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Hardware

Flash Memory And Its future 197

Posted by timothy from the let-the-insecurities-out dept.
NETHED writes "C|NET News is running an article about Flash Memory's future. Here is a How Stuff Works link about Flash memory. An interesting read especially considering how small these things are currently. Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?"
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Flash Memory And Its future More

Flash Memory And Its future

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  • ...have a new size benchmark.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dynoman7 ( 188589 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:34AM (#5629609) Homepage
    volkswagons are small, right?

  • well... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:35AM (#5629610)
    Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?"

    less than 6 inches?
    • My vote is that the new benchmark be the caffine Molecule

    • Re:well... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Usquebaugh ( 230216 )
      Well,

      The Timothy or the Timmy. As explained by :-

      The number of intelligent stories posted by a Timothy in a year.

      The IQ of a Timothy.

      How many times a Timothy posts opinion as a comment and not as story.

      See we're talking really,realy low numbers here.

      Go on my karma can take it.

  • New size benchmark... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dissonant7 ( 572834 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:35AM (#5629618)
    "Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?"

    LoC \ cm^2 ?

  • In regards to measuring... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Eric_Cartman_South_P ( 594330 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:36AM (#5629622)
    ...I find it usefull to measure very, very short periods of time in "Maxtor hard drive MTBF" units.

    • i never have problems with Maxtor Drives, perhaps i just have excellent luck of the draw, but 90% of my systems use them, seagate and Western digital however, i have lots of problems with.
      • I have to agree with you. I've got 4 Maxtor drives running currently (2x40's, 80, 120). I don't think I've ever had one fail since the modern era (which I consider the "over 4 GB" era of HDs). I have had 2 Seagates fail.

        If you go back far enough, every manufacturer has had times in their history where they made crap. I've seen Seagate, Maxtor, WD, and others all have specific models that had > 5% 1st year failure rates, which is way, way too high. But they're all pretty good now.
    • How true, I have used WD hard drives since I started assembling my own computers, and never had a problem. Bought two Maxtors a couple of months ago, and both have died, while my 3 y/o WD still works perfect. Maxtor really sux!

  • News Flash! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rooked_One ( 591287 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:39AM (#5629638) Journal
    Make it small enough to power a gameboy sized device and run GLQuake and then get back to me. I've already lost my current cellphone in my pocket. Anyone ever seen that show "Trigger Happy TV" with the guy with the overly ginormous phone? THATS the phone for me.
  • it's how you use it!

  • Posting... (Score:5, Funny)

    by NETHED ( 258016 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:43AM (#5629655) Homepage
    You know, after I pushed submit to the story, I wondered, "will this get posted because it is an interesting read" or "will this get posted because the Slashdot crowd wants to talk about thier penis size". 6 comments down, and I've got my answer.
    • Hey its not about the size you got. Were hackers here on slashdot... were good at using what we got to do more than anyone else could.
      • Hey its not about the size you got. Were hackers here on slashdot... were good at using what we got to do more than anyone else could.

        Is that why your sig is all UNIX commands rather than a link to your sexual conquests?

  • Damn (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:44AM (#5629656) Homepage
    Oh, howstuffworks.com, not The Way Things Work. I was looking forward to a good explanation involving mammoths.

  • I thought IBM had the small size (Score:3, Insightful)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:45AM (#5629659) Journal
    wern't they inscribing everything on the head of a pin? Of course, if they were doing the Bill of Rights, they could probably fit a lot more of them on there these days.

    Next on Ask Slashdot: How small is your 'Library of Congress'? Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge.

  • Compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)

    by birdman666 ( 144812 ) <[ericreid] [at] [mac.com]> on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:47AM (#5629665) Homepage
    Until all these companies find a standard that they can agree upon, we'll never see the supposed benefits of the advances in this technology. Just look at compact flash/memory stick/ MMC/SD/ whatever else is out there to plug into your camera/phone/palm. There's too many for any of them to have any real universal utility.

    • Re:Compatibility (Score:2, Interesting)

      by The Zody ( 635829 )
      Well if you take a look at the current PDA market, you will realize that many PDA's have both Flash and SD slots, due to the fact that currently each provides different benefits.

