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Data Storage Hardware

Solid State Memory on the Rise 266

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the fewer-moving-parts-to-break dept.
skaet writes "CNet is reporting that manufacturers of NAND flash memory are expanding the market for their chips - over the next few years - to eventually replace current methods of storage in media capture devices, mobile phones and even some notebooks as well as car navigation systems and large data storage at corporations and government agencies. From the article: 'The average notebook has 30GB (of hard drive storage). How long is it before the notebook has solid state memory? Five or six years,' according to Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron Technology, one of the world's largest memory makers. 'I'm not saying drives will go away. There will always be a need for storage, but when was the last time you tapped out a drive?'"
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Solid State Memory on the Rise More

Solid State Memory on the Rise

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  • Filled up a drive? (Score:5, Funny)

    by DietCoke ( 139072 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:23AM (#14420196)
    This guy clearly hasn't ever installed Bittorrent.
    • Yeah, no shit. People talk about how Bit Torrent downloads are consuming some large percentage of the Internet capacity ... but it's also consuming a larger portion of user's hard drives. All RIAA/MPAA bitching aside, downloading is driving the sale of a lot of storage hardware. It's even worse if (like me) you're a packrat and just hate to throw anything away. So, you don't ... you just buy a couple more hard disks and jack them into your RAID array.

      • Re:Filled up a drive? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Wisgary ( 799898 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @02:14AM (#14420391)
        I sometimes look at my download folder in awe, it's full of so much useless SHIT that I have no use for (or ever will have a use for, since there are new versions of just about ANYTHING in there) but... sometimes... it's hard to hit that delete key. It really is, I think we have a new symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder. I wonder how long until psychologists start to ask... "How long has it been since you deleted stuff from your download folder?"

        • Re:Filled up a drive? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by empaler ( 130732 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @02:26AM (#14420430) Journal
          I have the same problem but found a fix for it a short while ago - my laptop had to go in for service and I was too lazy to burn more than a single backup CD.
          Also, I don't think my downloads directory is any business of the service technicians (and, as we all know, they do look at your stuff, especially if they're bored) - so I wiped the entire Documents folder and generally scrubbed my computer for personal data.
          I saw it as a healthy practise, both from the standpoint of my private data but also because I had so much shit.
    • LOL - Try converting your movie collection to digital storage, for a media center system.

      3.5 TiB and climbing.
    • I recently succumbed and downloaded the HD version of a music clip (yeah I am a pirate, keel haul me you landlubber) and wow it looked good. It was a bit of a shock to find that it didn't actually fit my monitor but even scaled down it looked yummy. Only problem? about 12 minutes takes up 2 gb. Ouch

      And one nice thing about laptops is that they come with widescreen pre-installed. All of sudden that 30gb drive doesn't look all that big.

      It has always been the problem with solid state memory. The moment they

      • Yeah, I'm afraid that Mr. Appleton is engaged in a major bit of wishful thinking. I'm still chafing under the restriction that the largest available notebook drive is ONLY 120GB. I have a 11MP digital camera, and I can fill up a dozen gigabytes in a single afternoon.

        Now, maybe if he makes an inexpensive 30GB USB thumb drive...

  • Slow (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Jtoxification ( 678057 )
    Most solid-state memory is pretty darn slow, and the stuff that's fast costs major $$$ ... I'll buy it when it gets faster & cheaper - but then, flash *is* much faster than the ol' floppy - I was glad to see that go ...

    • Re:Slow (Score:5, Informative)

      by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:39AM (#14420269)
      Most solid-state memory is pretty darn slow...

      I was once asked to demo a solid-state HD...built with nothing but DRAM. This was a decade ago, and it was only proof-of-concept. It was only 2gb, but it would format instantly. Don't confuse SD and CF cards with DRAM. Micron makes DRAM.

      • Re:Slow (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Rosyna ( 80334 )
        It was only 2gb, but it would format instantly.

        Well, uhm. Formatting is almost a no-op. It just deletes a very, very small set of information about the volume and locations of files. They don't often delete any of the actual files (unless you do a low level or zero all data). Hell, even many floppy disks format "instantly". A real test of speed is read/write speeds, not a simple format.
        • A real test of speed is read/write speeds, not a simple format. I didn't say 'simple format, you did :) And my example was just one out of several where the solid-state HD routinely outperformed platter based mechanisms.

