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Japanese Scientists Develop Long-Life Flash Memory
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Jul 16, 2008 04:38 AM
from the degrades-gracefully-too dept.
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."
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Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
10nm get you anyting you want baby, me so info-dense, baby, me so info-dense. Me store you long time.
Parent
What is the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What is the point? (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.
Parent
Re:What is the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> 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
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You never worked for my old boss.
Re:What is the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [iconbar.com]
Parent
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
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' ;)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, snap!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What is the point? (Score:4, 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.
Parent
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 f
Re: (Score:2)
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 t
Re: (Score:2)
Hmmm... that's an interesting one... What is the procedure for securely erasing a flash disk? 30 seconds in the microwave?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ex
if you write real small (Score:5, Funny)
Stone tablets will last even longer!
Re:if you write real small (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, even God can only fit 5 commands on a single stone tablet.
Parent
Re:if you write real small (Score:5, Funny)
the fact that any three year old can do better is probably one of the stronger proofs that god, indeed, does not exist.
Parent
Or... (Score:5, Funny)
god, indeed, does not exist.
...Or is even less skilled than a toddler.
Parent
Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
The guy (or gal) was etching those stones using a friggin' lightning bolt from his cloud in the sky... that's pretty damned impressive.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
that's the first time I've been laughing out loud at moderation... metamods please reward that mod :)
That's what flash looks like under a microscope (Score:3, Funny)
And that's why it wears out. Apparently.
Or... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:if you write real small (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Parent
Re:if you write real small (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
People would still covet each other's wives and oxen?
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
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.
I thought that all flash was already long lifed. (Score:2)
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.)
Re:I thought that all flash was already long lifed (Score:5, Insightful)
(Bonus exercise for the reader: Calculate the lifetime of these chips in libraries of congress written!)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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 enou
Re: (Score:2)
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 dea
How long does today's flash memory last? (Score:2)
Anyone experts on this subject?
Re: (Score:2)
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 Fla
Excellent work. (Score:2)
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
Improvements reading the data? (Score:2)
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.
Read / write cycles (Score:5, Informative)
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.
The key might last 100 years... (Score:3, Insightful)
... 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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
"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... (Score:4, Funny)
You clearly haven't heard of the iPod, it seems.
Parent
Umm .. MRAM anybody? (Score:4, Interesting)
Fairchild has been making MRAM for awhile now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAM [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not flash ram (Score:3, Informative)
Novel Ferroelectric NAND Flash Memory Cell Demonstrates 10000 Times More Program and Erase cycles than Conventional Memory Cells [aist.go.jp] (AIST press release, surprisingly science-dense).
Highly Scalable Fe(Ferroelectric)-NAND Cell [ieee.org] - 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 [wikipedia.org]. 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