    • Re:Compatibility (Score:2, Insightful)

      by MrFredBloggs ( 529276 )
      Whats wrong with just sticking a USB2 port on the devices and using USB Flash Drives? Works for me.
    • It seems like that device makers have sortof agreed on a standard. I can buy an mp3 player (ex. Nex IIe [frontierlabs.com]), a digital camera (ex. Canon EOS 1D [canon.ca]), and a PDA (ex. Sharp Zaurus [sharp-usa.com]) that all take CompactFlash. I could probably find a similar combination for the other types of flash memory, but I think they do not have the storage sizes that CF has right now (up to 1 GB, I think). I walked into a computer store the other day and saw desktop systems with built-in flash disk drives (one bay with four slots for the di

  • Small enough to handle, but no smaller (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:48AM (#5629669) Homepage Journal

    I used to like SmartMedia. Until I folded one in a backpack accidentally. It's too thin. The SD chits are almost too small for convenient use. There's a useful size for media, and not everyone can deal with fragile postage-stamp parts that need to get handled occasionally.

    I like CompactFlash. It's virtually indestructable, big enough to see on a messy desk, small enough to fit in a PDA nicely, and just the right form-factor for carrying a few with me on a digicam expedition. Replacing a flash card with a hard drive in the same form factor and bus connection, now that's cool. There are multiple vendors, each trying to push the boundaries of access speed and capacity. I know the addressing space is nearing a limit.

    And principally, it's not peppered with pounds of private proprietary protected patented perversions.

    • Have you seen the XD cards? I have a few and I'm so scared I'll lose them that I've purchased large plastic holders for them just so they don't get overlooked. These things are literally the size of my thumbnail. Too small...

    • Re:Small enough to handle, but no smaller (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Agreed, I'm not able to keep track of things smaller than a 35mm slide, and CompactFlash is perfect. Pretty soon they'll be up to the 10s of gig and that would be great for a small computer's (swappable) main storage.

      Plus the goddamn connectors are PROTECTED! What the fizzuck is up with all those formats with exposed metal pads??? Who was the genius that designed that? NO positive connection, you just put it in the slot and "hope it works!" CF cards are VERY durable (ever dropped one? washed one in your wa

    • Re:Small enough to handle, but no smaller (Score:5, Informative)

      by cgleba ( 521624 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:12AM (#5629918)
      Not to mention the one thing that everyone seems to forget:

      COMPACT FLASH IS THE SAME PINOUT AS IDE

      Yes, you can use a compact flash card as an IDE drive. I use them as my /boot partition on linux boxes with a nice rescue installation for when the drive arrays go beserk.

      They read slow (~4MB/s) and write slower (~2MB/s) but they're reliable and have no moving parts.

      It is for this reason [it is an IDE drive] that I feel compact flash rocks and is far more versitile then the rest of the formats.

      • Re:Small enough to handle, but no smaller (Score:4, Insightful)

        by WasterDave ( 20047 ) <davep&zedkep,com> on Monday March 31, 2003 @03:43AM (#5630154)
        Two provisos with this:

        1, Do not hot swap of an ordinary IDE controller. You will bork it.
        2, Do not put a swap partition onto a flash drive. You will find out REAL FAST how quickly you can get through 1 million writes.

        Dave

        • Two provisos with this:

          1, Do not hot swap of an ordinary IDE controller. You will bork it.
          2, Do not put a swap partition onto a flash drive. You will find out REAL FAST how quickly you can get through 1 million writes.

          Dave

          Amen. I have a Minolta Dimage 5 camera and I wondered why the right side of it gets so hot. So I pull out the Compact Flash card and it is DAMN HOT! If someone used this as a IDE swap partition I rather suspect that it would rapidly become a fire hazard if it did not completely immo
      • Although I can see that it has the same pinouts, how do you connect it exactly? I mean, the connector on the CF card is smaller than the connector on a regular IDE cable and I am not sure where should the power go and what voltage.
        But connecting my CFs to the IDE bus sounds cool, so I would be glad if you could give some details :)

        • Re:How do you connect it? (Score:4, Informative)

          by chrestomanci ( 558400 ) <david AT chrestomanci DOT org> on Monday March 31, 2003 @07:10AM (#5630522)

          Although I can see that it has the same pinouts, how do you connect it exactly? I mean, the connector on the CF card is smaller than the connector on a regular IDE cable and I am not sure where should the power go and what voltage.