          Ever notice how your system seems to slow to a crawl when pageouts kick in, and the OS starts using the HD instead of RAM? DRAM is always faster than platters. Again, flash memory is slow. DRAM, which isn't.

          What type of buffer (8 & 16mb) is used in those 'fast' new hd's? Solid-stat

        • Re:Slow (Score:2)

          by AtrN ( 87501 ) *
          Formatting, for most file system structures, is dependent upon seek times and with solid-state storage seeks are non-existent. Hence the speed up.
    • If that is slow, then maybe what you want is gold nanorods [suvalleynews.com]. This could be the next generation in optical chips.

    • Re:Slow (Score:3, Interesting)

      by StarWreck ( 695075 )
      Assuming that you're referring to Flash Memory. Its getting faster, fast.

      Flash memory is currently using the same speed ratings as a CD-ROM does. 1X == 150 Kilobytes per second

      Secure Digital Flash memory is commonly available in speeds up to 150x. 22,500 Kilobytes per second.

      We're already starting to see 200x: 30,000 Kilobytes per second.

      I can boot an operating system, Knoppix Linux, with a full graphical user interface, full hardware support, multi-media, and office applications on an old 2

      • Re:Slow (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MrLizardo ( 264289 )
        actually booting off of even a "slow" flash memory device, like an older usb drive will be quite quick. Much faster than booting off of a CD-ROM and quite close to the speed of booting off of a hard drive. During a normal boot process you're loading a lot of smallish programs/files, and this plays to the advantages of flash media: no seek times. CD-ROMs have seek times in the tens of milliseconds (maybe even 100 ms for an older unit). Harddrives less than 10 ms these days. Flash media on the other hand

    • Re:Slow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by adrianmonk ( 890071 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @03:12AM (#14420543)
      Most solid-state memory is pretty darn slow, and the stuff that's fast costs major $$$ ... I'll buy it when it gets faster & cheaper

      As a guy who works on apps for Palm OS for a living, I've learned that flash memory has two really nice properties that hard drives don't have:

      1. Its access time is pretty much negligible. There is no head that has to be moved across the disk. Sure, there are bound to be advantages to one large read (or write) compared to several smaller ones, but the penalty for reading from (or writing to) different spots all over the place is way, way smaller than it is on a hard drive.
      2. Probably more importantly, flash devices can come out of power saving mode much faster than hard drives can. This is for one simple reason: when a hard drive goes into power saving mode, it has to make a big change in angular momentum of the platter in order to come out of power saving mode. Since the penalty is so high, you have to make a compromise: either you must use more energy and keep the drive powered on longer, or you must wait for sometimes 5 or 10 seconds just to get a single byte off the disk. With flash, you don't have this problem, because it takes more like 1/2 second or less to bring the thing out of power saving mode to full functionality.

      #2 is such a big benefit that I'd really like to have a laptop with a few GB of flash memory that acts as a read and write cache for the hard drive. With a good caching algorithm, it should be possible to keep the hard drive spun down most of the time and save a ton of energy.

      • Re:Slow (Score:3, Interesting)

        by pyrotic ( 169450 )
        I've seen combined disk/RAM drives in servers - at work we've got a 140G RAID 1 array with 192M battery-backed write cache. Write performance is so good we've stopped bothering worrying about filesystem optimisation.

        That's a great idea for laptops, as you have battery built in, and spinning down disks saves bettery life. So you'd have 2G RAM, 4G slower solid state disk cache on the ATA bus, then 100G hard disk on the same bus with a bit of software to deal with it. Just hope you can fit enough usefull stuff

      • Re:Slow (Score:3, Informative)

        by Jherek Carnelian ( 831679 )
        I'd really like to have a laptop with a few GB of flash memory that acts as a read and write cache for the hard drive. With a good caching algorithm, it should be possible to keep the hard drive spun down most of the time and save a ton of energy

        You are not the only one [extremetech.com] thinking of that.

  • What will this do to OS requirements? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:28AM (#14420215)
    With solid state memory, won't you never have to reboot the OS? Will I still have to reboot Windows every so often even though the machine is capable of instant on/off? This feature of the hardware will put serious reliability requirements on all OSes. MS will have to finally fix the damn blue screen or its lack of reliability will be a serious henderence.
    • My understanding of Vista is that you can reboot 'sections' of the OS without having to restart everything.

