Hynix 48-GB Flash MCP 129
Hal_Porter writes to let us know that the third-largest NAND chip maker, Hynix, has announced they have stacked 24 flash chips in a 1.4mm thick multi-chip package. It's not entirely clear from the article whether the resulting 48-GB device is a proof of concept or a product. The article extrapolates to 384 GB of storage in a single package, sometime. Hal_Porter adds: "It's not clear if it's possible to write to them in parallel — if so the device should be pretty damn fast. The usual objection to NAND flash as a hard drive replacement is lifetime. NAND sectors can only be written 100,000 times or so before they wear out, but wear leveling can be done to spread writes evenly over at least each chip. I worked out that the lifetime should be much longer than a typical magnetic hard disk. There's no information on costs yet frankly and it sounds like an expensive proof of concept, but it shows you the sort of device that will take over from small hard disks in the next few years."
48 GB = 384Gb (Score:5, Informative)
Re:48 GB = 384Gb (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why only 100,000 times (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, the upshot of this is that because you have to constantly burn charge through the insulator to use the part, eventually you basically burn out the insulator and cause it to leak charge. Once it starts leaking, you lose your stored bits and the part is useless.
Re:NAND flash writes (Score:4, Informative)
Commercial products in the high-end flash space are promising 500,000+ writes.
We are not talking about glorified thumb-drive flash memory here, but decent chips with good wear leveling and high quality construction.
Re:HyperDrive4 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.computers4sure.com/product.asp?product
I guess it may be somewhat faster, but both are approaching the limits of what you can push through a sata interface.
Not parallel (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why only 100,000 times (Score:5, Informative)
Flash Cell stackup (same for NOR and NAND, the interconnection of cells determines what type of array it is):
ONO - Oxide/Nitride/Oxide layer
FG - Floating Gate (Poly)
tOx - Tunnel Oxide (very thin)
Si - wafer (NPN/PNP wells)
Re:Flash lifespan in persective (Score:3, Informative)
Having said all of that, I don't think my throughput is anything like 2Gb, and most of it would be swap (hasn't happened much this past couple of years) and
Re:What about RAID? (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2_(storage_media) [wikipedia.org]
From the wiki: The P2 Card is essentially a RAID of SD memory cards