New flash memory chip

[Gary - K7GLD]

With the ability to use 1 or 2 of these for primary data storage, I wonder why we bother with hard drives?



My Way News - Samsung Develops New Flash Memory Chip

 

[ACoyle]

I think 64 GB flash drives are mega pricy yet, of course that will change.



Still a long way off of 1 TB hard drives which are available.



My only problem is - Do I know a terabyte worth of stuff? :-laf

 

[jkalchik]

Don't be too quick to jump on solid state disk technology. My understanding is that flash memory does have it's own pitfalls, including sector failure. The newer flash controllers do take this into account, and try to even the usage across the device.

Eventually, I do suspect that we will get away from both rotating magnetic and linear magnetic storage (read: disk and tape) in favor of something else. I don't think it'll be flash.

 

[fest3er]

There are two main reasons flash memory won't yet replace hard drives. First, flash has a limited life: it can only endure 10,000 to 100,000 write-erase cycles before it starts to fail. Second, writing flash RAM is slow; it takes around 1ms to write flash, where-as reads are down around 10ns.

That said, flash ram is very good for persistent storage. One very good use of an 8GB flash device would be to store an ISO-9660 image containing the static, unchanging parts of a unix-ish root filesystem. All the dynamic data (system settings, logs) could be stored on a hard drive. (Windows could benefit from this too, but it really wants all the system stuff on the C: drive. ) The main benefit would be far faster program execution; flash is a good deal faster than a hard drive, when reading. The other big advantage is that is is more impervious to unwanted changes (virii & trojans).

There are a few companies working on holographic storage devices. Optical, no moving parts, and very high densities. The next five years should be interesting.

 

[nickleinonen]

and just a few years back, my 512mb usb stick was top of the line. . now they are giving away 4gb ones...

My only problem is - Do I know a terabyte worth of stuff?

i don't, but a whole wack of movies and music downloads makes one fill up pretty quick [i filled my 500gb worth on my pc pretty quick. need to get an ext 1Tb to store the stuff i don't use regularly]

 

[fest3er]

... My only problem is - Do I know a terabyte worth of stuff? :-laf

I'm getting close. I've filled around 350GB of the 1080GB I have here.



N

 

[catoiler]

That said, flash ram is very good for persistent storage. One very good use of an 8GB flash device would be to store an ISO-9660 image containing the static, unchanging parts of a unix-ish root filesystem. All the dynamic data (system settings, logs) could be stored on a hard drive. (Windows could benefit from this too, but it really wants all the system stuff on the C: drive. ) The main benefit would be far faster program execution; flash is a good deal faster than a hard drive, when reading. The other big advantage is that is is more impervious to unwanted changes (virii & trojans)

Yep got one of the pc set up that way with PC-OS works great!!(you got to love linux!)