          But connecting my CFs to the IDE bus sounds cool, so I would be glad if you could give some details :)

          Use one of these [linitx.com] to connect it to a spare IDE connector. The adaptor also needs power.

          Unfortunately, I have not seen any similar adaptors that connect to a laptop style connector (with power) because if there where it would make a cool direct HD replacement for an older laptop.

          • Unfortunately, I have not seen any similar adaptors that connect to a laptop style connector (with power) because if there where it would make a cool direct HD replacement for an older laptop.

            As mentioned above, that probably wouldn't be a good idea. Virtual memory gets rewritten a lot, and you may hit yout 1 million write limit.

          • Use one of these [linitx.com] to connect it to a spare IDE connector. The adaptor also needs power. Unfortunately, I have not seen any similar adaptors that connect to a laptop style connector (with power) because if there where it would make a cool direct HD replacement for an older laptop.
            Here's one: http://www.peeweelinux.com/products.html#cf25 [peeweelinux.com]

    • No smaller than a US nickel please. Dimes are my least favorite coin for this very reason--small enough to lose quite easily, yet way more valuable than pennies. Pennies are easy to lose too, but who cares? I routinely give them back to the cashiers for "penny karma".

      My data, of course, is worth more than a nickel. Ideally, the flash should be as cheap as a nickel, or better yet the nickel should be replaced as a national currency with however much flash fits in a nickel-shaped package.

      I mean, money

  • Benchmark? (Score:3, Funny)

    by lostchicken ( 226656 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:55AM (#5629694)
    What, like "1/4 fingernail sized"?
  • 128mb is now officially small. 256mb is now minimum I'll buy in CF.
  • Is flash memory the same stuff they'd use to allow you to save your games in old console cartridges such as Zelda for the NES or NBA Jam (TE) for Sega Gamegear etc in the same way the article mentions "memory cards for video game consoles"?

    • I have never gotten around to taking apart a game cartridge before, but I have seen in some of the translucent (it was a Game Boy color game)cases a battery like a CMOS battery. which leads me to belive that the data is sometimes carried on a volital RAM chip

      It would not surprise me if it varies on which cartrige uses what medium

      However with the advance of CD based systems, I guess that intergating the game saves on the game cartrige has gone the wayside

    • Re:In console cartridges... (Score:5, Informative)

      by freeweed ( 309734 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @01:19AM (#5629776)
      Nope. At least, certainly not for the mainstream consoles.

      The NES, SNES, etc used battery-backed RAM to save your game with. Things like flash memory were just too expensive (or didn't exist) back then. This is why a well-used Zelda cartridge doesn't save games very well after a few years, yet some of them still do even today - almost 20 years later. The secret? A simple CR2032 battery, at least in the NES carts. Yup, the same battery that most motherboards now use (do any still use those old battery boxes you hooked on with jumper pins?). Whenever I need to repair an NES cart, I'm sure to have a dead motherboard or 2 to scavenge from.

      I can't speak for GameGear, if it WAS batter backed it'd be a much smaller form-factor battery, I'd imagine. Any Slashdotters know?

    • Re:In console cartridges... (Score:5, Informative)

      by La Temperanza ( 638530 ) <temperanza@@@softhome...net> on Monday March 31, 2003 @01:23AM (#5629795)
      No, that was standard RAM kept working by a lithium battery, which in Zelda carts is often long dead. A lot of PC motherboards, even brand-new ones, still store BIOS settings this way. Those few cents of extra profit add up, I guess.
      • When most people say standard ram, they mean DRAM (Dynamic RAM) meaning the memory must be updated many times per second. This would require a significant current draw from the battery. I imaging these early cartridges used SRAM (Static RAM). This would mean the memory could be maintained by simply maintaining the voltage (with theoretically no current draw). I wonder if SRAM is used for much of anything any more, but at any rate, I just felt like being pedantic today. Sorry.

