a disc. With a disc, you need a lot of precision mechanical stuff in addition to electronics. With a semiconductor, you don't need all the mechanical stuff. It would take me about 45 minutes to make a circuit on breadboard to read a ROM that was made in 1975 onto a modern MacBook Pro. To homebrew a laser disc player would probably be two years work.

Re:The key might last 100 years...

[Free the Cowards]

I would have doubted that many people want to talk into a little plastic box all day, or shove magnets into their ears and shut themselves off from the world, or get electronic messages from work in their pocket twenty four hours a day, but here we are.

Re:The key might last 100 years...

[ucblockhead]

It all depends on how successful the format is. It's trivial to read a CD, and that is twenty-five year old tech.

Re:The key might last 100 years...

[Viol8]

If theres a choice between having something plugged into you or dying the choice is pretty clear. If its just so you can have quicker access to the internet I think most people would say no.

"but if the entire computer is inside them they really won't care."

Speak for yourself.

How do you plug this thing?

[Spassoklabanias]

On top of that and given how quickly hardware manufacturers decide to change the way parts connect to eachother, what's the point of having 100 years old flash memory archives and no way (at least for the everyday user) to use it?

Re:How do you plug this thing?

[LeandroTLZ]

I have some 5 1/4" floppy disks in a box somewhere. I bet that I can plug a 5 1/4" disk drive to my computer and it will work; it still has the connector for floppies. So there you have a medium that is still compatible with modern computers 32 years after creation.

More, 3 1/2" floppy disks were introduced in 1984 and I still see drives for those regularly, 24 years later. They're still being sold, and new 3 1/2" drives with USB plugs are sold for the everyday user.

With that in mind, I see no reason why we won't be seeing USB ports in 2108. Sure, they'll be USB version 20 ports at 3TB/s transfer rate, but I'm willing to bet they'll recognize a USB 1.0 storage device just as well.

That's what flash looks like under a microscope

[Joce640k]

And that's why it wears out. Apparently.

Who needs FIVE commands, anyway?

[neokushan]

10 cls
20 Print "First"
30 Print "Post"
40 goto 10

Umm .. MRAM anybody?

[djtachyon]

I just received some samples of military grade MRAM recently. 4MB, "infinite" writes, "infinite" lifetime, -55C - 125C operating range, lower power than DRAM, and 35ns cycle times.

Fairchild has been making MRAM for awhile now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAM

Re:Umm .. MRAM anybody?

[djtachyon]

Correction, make that Freescale Semi, not Fairchild. Going to be a long day.

Re:Umm .. MRAM anybody?

[mgblst]

-55C to -125C - really? I can't see that being very useful. Except for a trip to Neptune.

Re:Umm .. MRAM anybody?

[djtachyon]

-40C to +125C .. silly.

Re:Umm .. MRAM anybody?

[Kentari]

-55C to -125C - really? I can't see that being very useful. Except for a trip to Neptune.

-55: How about Antarctica, The North Pole, Canada in Winter, Siberia, ...

125: Stuff near big engines, in rockets, in jets, ... Cooling electronics in a tank in the middle of a 60 degree desert ain't that easy, for example (Big ventilation holes just make interesting targets for RPGs).

Because you don't need in such circumstances, doesn't mean noone needs it. And if there's something good at making up needs in extreme conditions it's the military...

Re:Umm .. MRAM anybody?

[Alioth]

Pity it's so expensive - from my usual electronics supplier it's over an order of magnitude more expensive than NOR flash of the same size.

Re:Umm .. MRAM anybody?

[dave420]

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 :)

Re:Umm .. MRAM anybody?

[Kilroy]

whooosh.

Full circle

[zakezuke]

For the home market

Solid State Cartridge
Tape
Magnetic Disc
Optical Disc

So what are we back to?

Solid State Cartridge

So so long as they make 5 inch jewel cases to store them.

Re:Full circle

[Hatta]

I really hope game cartridges come back. Discs just don't do it for me the way popping a cartridge into a console does.

Re:Full circle

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah that whole "Disc Read Error" doesn't happen with my DS playing old games.

Re:Full circle

[Vegeta99]

Cartridges aren't all that much better, unless Super Mario Brothers is supposed to flash a blue screen every other second...