      As for the blue screen, I hear MS fixed that in the Xbox360.
      They made it black.

      thank you, try the meat loaf and don't forget to tip your waitress.
    • With solid state memory, won't you never have to reboot the OS?


      There are plenty of people who never (or almost never) reboot their OS now... they just leave their machine on 24/7 possibly with an automatic sleep mode or perhaps without. I agree that having solid state memory would probably do away with "reboots" almost entirely, but that situation wouldn't be that much different from how it is now...

    • It won't be enough. Why? Because The Internet is for Porn! [google.com] (A hilarious video via Google Video)
    • Nope, you're thinking of non-volatile RAM. This is nothing more revolutionary than a huge pile of flash keychains -- and about as fast to use. So yes, laptops with this will still need RAM.

      But yes, IF we do eventually get non-volatile RAM that's as fast as volatile RAM and cheap enough to replace hard drives, we will have to do some rethinking of OS and software design.

      Well, true, we won't HAVE to -- stuff does work off ramdisks and tmpfs, but those are still designed to go away when the computer shuts of

  • change is bad (Score:3, Interesting)

    by loserhead ( 941655 ) <chillwill48209@gmail.com> on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:28AM (#14420218)
    i dunno...i would rather use hard disks personally. in my ecxperience, they fail in a less catastrophic way. have a few errors....back it up and get a new HDD. with flash memory, when it fails, it FAILS. the end
    • You obviously didn't own an IBM Deskstar and didn't have to hear the "click-o-death" and all your data gone before you can type "tar -cf" -- which is why they became known as Deathstar. If that is not catastrophic then I don't know what is...

      I would love to see the HDs go, they are the only critical moving component in the system. Anything that is moving at 10,000+ RPM is prone to failure. I also wonder whatever happened to holographic solid state memory that was supposed to hold TBs of data - that stuff

      • We should obviously focus on the time machine, as when it's completed we can make sure the holographic memory is/was right around the corner. Hell, perhaps I can send back some of that holographic memory already filled with pr0n and thus releave the load on the internet.

        Do-dee-do la-de-da... Hmm... looks like it didn't work. damn. nevermind. Good thing azerus is already running.

      • The time machine is indeed right around the corner...tell me, do you know where all your socks are? Those time voyagers are such pranksters.
      • I also wonder whatever happened to holographic solid state memory that was supposed to hold TBs of data


        I think the problem was that the capacity and cost of "traditional" hard drives has improved so rapidly over the past decade that holographic memory, like lots of other potentially revolutionary alternatives, simply didn't look like it would be able to compete any time in the forseeable future. Without a likely market for the product, research funding dried up.

    • I'll go with both, I either read about a combo flash/hdd drive somewhere or said it would be a good idea somewhere. I also prefer the use of HDDs for storage of important data, but there's no reason flash can't also be used, for 'less important' data, say the partition containing the Windows and apps installations, around 4GB on my PC. I'd have no problem with having windows and apps on a fast 6-8GB flash drive that I can backup once a month/week/day or whenever I install new software or make any major chan
      • The right design for most applications is probably to use Flash for read-mostly drives containing your OS and most common applications, so they load fast without annoyances like rotational latency, and mechanical disk drives for bigger file storage (especially your media collection which is going to soak up whatever space you've got available), and enough caching RAM that you don't need to spin the disk too often. It's easy to do crude versions of this today (e.g. booting from Knoppix-in-flash and using

  • When was this article conceived? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Saven Marek ( 739395 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:31AM (#14420233)
    The average notebook has 30GB (of hard drive storage). How long is it before the notebook has solid state memory?

    I havent seen a laptop with less than 40GB in I dont know how long. A long time anyway. Maybe this is out of date.
    • They could be founding old laptops as well. Infact more and more laptops are getting bigger hard drives(60gig and 80gig). Anyway they might be looking at what the average consumer uses. I know I only have 50gigs left on my 200gig drive after about 1.5 years of use.

    • Mooreon's Law (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nick_davison ( 217681 )
      He was quoting Mooreon's Law...