  • Money to be made... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gortbusters.org ( 637314 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @01:00AM (#5629710) Homepage Journal
    Billions of dollars ride on the challenge. Industry estimates forecast that flash revenue will hit $13 billion this year, up from $7.7 billion in 2002, according to Jim Handy, a memory services executive with Semico Research. By 2007, flash memory is expected to be a $43 billion industry.

    Despite the limitations of Flash memory that the article states, it appears that there will still be room for a lot of money in this industry. Given the current amount of products with flash memory, I doubt we'll see a big shift to a new technology. I'm guessing it'll be more like DVD-Rs. CDrs are still good, but in a few years I'm sure we'll all be burning on DVDs.

  • Some interesting additions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31, 2003 @01:03AM (#5629721)
    Well the article does seem to be slighly out of date since CF is now available in 4 GIG sizes.

    Pretty amazing, and when i think about it probably the best contender to actually replacing the floppy standard.

    Hard to belive that a few years ago the huge and easily destructible jaz disks were the alternative at 1 gig and slooooow speeds.

    What the article didn't mention is the write times which are also improving, but cost slighly more. And lastly the newbigg cards require devices (ie cameras) that support a 32 bit file system, most consumer digi cams can't write on those cards (2 gig and up although one of lareger ones is still 16 bit)

    Maciek
    I don't spell check and i can't type

  • Why not small hard-drives? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31, 2003 @01:07AM (#5629729)
    Why not use a small 20GB 1.8" hard-drive like the iPod does? I have a 3 Megapixel digital camera that uses a 64 MegaByte flash memory card. I'd much rather have a 20GB hard-drive in the the thing even if it did add 2 oz. of weight. Not an option for cell phones though obviously.
    • Hard drives burn to much power to be very pratical in anything portable. The iPod's battery life isn't to great, considering its size
      • Wow, you consider 15 hours from a portable the size of a deck of cards to be "not that great", you must be a youngun. When Sony first introduced the portable cd player you were lucky to get through 2 cd's on a set of 4 AA's. Also the good cameras already use the 1.8" HDD's look at any of the pro cameras to come out in the last year, chances are they support PC Card HDD's.
        • I guess cameras like Canon d-60 and the likes could count as "pro-cameras". They don't sport PC Card HDD's, but most of them support IBMs MicroDrives.

          Because the microdrives are slow, can't take much of a beating and pretty expensive, I've still to know a single photographer to use one... They all just get big CFs or loads of smaller CFs...

      • The iPod's battery life isn't to great, considering its size

        Well, I don't know what kind of digital camera you have, but my Toshisba PDR-M70 burns through batteries much faster than my iPod. I can use my iPod all day and still have power left over. My digital camera usually runs out of power before I can fill up the 64MB flash card.

    • Partial solution - devices that copy memory cards (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:25AM (#5629949)
      There are already a couple of devices around right now that can read most memory card formats (like SD and CF) and copy them to a small HD.

      I think a really great product would be at attachment for the iPod to transfer CF card contents onto the iPod - or better yet, let me hook up a camera with a firewire connection and transfer pictures over to the iPod HD just like iPhoto on a Mac would.

      Even though the iPod life is not great, it would be fine for several dumps of a 512mb CF card...
    • IBM sells 1gig micro-hard drives that can fit inside a PCMCIA card... the Hard Drive is like 1/2 the size of a PCMCIA card, SO, I see no reason why not to put one in a phone/MP3 player /phone/ etc.

      Well maybe cost, I am sure memory has to be cheaper than a finely tuned drive mechanism and platter, on production scales.

      _CMK
      • The microdrives suck now, you can get a 1GB CF card with faster data transfer, much lower power usage, and it will cost you less. When it came out it was a great product, but IBM didn't refresh it and never dropped the price.

