Disk Drives Face Challenge From Chips

WSJdpatton writes "Researchers are reporting significant progress in perfecting a different way to store data in semiconductors, which could replace one widely used type of memory chip and possibly become a credible competitor to disk drives. The researchers, in a paper being delivered at a technical conference in San Francisco, say they used a novel combination of materials to create prototype phase-change components that are more than 500 times as fast as flash chips, while requiring less than half of the electrical power to record data."

Yeah, but

[Keyslapper (852034)]

What is the storage density, and will it still be feasible when this finally comes to market in 10 years?

Re:Yeah, but

[TubeSteak (669689)]

Does the storage density really matter? At least initially?

Even if the first unit they put out is 2x [standard size of whatever] but 500x as fast & uses less battery power... don't you think there's going to be a market for it?

Re:Yeah, but

[Keyslapper (852034)]

Possibly. If I had to give up a 360G platter drive to put in a 120G phase drive, I'd probably do it - so long as the cost favored the phase drive.

I'd probably still keep the platter drive for secondary storage and put the OS and critical apps/servers/whatever on the phase drive though.

I wouldn't pay twice as much for a drive with half the head room though - even if it is 500X faster. That kind of speed (and especially power consumption) may be a big deal for notebooks, but if density is really a problem, the notebooks would probably have to give up a lot more headroom - relatively speaking. We're finally seeing 200G notebook drives, but keep in mind they're tiny compared to your standard laptop drive. If the new phase drives can store the same or more data in the same space, then yeah, I definitely see the end of the platter drive in mainstream use - once the supply outweighs the demand enough to make it financially realistic. If they can put no more than 30G in a notebook drive, then I think it'll take a couple product generations for that to happen.

Formats

[symbolset (646467)]

Ina remarkable case of technology amnesia, the same idiots that standardized on FAT for flash media for devices are now touting the amazing formatting capacity of FAT32 - An astonishing 32GB! As if in four years that's going to be a lot for flash media you don't have to handle with tweezers.

So run out, children, and buy your SD 2.0 standard devices while they're not yet obsolete. That way you can buy your camera again and again for no good reason.

Good news

[fatduck (961824)]

FTA:

The chip industry is racing to find a replacement for flash memory, because the technology is expected to leak electrical current unacceptably when manufacturers shrink chip circuitry beyond certain dimensions.

This is the important part. Good to see someone addressing the oft-ignored failures of flash.

Re:Good news

[tttonyyy (726776)]

Arguably, this is the important part, and one reason why Flash would never have been a good replacement for a HD even if the speed issues were resolved:

Flash memory is popular because it retains data without a constant electric charge. Such chips aren't usually used in place of disk drives, because of their higher cost and because there are limits on how many times data can be written. Phase-change memory doesn't have that problem

(emphasis mine)

Re:Good news

[el_womble (779715)]

Do you really believe that harddisks don't fail?

The difference is that flash fails with writes (not reads) and HDD fails with reads AND writes (bad sectors?). Early flash failed after only 10,000 writes per sector, newer flash is in the millions. Flash spreads the writes around, so to reduce the chance of any one sector failing and can do this because flash is genuinely RAM (unlike HDD where location affects transfer speed). Both HDD and SSD employ firmware stratergies that hide sector failure from the OS, only flash can do that without any real cost to performance.

The end result is that if either are working after 3 or 4 years your doing well, and should really be looking for a replacement unit.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Do you really believe that harddisks don't fail?

No, but HDDs are amongst the most reliable storage media. A good, well-built SCSI drive can last for much, much longer than 3-4 years. I've personally seen hard drives as old 10 years functioning without a hitch. RAID can very much mitigate the risks associated with keeping drives around that long, too.

Re:Good news

[BeBoxer (14448)]

The end result is that if either are working after 3 or 4 years your doing well, and should really be looking for a replacement unit.

Wow! I never suspected. You should probably let Seagate know. I'm sure they will want to rethink their 5 year warranty.

Perhaps you buy really cut rate drives, but in my experience hard drives almost always outlast their usefulness. I've disposed of more drives due to a combination of obsolete busses and pathetic capacity than outright failures. If you are really seeing high failure rates after only three years, you should be looking for some external factor because that isn't normal.

Re:Good news

[darkmeridian (119044)]

I always thought that using a hybrid system with a flash memory and a hard drive would be great. Every time the boot configuration changes, write a new "hibernation file" to the flash memory, and then boot from that. Furthermore, the code calls for each application as it starts up could be written to the flash memory. Indeed, the most-accessed binaries can be copied onto the flash memory, as space permits. Such a system would decrease boot times and quicken application start times while reducing the risk of burning out the flash memory over the average life of the computer/drive.

Re:

[IDontAgreeWithYou (829067)]

"oft-ignored" - I do not think that means what you thnk it means. Every time someone mentions using flash in place of a hard drive, nearly 80% (totally made up number) of the comments are about the rewrite limits of flash memory. I mean there are at least 10 comments below yours that mention it already.

No more harddrives?

[CronicBurn (316845)]

Interesting read, however I don't see these things holding a useful amount of data by 2010. Even if they can get 4G capacity on these chips it still wont replace hard drives that hold terabytes of data.