      1. Every eighteen months, the technology that you support will double in capacity.

      2. Every eighteen months, the technology that you are supporting it over will do nothing.

      Ergo, given that average notebook hard drives are currently around 60gb, rather than 30gb, Moore's Law (as opposed to Mooreon's Law) allows us to deduce he began applying Mooreon's Law 18 months ago - the doubling of average disk space since then has been ignored by him as it's a competing technology (and cov
    • maybe he wasn't refering to average new one. maybe the average notebook out there.

  • Is this guy for real? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by barc0001 ( 173002 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:31AM (#14420234)
    "There will always be a need for storage, but when was the last time you tapped out a drive"

    Last week at the parents' place. Two days ago at work. Probably tonight as well at home. You were saying?

    No matter how much storage you put in a given system, it will eventually be not enough. I've seen it a million times.

    Also, flash memory is way too slow to be used as primary storage. Putting 512MB of MP3s on my SD card takes almost a three minutes. Drive to drive, that's under 10 seconds.

    And let's not even mention how quickly a cache partition would die with the 100,000 writes before failure standard of current flash drives...

    • Also, flash memory is way too slow to be used as primary storage. Putting 512MB of MP3s on my SD card takes almost a three minutes. Drive to drive, that's under 10 seconds.

      That's totally wrong. The whole point of using memory instead of a hdd is because of speed; the long time for your mp3 player to fill is due to the transfer rate of whatever you're hooking it up to (ie usb).

      • Re:Is this guy for real? (Score:5, Informative)

        by karnal ( 22275 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @02:41AM (#14420464)
        The whole point of using memory instead of a hdd is because of speed; the long time for your mp3 player to fill is due to the transfer rate of whatever you're hooking it up to (ie usb).

        That's not entirely correct.

        While if you hook up a flash memory to the USB 1 spec, it will be painfully slow, even with a connection to a high-speed USB 2.0 hub, you'll still run into slowdowns. Why? Because most flash (which is most, if not all non-disk related MP3 players) write speeds are averaging around 5-10MB/sec. And even then, that's being generous.

        So, for 10MB/sec, that would be at least 1 minute to fill up a 512MB mp3 player. Of course, real world is never the same as rated specs, so I'd be happy with 2 minutes, to be honest....

        Another neat trick to try with Flash drives is to fill them with a bunch of itty bitty files - it literally takes forever to do so! Maybe someone more insightful than I can enlighten me as to why that is....
        • The slowdown is due to the file system: FAT. Everytime a (small) file is written, the File Allocation Table needs to be be (re)written too.

          It's just one of those great things MS has given us.
        • Another neat trick to try with Flash drives is to fill them with a bunch of itty bitty files - it literally takes forever to do so!

          It literally takes forever does it? Then I take it you're still waiting for those itty bitty files to copy? Better hope you don't have a power outage...

        • "Another neat trick to try with Flash drives is to fill them with a bunch of itty bitty files - it literally takes forever to do so! Maybe someone more insightful than I can enlighten me as to why that is...."

          The NAND memory used in flash drives are optimal for sequential writes due to the large erase blocks which can reach a couple hundres kilobytes. When you write small files, it has to copy everything in that erase block to a new location except the small portion it changed. This results in significant o

    • Re:Is this guy for real? (Score:4, Funny)

      by AEton ( 654737 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @02:36AM (#14420452)
      "There will always be a need for storage, but when was the last time you tapped out a drive"

      Last week at the parents' place. Two days ago at work. Probably tonight as well at home.
      Most civilized people do not discuss this sort of thing in polite conversation.

    • Re:Is this guy for real? (Score:5, Funny)

      by CosmeticLobotamy ( 155360 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @02:43AM (#14420467)
      No matter how much storage you put in a given system, it will eventually be not enough. I've seen it a million times.

      I remember begging my mom to replace our 2MB hard drive with one of the fancy new 20MB ones. "But Mom! That's twenty MILLION letters! You'll NEVER use that much. You don't type that fast."

      Then some jerk went and invented graphics. Bastard.
    • at home, yes. with computers becoming the digital dumpster for pictures, audio and video you will never have enough storage. though that's assuming they are. my parents have a 80GB drive from last year. over 60gb of that is still free. and at work, most users don't work with multimedia. we only have 3-4 users (out of over 150) that have more than 5GB of files. this includes email. and speed, the fastest sd cards can read/write about 22MB/sec these days. they will only get bigger/faster/cheaper/smaller/etc.
    • "30GB should be enough for anybody" -- say the CEO OF A MAJOR FLASH AND DRAM company.