    • Re:Two words (Score:5, Informative)

      by quasi_steller ( 539538 ) <Benjamin...Cutler@@@gmail...com> on Monday March 31, 2003 @03:00AM (#5630082)

      Moving parts.

      Hard-drives are not as robust as solid state memory devices. Usually the first thing to go on any computer is the hard-drive because the mechanical parts fail, causing data loss. This is especially true for portable devices that may be dropped.

    • All my eggs in a basket come to mind.

      I use a couple of IBM Microdrives in my camera. I'd lose 210 images (more or less) if one of them failed/was destroyed/got lost.

      That's more than enough risk for me. So, don't make them bigger, make them quicker/cheaper/more reliable.

      Rob.

  • Small size benchmark.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by jokercito ( 190777 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @01:09AM (#5629738) Homepage
    Mine...

    oh... hmm wait... scratch that... arg! I mean nevermind..

  • CompactFlash all the way (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 3141 ( 468289 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @01:09AM (#5629739) Homepage
    Definitely CompactFlash for me, ever since I accidentally put one in the washing machine on hot and it not only survived but didn't seem to be damaged in any way.

    It's small enough to fit into cameras and the like, yet big enough to be a "sensible size". It's only common sense that a slightly larger form factor will (in the future) allow greater storage than the smaller ones, at a lower price, with higher reliability.

    Furthermore, it doesn't seem to be as bogged down with patents as the other formats, different companies can make CompactFlash cards, while things like the Sony Memory Stick are made by... well... Sony.

    Oh, and lastly, unlike Secure-Digital and another one which I've temporarily forgotten the name of - it has no built-in Digital Rights Management - at least not that I've come across. I avoid anything to do with DRM on principle, even if I'm missing out by doing so.

  • IEEE Spectrum article (Score:5, Informative)

    by hp48 ( 145151 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @01:15AM (#5629762)
    IEEE Spectrum also has an article dealing with the future flash technologies in the current issue [ieee.org]

  • xD Flash Memory (Score:5, Informative)

    by dopaz ( 148229 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @01:17AM (#5629769) Homepage
    I recently bought a Fuji FinePix 2650 digital camera, which uses xD picture cards. They are the smallest standard on the market (i think). Here's [steves-digicams.com] a picture of all the different types... xD is on the right. Its small, but unlike smartmedia it is not thin. Its rigid and feels durable. I think capacities can scale up to 1GB with the architecture. The only drawback is that the standard was created by Fuji and Olympus, and I don't know if it will be offered by other manufacturers.
    • Its rigid and feels durable.

      It's better to compare its durability in term of no. of r/w it can do before failure, but we can't really compare it without those figures.

  • No one size (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mpost4 ( 115369 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @01:27AM (#5629810) Homepage Journal
    I would say that the application will dictate the size needed. For mp3s you will need larger sized flash memory (with this I went with a 20Gb Hard Drive mp3 play because all the flash memory ones were to small). With a PDA that is used only as an organizer, you can get away with a cheaper smaller one. (Here I have only 32Mb total storage on my pda, but I also use it for a bit more then just an organizer, I also have a map, ebooks on it[see below] and internet applications on it[web, email and aim] ). For an ebook reader you probably can get way with 8Mb (I use my palm pilot for my ebook reader, but still prefer a paper book much better then an ebook, The only books I have are books that I don't read as a book but are there for reference, and use only 5Mb) So I would say the function will dictate what size will be needed.
  • AMD has a nice flash presentation [amd.com] on how conventional, MLC, and Mirrorbit flash works. It's actually an presentation for their MirrorBit flash technology, but it has a good description of the basics.

  • So what's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:03AM (#5629887) Journal
    Currently Flash memory in CompactFlash Form-Factor is available up to 4 GB. The article discusses the future of flash memory mainly in regards to Cell Phones. If we can easily fit 4 GB of flash RAM into a cell phone today, and can keep miniaturizing flash technology until at least 2005, then what is the problem? Cell phones will be limited to 12 GB of flash RAM? That's 3,000 4MB MP3s, or at least 24 full-length movies at a cell phone-ish resolution (say 320x240 pixels by 2005).