Although it could make really cool applications for OS installs. Could you imagine your favorite OS installed on something as fast or faster then today's RAM? I don't want to think about the cost of 4G of this stuff though. *shiver*

Re:No more harddrives? YES!

[denis-The-menace (471988)]

I can see as this memory becomes faster, cheaper and more reliable to replace system memory, too. I can even see the stuff become so cheap that backing all the info will become cost prohibitive, something like how tape backup systems cost way more today than a 2nd hard drive, but an order of magnatude higher.

The irony is that this would explain why in the future (à-la-Star-Trek), backups of the computer's memory doesn't exist and cause improbable storylines for us system admins.

Re:

[Daniel Dvorkin (106857)]

I don't want to think about the cost of 4G of this stuff though. *shiver*

[shrug] A decade ago, I'd never even seen a machine with 4GB RAM, and five years ago, I'd only ever seen that much RAM in monstrously expensive servers. Now I have a machine with that much RAM on my desk. (And yes, I use it; most of my work is pretty heavy number-crunching.) So if this stuff turns out to be viable, it'll get there.

Actually, a better comparison just occurred to me: about fifteen years ago, I paid an extra thousand

Re:No more harddrives?

[Ngarrang (1023425)]

I don't think the hard drive will disappear completely, but as the costs come down, the companies cannot make money producing the smaller capacity drives. We will see 1Tb hard drives readily available someday, sure thing. But different people have different needs. Hard drives are beginning to augment backup strategies because they have become so cheap and high in capacity.

A solid state drive has a higher G-shock tolerance, is quieter and requires less power than a hard drive. These features are why the technology is attractive to the people who need it. And not everyone needs a hard drive that is 400gb in size. Network appliances may only need a small 1gb boot drive, and these kind of devices will need this new phase-change memory, or whatever will work for the task beyond flash.

It would be cool to have something like this that is your main memory AND your storage space in one. We could call it Run-In-Place. We could then have a instant-on computers. Just imagine Windows XP or Linux booting up in under 3 seconds!

Technology description

[in2mind (988476)]

From the company developing it - Ovonyx:

http://www.ovonyx.com/tech_html.html [ovonyx.com]

http://www.ovonyx.com/ovonyxtech.html [ovonyx.com]

Ita about time

[El Lobo (994537)]

Today the bottleneck of the whole system lies in the hard drive. This is the only mechanical part (fans excluded) of a computer. It's about time to find a solution for large storage that doesn't depends on an arm swinging and moving back and forward through a fragmented file system....

The real challage is price.

[jellomizer (103300)]

Hard Disk Drives now are about $0.50 a Gigabyte. Flash is now about $25.00 a Gigabyte. 3 1/2" Floppy disks about $250.00 per Gigabyte. So it is natural for the Flash Memory cards to replace the floppies as they did. Better speed and better cost/Gigabyte. But right now Hard Drive technology is really cheap. If this new design can match prices/gigabyte of a hard drive then the Disk Drives will need a real challenge. Otherwise This new technology may only be a threat to Flash, or used with drives in hybrid mode for faster disk access. But not until then.

Price is a major driving force in memory.

CPU Registers are the fastest but most expensive (very small amount is used)
Cache is the next fastest and the second most expensive. (4 Megs or so)

Then comes normal RAM Memory Still slower then Cache and cheaper normally systems now have about a Gig or 2 of that.

If price wasn't a case Computers wouldn't have much RAM but all Cache, or huge amount of registers. But in real life price is the final decision.

 

Re:The real challage is price.

[stevesliva (648202)]

If price wasn't a case Computers wouldn't have much RAM but all Cache, or huge amount of registers. But in real life price is the final decision

Actually in systems where price is no object, performance is usually paramount. If you have astounding amounts of registers or cache, your performance per instruction or memory operation may be slower. Given the fact that we can manufacture dual-core dies with ease, I imagine we could easily fit a bazillion more registers or double the L1 cache of a single core, but there is a performance trade-off there.

Re:

[WuphonsReach (684551)]

Hard Disk Drives now are about $0.50 a Gigabyte.

You're a bit on the high side there... SATA/PATA drives are down around $0.28-$0.32 per gigabyte and have been for a while. The sweet spot seems to be the 250GB drives for $70, with the 200GB, 300GB, 400GB sizes at around $0.32/GB.

(Which hasn't changed a whole lot in the past few months. But Seagate's 7200.10 series is one of the cheaper $/GB drives on the market even though it's brand new tech.)

On our way to the future

[CopaceticOpus (965603)]

Can't we just skip ahead to the transparent crystals that glow in various colors and store almost limitless data? We all know that's where this is heading.

Maybe we need to perfect holographic 3D displays first?

Bah

[feijai (898706)]

Still won't be able to compete with the sheer density of colored symbols on A4 paper [arabnews.com].

Re:Cost is what matters

[kansas1051 (720008)]

Wikipedia(as always) has a good article on the technology. It looks like the write time is currently about 5ns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_memory [wikipedia.org] What is really interesting is that the technology is generally temperature based.

Re:

[shaneh0 (624603)]

"The chips won't work in brown devices."

dirty f'in racist chips.

Re:

[Easy2RememberNick (179395)]

With or without milk?