      Wow - I'm shocked!

      People will always find ways to fill up what you give them.
      How about redundant storage for reliability?
      Effectively infinite undo/save for documents (Never worry about "saving" a document again because every keystroke is saved).

      etc...

      That's just out of my ass. I'm sure other people have many more usages for more space.

  • This has already begun...for desktops too! (Score:5, Informative)

    by meatflower ( 830472 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:32AM (#14420240)
    Gigabyte has something out they call i-RAM. It's a PCI add-in card that allows you to plug regular ram sticks into and then access them as a piece of solid storage space. They say its good for "multimedia applications" and I'm sure it is...if not a little overkill.
     
      Here's a link to a review from Anandtech http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480 [anandtech.com]
    • I believe that's just a normal ramdrive - they've been around forever with software emulation. Of course, the advantage of a hardware add-on is that, otherwise, you have to part with a portion of your system ram to make it into a ramdrive and of course, it was not always economical to add more ram (limited # of slots or too expensive for a huge single stick of ram) - the PCI card effectively just doubles the number of ram slots you have.....

      Cenatek also has a Solid State Disk hardware solution available fo
      • Yeah I'm surprised nobody mentioned this inanity earlier. It would be cheaper (and faster) to ditch your current RAM DIMMs, upgrade to some fat >1G chips, and set up a RAM drive. This is why I hate the industry, anyone with a clue is just dead weight, we need fresh talent to reinvent the wheel over and over.

        • Re:This has already begun...for desktops too! (Score:4, Informative)

          by vux984 ( 928602 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @05:11AM (#14420829)
          It would be cheaper (and faster) to ditch your current RAM DIMMs, upgrade to some fat >1G chips, and set up a RAM drive.

          You might want to rethink that because it won't work:

          1) Most editions of Windows only support 4GB of RAM in TOTAL. Including XP Pro, Server 2000 and Server 2003. The 95/98/ME line only supports 1GB of RAM. Its going to be pretty hard to dedicate 4GBs of RAM to a software RAM drive if that's all (or more) than your OS will recognize. (Only Enterprise editions of Windows servers will address more than 4GBs.) How many linux distros support more than 4GB of RAM right now "out of the box (ie from the live cd/dvds or precompiled isos)

          2) Most desktop MOTHERBOARDS don't even support >1GB chips or more than 4GB total RAM, including 'gamer' oriented boards like the ASUS A8N32-SLI, for example. You aren't going to have a 4GB RAM drive if you can't put more than 4GBs onto the motherboard. Generally only expensive server boards support more than 4GBs.

          The i-RAM lets you build a 4GB RAM Drive today, and add it onto your system *without* sacrificing any system RAM, without installing a new OS, without getting a new mobo. Plus you can max out your system RAM, and then add an i-RAM on top of that!

          Anandtech kept saying they couldn't see why you'd use an i-RAM over adding more memory; and they are right... except that maxxing out your system RAM is actually pretty easy; and what do you do THEN? What if you've already got 4GBs of RAM and photoshop is still paging on you? You CAN'T just throw more system RAM at it. i-RAM technology could be a solution.

          Finally, another major difference between an i-ram and a software ram drive is that you can't install and boot an OS from a RAM drive.

          (PS I am not affiliated with gigabyte or i-ram in anyway.)

          cheers

      • Re:This has already begun...for desktops too! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by wfberg ( 24378 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @05:33AM (#14420889)
        I believe that's just a normal ramdrive - they've been around forever with software emulation.

        Very observant. Except;

        • It doesn't need software emulation, it's transparent to the OS, in fact, you can boot off of it.
        • It has battery power back-up, so if the computer shuts off or the grid goes down, the data is retained.
        • Seeing as it doesn't use emulation, even if the OS goes down for some other reason; data still there. You can even do without write-behind cache (seeing as the cache would only be in system DRAM anyway), so you never have dirty data to flush!
        • The RAM used on the PCI card doesn't come from the systems's RAM, no need to worry about bios/OS/architecture memory limitations (4GB?).