    One thing of interest is that for decades both the storage capacity of computers has grown along with the amount of information we need to store. However we are reaching the threshold where the amount of information we need to store will plateau. A perfect example is audio files. We are now storing audio data at a high enough quality that any additional improvement will not be discernable by a person with normal hearing. Thus in the future the storage required for a typical song will not be any larger. On the contrary, assuming that compression algorithms keep advancing, we may actually need less storage in the future for audio data. We will eventually see video reach a similar plateau, where a high enough resolution will be achieved to satisfy even the most devoted technophiles.

    Finally, all aspects of networking are improving (wireless, broadband home internet access, etc). The greater the bandwidth and connectivity, the less information required to be cached on the device ahead of time. Think about it - the carriers would much rather you have a cell phone with limited storage capacity if it means you have to consume more bandwidth accessing information from the network.

    Dan East
    • Dan East said:
      One thing of interest is that for decades both the storage capacity of computers has grown along with the amount of information we need to store. However we are reaching the threshold where the amount of information we need to store will plateau. A perfect example is audio files. We are now storing audio data at a high enough quality that any additional improvement will not be discernable by a person with normal hearing. Thus in the future the storage required for a typical song will not be
    • I question the assertion that there will be a plateu in data storage needs because someone will find a new way to waste space. Too many similar predictions have been made in the past, and failed, to make it not a rediculously safe bet. Even if a per-file size remains the same, people will want to shuffle away even more files.
    • IMHO, audio compression (mp3, ogg etc.) has a lot to do with network transmission, not simply storage. Broadband connection speeds have not improved by anything comparable to storage capacities. I just bought a 120 GB HD, but for my Net connection I can't get much better than cable, which gives about 1Mbps down and 300 kbps up. I live in a small town in Finland, and the only better option would be ADSL which only improves upstream rate, for about double the price.
  • If the megs to square cm ratio for flash is on par with current (or even yesteryear) hard drive platter megs to square cm ratio, then its great.

    Hard drives will eventually reach a limit due to the laws of physics, and I think flash is a much better infrastructure than hard drives. In other words, I believe that a 3.5" HD which has reached the limits of the laws of physics will have much less capacity than a block of flash with the same cubic cm (reaching the limits of the laws of physics).
    • I realize the article was full of doom and gloom, but I am a firm believer in Moore's Law, and other factors. For example, the smaller chips get, the less power they seem to need. Also, don't forget about promising technologies, breakthroughs in manufacturing processes, etc. Perhaps I am glimpsing 5-10 years from now, instead of the next year or two, like the CNet article.

  • Did someone say flash? (Score:4, Funny)

    by soulsteal ( 104635 ) <soulsteal@NoSPaM.3l337.org> on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:05AM (#5629893) Homepage
    Is it anything like this [3l337.org] flash?

  • Flash mem. is handy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by failedlogic ( 627314 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:07AM (#5629904)
    I happen to find Flash Memory handy to make backups - am I the only one here? They're better than floppies, CD-RWs, CD-Rs and zip disks. They're quick, convienient, reliable, and reuseable.

    I write a lot of documents and I find using a flash key chain drive practical. I pop the drive in at school and upload the documents via USB to the keychain drive. I do the same at home to have mulitple backups. I'm paranoid - but - I also haven't lost anything.

    I don't know about failure rates on these things but I have enough backups not to worry.

    • Handy Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by NetGyver ( 201322 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @04:07AM (#5630193) Journal
      I remember when i got my first digital camera, an HP 215 and came with a 4mb CF card. It introduced me to flash memory from the get go as a "digital film" medium.

      I also write a fair amount documents myself. I used to put them in a folder on my hard drive because there's a lot of space there to begin with, and I don't really have a need to transport my docs anywhere other than at home. If you upgrade regularly or do a lot of "house cleaning" on your HDD, (as in remove junk stuff you don't need anymore), or if you move files around a lot on your computer, or partition..things start to disappear over time.