Re:Full circle

[bluefoxlucid]

Replace your ZIF reader with one that doesn't use a cheap, volatile alloy prone to oxidization.

Good but....

[Kingston]

Not the biggest problem with flash memory. Typical MLC NAND flash is rated at 10k write cycles. This is the sort of flash you find in older cheaper usb keys, sd cards etc. For a typical application like a camera or an mp3 player if you completely filled and emptied the storage once a week they could, in theory, last 200 years.

High performance SLC NAND flash that you find in SSD drives and higher end flash cards and keys is typically rated at 100k write cycles. These devices usually have bad block management and wear levelling to maximise the life of the device.

A "netbook" with a half full 8gb nand flash drive that wrote 4gb of swap, tmp files, logs and data to disk every day could last, in theory, over 200 years although the bad block management would have shrunk the size of the device by then. Even if these figures were only 20 years that's more than enough for most uses. HD manufacturers usually recommend you retire your HD after six or seven years. If you have an application that needs to be nv but has a huge number of write cycles then battery backed SDRAM is available now.

I think the problems with flash storage are size, cost and throughput. With SLC NAND wear is not such a big issue any more.

Domesday, not Doomsday

[Mathinker]

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.

Hammer delete

[KlaymenDK]

A good whack with a hammer should do it.

For hard drives, even damaged ones can be put back together if you do it carefully enough. I'm no specialist, but I doubt you could do that with ~50 shards of a flash chip.

Re:Hammer delete

[SatanicPuppy]

Second vote for hammer; there is nothing like good old bft for making media unreadable.

No matter how many times you write 1's and 0's across your drive, it's not going to be as secure as a good whack with a sledgehammer.

Re:Hammer delete

[bluefoxlucid]

False. A whack on a hard drive is not as secure as the Gutmann Shredding Algorithm. A single scrape across a physical NAND cell is; but NAND uses a tunnel injection and tunnel release, so unless you reduce a chip uniformly to nano-scale dust, you might still have useful data somewhere that can be extracted by TEM. Highly unlikely that you could reconstruct sense from dust, but doable.

In either case, fire to melting works.

disappointed

[crimperman]

On my feed reader this story is shown as "Japanese Scientist's Develop Long-Life.." which sounded much more interesting.

This is not flash ram

[infolib]

First, the real links. I don't know why the blogger didnt't include them, and I don't think this should have gone on the front page without them. Oh well, there's always the comments...

Novel Ferroelectric NAND Flash Memory Cell Demonstrates 10000 Times More Program and Erase cycles than Conventional Memory Cells (AIST press release, surprisingly science-dense).
Highly Scalable Fe(Ferroelectric)-NAND Cell - contribution to the Non-Volatile Semiconductor Memory Workshop, 2008 (you may have access to only the abstract).

This is NOT flash ram, it's ferroelectric RAM. This doesn't matter much to the consumer who can use it much the same way, but it's a different principle. Apparently they've (semi-)tested 100 million r/w cycles, and expect that it can hold data for 10 years (extrapolated from some curve). Besides, it uses a lower voltage than flash, and they expect it to scale down further. Nice. It even looks like it might work. SSDs for teh win :-)

Re:This is not flash ram

[infolib]

Nope, core is ferromagnetic. Ferromagnetic materials are named after "Ferrum" (iron), because they are alike in that when you put them in a strong magnetic field they'll become little magnets and stay that way, even when the field is gone. Incidentally core was made of ferrite (iron oxide).

Ferroelectric is named after ferromagnetic, because it's the same, only with electric polarization: If you put a ferroelectric in a strong electric field it will become positively charged on one end, and negatively on the other, and then stay that way even if the field is removed. Some crystals (Barium titanate and others) can do that by all the molecules in the array distorting, so the positive and negative ions move a little in opposite directions.

Now, if you put a little piece of crystal between two leads you can polarize it that way, and if you put the gate of a transistor near one end, it will open or close depending on the charge there. Now you can write the bit by choosing the polarity of the two leads, and read it by measuring the current through the transistor.

Crash-Proof Storage!

[StCredZero]

If you used wear-leveling on drives built like this, you could market Crash Proof Hard Drives! They could be constructed to be immune to shock, and wear-leveling could make them last many decades. Hot-swappable RAID appliances using these would be awesome.