        These cards are intended as a hard drive replacement for very demanding applications; for example high-volume transactional systems. Transactional means you want persistence, even in the face of power-outages or OS failure, but high-volume means that you can get quite a boost if random access is nice and fast (near zero seektimes). If your whole database won't fit in a few GB (pretty likely) and you're not distributing this sort of thing, it would still be great for transaction logs, temporary databases, sessions, etc. Or how about using them for message queues? Any message sent is persisted, but not written to a slow hard drive or database.

        NAND drives I'm not too sure about. But for demanding applications, battery-back-upped-DRAM-drives are way cool.
    • i have seen something like this RAM Drive back in the ISA-Bus days... it hasnt been quite successful

  • Wrong direction (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ThatGeek ( 874983 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:34AM (#14420247) Homepage
    I think that they're moving in the wrong direction. Yes, solid state is cool (despite its price). Yes, it uses less power (but is noticeably slower). What I want to see as the future of portables is a thin client. Companies try to roll out thin client desktops every few years, but they never seem to think about thin client portables. Imagine a very small portable that is nothing but a thin client with wireless. It wouldn't take much power, could run resource hungry apps via an ssh tunnel to a real box and be and be relatively cheap to produce. Something like what I saw on one of the blogs at Sun [sun.com] a few days ago represents the future. Don't try to take the whole computer with you, just take a small phone to call your computer.

    • it uses less power (but is noticeably slower)

      I'm curious: Why is Flash/NAND memory "noticeably slower" than a hard drive? I remember back when RAM drives were the rage at the ultra-high end because of blazing fast access times. It wouldn't surprise me that Flash is slower, but it would surprise me that it was so much slower as to be slower than a HD, which has seek and access overheads.

      Are you sure it just wasn't the way it was accessed (i.e., a USB drive)? I would think that a NAND drive on an equival

    • That's way to cool to ever really happen.

      It is not an actual or planned product. Images are obviously made with GIMP. This is my vision or prediction for 2006. Read it as my pet peeves about today's iPods or mobile phones - cant keep them in a wallet, limited storage, limited processing capability, need for a charger, monopolistic service providers who try to squeeze every pennies out of your pocket for silly things like incoming calls.... I am just tossing an idea, catch it and build it if you want :-)

    • Re:Wrong direction (Score:2, Insightful)

      by krysolid ( 933341 )
      I am familiar with the current Sun thin client. The paradigm "seems" to make
      sense, until you realize just how fast technology leaps. My conclusion is that
      what you get with a thin client is:

      * Yots of your data flowing through eveyone's networks.
      * Your data residing on someone else's "thing" somewhere.
      * A regular fee that someone is charging you to do everything for you.

      This makes sense, I don't say it doesn't. But for me, I would prefer to
      pay the price of waiting for all of it to b
      • Don't reject the entire idea quite yet -- the "thing somewhere" could be your own PC back at your house (via the Internet), or it could even be your laptop/cell-phone/PDA across the room in your briefcase (which you use for more intensive stuff, but the thin client is more convenient for quick google searches, IM, etc)


        There's nothing about this idea that says you have to let some corporation or government hold your data for you.

  • What is the expected lifespan (in cycles) for flash memory? I thought it was only good for a few thousand writes.
    Has it improved recently?

    • Re:Lifespan (Score:5, Informative)

      by baryon351 ( 626717 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:51AM (#14420312)
      What is the expected lifespan (in cycles) for flash memory? I thought it was only good for a few thousand writes.
      Has it improved recently?

      This topic arose when people started using flash memory as a hard drive in old Powerbook 1400s. While they're a nice very expandable old powerbook, they have a RAM ceiling of 64MB. a G3/400 CPU expansion in them is one thing, but being limited to 64MB is a pain in the butt.

      So popping a flash ram card in and using it as the virtual memory drive let PB1400 owners use 128, 256MB of virtual memory, running off the flash ram which was far quicker than the internal HD for swapping. Many people have also used these cards as the main boot drive so the whole OS boots from RAM, swaps to that same RAM, and gives mostly silent operation and saves on battery life. Critics of doing this noted the drives would last a month or two until suffering write death.