      My biggest problem was moving files around trying to organize them, and saving documents in different locations on my hard drive. I wound up forgetting where i put certian docs. When i clean up my HDD and remove stuff i don't need anymore, I wound up deleting some documents I wish I still had.

      This is where CompactFlash came in for me. I was never a fan of floppy disks to begin with because the data capacity is so small by today's standards. That, and their really horrible with holding data for a extended period of time. Bad sectors are a royal nightmare if you store anything of value on a floppy.

      So i got myself a 64meg CF card, a PCMCIA card reader, and a USB card reader, and it's a true lifesaver and a great replacement for floppies. The pendrives are awesome for portability and transporting things from PC to PC, I plan to get one of those as well.

      I was never a fan of zip disks etc, either. It's still the same basic idea of a floppy only more modernized. It's not solid-state, and aren't nearly as reliable as other mediums.

      CD-Rs are still my main method of backing up data. Their capacity/cost/reliability ratio is great for things like mp3s and video files. However, documents aren't all that big to begin wtih unless you have hordes of them to backup. That and it's read only once you burn. So i find it wasteful to burn a CD-R for a few megs worth of documents, even if CD-Rs are under .10 cents per disk.

      CD-RWs are too cumbersome for me to really be worthwhile. If you want to store data at work, school, a friend's house, etc, they have to have a CD-RW burner as well. Not exactly an efficient way to store data on the go like flash is.

      So Compactflash was the sweet-spot for me. Good storage compacty for what i want to use it for. Great reliablity, durable, reuseable, portable, and comes in a nice array of capacities from 8MB to 1GB.

      The new XD flash cards are way too small for me. Something nearly as small as a dime isn't something i want to store my data on. Odds are I'd lose the card before I got my money's worth of use out of it. SD/SM/MMC cards are too thin and tend to break easy. Compact flash is big enough where you don't have to worry so much about it breaking or losing it, big enough to hold in your hand comfortabily, yet small enough for use in PDAs and cameras. Their great!

      To answer your question about failure rates:

      If kept in a dry and cool place, and if you take care of it (as in not dropping it on hard surfaces, etc) The average lifespan of a CF card is about *1 million* reads and writes. However, another thing to take into consideration is data retention. A lot of CF cards and pen drives specify data retention up to 10 years.

      So they're pretty damn reliable for as small as they are. :)

      ***Figure source: http://www.memorywizards.com/pd_flash_usb_drv.cfm
  • Well, personally I could care less if flash dissapears. Why is that? Because the ONLY way it can is if something better comes along. Flash is far too important, not only because it makes it convenient to store pics from our digital cams but also because of the lower level applications. Most importantly program memory in microcontrollers and configuration memories for FPGAs etc. Without that you could kiss the idea of updating firmware in your router/MP3 player/camera or whatever else goodbye.

  • Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Loki_1929 ( 550940 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:11AM (#5629916) Journal
    "Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?""

    We... don't like to talk about it. Oh... oh you mean the memory thing...

  • FM as a HD...? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by crimson30 ( 172250 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:44AM (#5630023) Homepage
    I noticed in the article it mentioned:

    "So why don't we just use Flash memory for everything? Because the cost per megabyte for a hard disk is drastically cheaper, and the capacity is substantially more. You can buy a 40-gigabyte (40,000-MB) hard drive for less than $200, while a 192-MB CompactFlash card will generally cost you more. "

    Notice how they make no mention of long term use, which would seem to support that you can rewrite flash memory to your heart's content, but I've heard otherwise. I've been told that the FM card would only last so long, as it couldn't handle all the writing (like swapping for virtual memory)... anyone have any such experience to back this up? And if so, why would this happen? Do the gates or oxide layer simply wear out? Or is it 'this brand only' problem, such as maybe a problem with the CF micro-contoller?