Okay, then...

[DrYak]

The guy (or gal) was etching those stones using a friggin' lightning bolt from his cloud in the sky...

Okay, then either god is less skilled than a toddler, or god is a fucking camping snipper.

Happy, now ?

Re:Okay, then...

[ProfessionalCookie]

God camps everywhere...all of thee time.

No future for digital archives

[Anonymous Coward]

In the digital computer age, 100 years is more than enough for "archival", heck we haven't even had digital storage (in practice) half that long. Like any library or archive, maintainance is the key, and to maintain a digital archive it's not more than reasonable to move contents to newer media when it becomes more practical to do so.

Storage space has followed Moore's law rather well, and if you use a building to physically store storage digital content today, in a hundred years you would need a wrist-watch to store the same amount. Hence, it would make no sense but to move the data.

Also, the demands for how easy it should be for us citizens (if we're speaking of public records) to access the data, it would make absolutely no sense to keep the data on a medium we will consider obsolete in a decade or two. However, with the current flash discs, for how long can you safely store data? A year, 5 years? An entire decade?

100 years of more or less "guaranteed" life is far enough to be comfortable storing archive materials.

However, I can't but help to think about the reasons for "archives" of digital content. Ten years ago people started to have the capacity to store an entire library of books on their computer. Today we can store all the worlds books on our computers. In 5-10 years it will be practically possible to quickly download them over the internet (legally or illegally). In 20 years we will be able to walk around with all the worlds books in our pocket computers (todays cell phones / PDA's). In 30 years we'll have the possibility to store all the worlds books on our wrist-watch. In 40-50 years maybe all the photos and movies we can possible get our hands on, on each of ours wrist-watches.

Again, I can't help but to question the reason for digital archives, when we'll in a not-too-distant future will have billions of people walking around with all books (and knowledge?) in the world in the pockets, literally.
However, with the constant decline in education amongst the youths, what's the chance people will be able to read any of these books in 40 years anyway?

One wonders for what good today's technical development is meant.

We'll probably be happier and happier, while being dumber and dumber, more and more brain washed with propaganda, all tied up and connected to an enormous corporate enterprise grid with our Level 3 RFID's, being satisfied in life as long as we can try to get the Level-9-shield-of-bogus or be swallowed up in another entertainment puddle of mud, and perhaps not even need seeing people in real life, but only through our digital and pathetic image of ourselves not understanding that we aren't just slaves to trends but slaves to what we have created.

Will a /. article cover these questions?

These are the questions...

See grammar is important after all!

[VirginMary]

> I would hardly call 100 years archival. In some exceptional cases its within the memory span of a single human individual.

The article said "potential lifetime of hundreds of years." "Hundreds" being plural is different from "hundred" being singular!

Or...

[Nerdposeur]

...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.

Teenage mutant ninja scientists?

[chord.wav]

Japanese Scientists Develop Long-Life Flash Memory

Anyone else thought they've mutated by experimenting on themselves? I have to stop seeing anime...

Already achieved?

[francisstp]

The SSD vs HDD benchmark discussed yesterday estimated the life of the Samsung FlashSSD and OCZ SATA II at "over 350 years with 50GB of write-erase ops per day."

Is therer a major difference between these drives and the Nand Flash (aside from the 10 nm cells)?

What's the "Stick it in a Drawer" lifespan?

[RailRide]

All I've heard so far is debate on how long flash RAM will last while being constantly thrashed with read/write cycles. But what I'd like to know is how long data can be expected to remain intact on a typical flash drive that you just throw a bunch of files on and subsequently stick in a drawer and forget about, or at very least infrequently read from.

I keep a lot of files (mostly art projects) backed up on 2 or 3 seperate hard drives, but while any current project is progress, they tend to reside on a flash drive. Oh, they get rewritten to a couple of dozen times between scanning and completion, but once complete (and backed up) I tend to just leave the project folder on the drive, and when the drive gets close to filling up, I stick it in a drawer and buy another one. Should I expect to be able to call those "retired" drives backups as well, or will the integrity of the data likely deteriorate after a few years like a late model 3.5" floppy

---PCJ