      Systems running these cards have been seen working just fine for 3-4 years now. Write limits in the range of tens to low hundreds of thousands may not seem much, but in reality it's working quite well. Apparently part of this is that most newer flash ram drives are set up to attempt evenly distributed writes over cells, and not concentrate hundreds of writes one after another on the same cell
    • I've looked at a few datasheets, and they all say 100 thousand read-write cycles.

      Looks like Micron NAND flash is the same [micron.com].

      I read something about getting > 100k cycles out of an EEPROM, so some applications must approach that limit.

    • What is the expected lifespan (in cycles) for flash memory? I thought it was only good for a few thousand writes.

      As I understand it, this is basically a solved problem. For one thing, the number of write cycles before a location dies is actually more like 10,000 or 100,000.

      But more importantly, apparently most all modern flash controllers automatically and transparently cycle writes through various parts of the flash, so that if you tell the controller to write to the same block several times in a

    • My understanding, based on CF, is that it's fine for systems that boot from CF, run in RAM and only write to CF when the configuration changes (eg Locustworld's Meshbox), but pretty failure-prone on systems that write logs and otherwise use the CF as workspace (eg IPCop).

      It seems pretty obvious to me that sooner or later we will get rid of the remaining moving parts in electronic equipment, but I'm not sure the alternative technology is there yet. Cf the time it took between the first hype of flat screens

  • Last time I tapped out a drive? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dino ( 9081 ) * on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:45AM (#14420293) Homepage
    Most of my hard drives are already full. Let's review.

    ShuttlePC Red Hat box: ~120G on a 200G hard drive. (old IDE controller) Full.
    G4 Apple Mac, 3 hard drives totalling ~ 620G. Aproximately 60% full, and that's only because I recently added a hard drive.
    PC Laptop, 80G hard drive. 25% full. And that's only because the hard drive was recently formatted and reimaged.
    120G external hard drive. 75% full
    27G external hard drive. Full
    60G iPod. Full

    So I'm a little shy of a terrabyte of active hard drive space. It would all be full if I didn't have multiple binders full of CD-Rs and DVDs.

    But I guess not everyone regularly edits and encodes video on their computers, or routes their entire entertainment system through their computers.

    I don't think hard drives will ever be big enough because data files will continue to grow as well. Solid State memory is and will always been a niche technology for areas that suite it best such as high reliability, small packages and extreme environments.

    IMHO the market is already awash in solid-state storage microcomputers. They're called PDAs.
  • My crappy old 900 hmz ibook has 40 gigs and I have to hook up a 120 gig firewire drive to it just to hold my mp3s and various digital video caputures, thousands of pictures and graphics, etc. So the answer is I would "tap out" 30 gigs instantly and you can add another 30 gig on top of that. Anything short of 80 gigs is really pretty laughable by todays standards, talk about years from now when we'll see hd (or blu ray) dvds, 5 channel 24 bit music, etc, etc.
  • Let's set aside price. Does anyone know what the power consumption for say 100GB of this vs a 100GB hard drive is? If price weren't a consideration, I might be willing to consider a slight drop in speed, if it meant that my batter would last say 5x as long.

    2 cents,

    Queen B
    • I know you were just tossing a number, but I don't think solid state storage would reduce your power consumption by anything in that neighborhood. The biggest use of power in a laptop IINM is the backlight.

  • What about limited number of rewrites? (Score:4, Informative)

    by geneing ( 756949 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:53AM (#14420318)
    I remember reading that flash memory can only be rewritten only about 10K-1M times. It works Ok for USB memory sticks, but having a page file on a solid state disk would destroy it in no time.
    • I think what that means is that you would have to force the operating system to not page out. That shouldn't be a problem because flash memory isn't that much different in complexity than RAM in terms of gates, so by the time you can afford get a 32GB flash module, 32GB of RAM would be pretty affordable too.
      • If you went back in time and told me in 1995 that in 2006 I'd have 512MB to 2GB of RAM, but still have to use a page file, I would never have believed you.