    • Re:FM as a HD...? (Score:3, Informative)

      by matt_martin ( 159394 )
      Good point.
      Flash can usually only be written/erased 100K to 1 million times.
      Writing data is inherently destructive to the tunnel oxide layer in each storage transistor.
      When you write applications storing data in flash you have to be aware of this or you can burn it out very quickly !
      This is also the reason why flash cannot entirely replace hard drives.
      FWIW, some of the newer memory formats in development do not have this restrictions (MRAM, ovonic,etc )

  • compact flash makes a great boot device (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:48AM (#5630038)
    install some cf in your system using an ide-cfa adaptor (http://www.acscontrol.com or similar, there is at least one model with a drive bezel for front-panel access) and double-stick tape. use it to boot a kernel that assembles raid volumes from devices it finds. for extra points, do this in a pci sun system (eg, the ultra5) which won't boot from non-openfirmware pci cards like the generic adaptec 2940 or qlogic 1040 -- the bootprom will happily load a bsd kernel from flashdisk, then find a rootfs in RAID_AUTOCONFIG. to avoid needless writes to compactflash, add some boot logic to create mfs /var and /tmp, to be invoked if the rootfs is the cf device (freebsd has this feature, iirc).
  • Wow, I can remember watching a documentary about the world's first magnetic hard drive. It was 5MB in capacity, and was about the size of my bedroom...but don't try putting your favourite MP3 on it, because the data access speed was slower than a 300 baud modem!

    My first hard drive was a 25 megabyte hard drive for an IBM compatible. It was about 20 pounds, and at the time I thought "wow, I'll never fill this thing up!". All the text files I could ever want, and even a few images and 1-second WAVs! Sudde

  • "flash shouldn't work"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @03:16AM (#5630114) Homepage Journal
    "(Flash) shouldn't work," said Stefan Lai, a vice president in the technology and manufacturing group at Intel.

    What the hell is this? There's no physical reason that voltage can't be stored for years. And flash obviously does work, so to say it 'shouldn't' is stupid.
  • Flash and it's "million rewrite" really has me pained. It is soooo restricted to storage, but nothing else. Especially considering that NOR flash is the only dense one, they are not even that good compared to, say, CD (well, smaller, but the dense ones have slow read speed - random read speed, anyhow).

    I am seriously hoping for the time when MRAM (try RAMTRON, which I think is one of the only manufactures of it) ramps up in density; DRAM speed, unlimited rewrite, AND stores after power off to boot.

  • Size benchmark? (Score:3, Funny)

    by miketang16 ( 585602 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @07:00AM (#5630508) Journal
    Well, we can do the standard media benchmark and relate every component to the size of a human hair...

  • Flash write limitations (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Frice ( 412975 )
    So why not put some normal *fast* ram in a compact flash that acts as a cache? All the downsides of flash are then negated: reading & writing are really fast and there is no 1 million writes limitation. When the cf is removed from the machine, the data in the ram should be copied to the flash, using a small battery (that gets reloaded when in the machine). Simple. Fast. It'll cost only a bit more.

  • Forget About size.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SomeOtherGuy ( 179082 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @12:24PM (#5631611) Journal
    The problem is with form factor. How many different (incompatible) options --

    Compact Flash (standard in high end cameras or devices where you need the most space. 512 Meg and 1 Gig+ available now)

    Smartmedia (standard in items that do not require much space -- or where they did not "know any better" -- Lot's of camera's and Mp3 players)

    MMC Expensive and caps out about 128 Meg)

    SD Being used more and more -- getting bigger and bigger -- but did not all of us already have about $10,000 dollars worth of media in other formats by the time this broke the "64 meg" barrier?

    Memory Stick Die Sony die...Why did we need this?

    Xd (sic)? picture cards New cards being used by the new cameras. Small as a finger nail. But why? why? why? Why so many form factors?

    Anybody on the bleeding edge will have aquired a variety of the above types of memory. I for one am always holding out for a device that supports CF -- since my first camera was CF, and I have the most cards in that factor -- and it makes me sick to my stomache to buy a new device that uses a type of memory that serves no purpose other than to make all of my existing memory useless.
  • Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?

    How about how many can fit inside the pysical building of the Library of Congress? Then, for information density, we can even do the Libraries-of-Congress-per-Libraries-of-Congress measurement!

    Instead of that USELESS Gb/in^2 measurement that we get sometimes, we can have a drive that holds 2.4e^73 LoC/LoC!

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