        I'm sure it's possible to have entertainment center-type PCs that don't use them, but things like graphics and video editing software always seem to outpace the limits of RAM.
    • The endurance is much better than 10K-1M because for one, error correction is used recover from the first few bits lost due to endurance failure and secondly, wear leveling is used where a new location is written everytime a sector is modified.
  • It already exists in the form of all the hand helds out there, only difference is the scale, few hundred MHz instead of 2+GHz and storage in a few hundred MB instead of GB. My Zaurus(206MHz, 32MB ram, ~1GB storage(SD card) is running faster than my old laptop 366MHz, 320MB ram 12GB HDD. It suspends/restores in 2s and reboots in 1-2min while the laptop only takes a few minutes more. It's not going to replace the power of the desktop used for gaming or A/V editing, but it will improve the small, light and por

  • Flashback. 1986 all over again? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @02:17AM (#14420399)
    What's new about this?
    Back about 1985 or 86 I bought a NVRam card for my AT.
    I *think* it was called a "BatRam" or "BatDisk" or something like that.
    I also had one before that for my 8bit XT machine.
    I no longer have the 8bit card but I dug up the 16bit AT card out
    of my garage just now, it took me about 30 seconds to find it.
    Here's what it looks like, (please be gentle on my bandwidth!)
    http://www.systemrecycler.com/misc/dscn0773.jpg [systemrecycler.com]
    and
    http://www.systemrecycler.com/misc/dscn0774.jpg [systemrecycler.com]

    At the time, this was revolutionary stuff. You could power down and
    all your stuff was right where it was before. I think these things were
    only about 2 or 4 megabytes (which was HUGE back then).
    IIRC, I was using mine as a ram disk. I could put LOTS of programs
    on 4 megs. This being in the day when most programs were still being written
    to run on 64k IBM PC's.

  • Great for low end users (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TRRosen ( 720617 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @02:24AM (#14420420)
    While 30 GB is a thimble for the Slashdot crowd. I've worked with a lot of lowend users (grandma's , email only) who only use 5-10 GB. A solid state drive would be perfect for them...smaller,less power,more durable (at least mechanically). Those who don't store any multimedia (MP3s, Movies,Photos) wont ever use more than about 5GB (3 for OS,1 for apps and a gig left for a whole ton of recipes and emails). I on the otherhand have two full 200GB drives and need to add more.
    • MS Outlook encourages you to use bloated email formats, e.g. mailing around Word documents and Powerpoints instead of text, and using various formatted text formats instead of plaintext.

      I'm currently using about 1.5GB for the last year of work email, not counting the stuff I've deleted after saving the attachments or reading the contents. It'd be a lot bigger, except that Outlook apparently freaks out and dies if your .pst is 2GB or larger, and it also gets way too slow to search for things, so I try to k

  • I don't know what decade he's in, but it's hard to find even a budget laptop that has only 30gb of hdd space. By the time the price of flash has shrunk, the files people will be using will be that much bigger, as will the harddrives. Without some major advance in the manufacture of flash, it will always be significantly more expensive per-gigabyte than hdd.

    And the argument that 30gb ought to be enough for anyways (sound familiar?) is a fallacy. As disk space grows, so does the size of content and programs.

  • I fill up drives like Wimpy eats burgers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mooncaine ( 778422 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @02:29AM (#14420437) Journal
    I work with digital video and audio. I filled up 3 160 GB drives this year with stuff I can't delete for years, and I'll have my new 200 GB FireWire drive filled up by April. Yeah, I keep too much, but I have a lot of really, really large files.

    Come tell me when they finally come out with FW3200 10 PetaByte thumb drives -- I'm going to need a few of those.
  • if they can build lots of storage (50G+), lifetime you'd expect from DRAM (get rid of the wear problems of flash) and make it fast enough to saturate typical disk busses and fit it into 2.5" and 3.5" HDD form factor with appropriate bus to use as a HDD. Who needs TCQ when you have no head movement. Then these super fast disk busses would actually be worthwhile.

    I've seen flash "disks" in HDD form factors for IDE and SCSI before, but they're hyper expensive, typically intended for military use and still suffe
  • and magnetic disk and removable media for the content ?

    I must spend forever trying to configure windows to run the Documents and Settings folder on a seperate partition as well as finding ways of locking the current run state install for the Window folder. Programs like drive snapshot help in the build but I can see how it may now be possible to sell a alternative Pc.

    Manufacturers can start builing a PC where you buy a seperate "option" of a external USB drive. Now they can manufacture a PC with all Solid S
    • I must spend forever trying to configure windows to run the Documents and Settings folder on a seperate partition as well as finding ways of locking the current run state install for the Window folder. Programs like drive snapshot help in the build but I can see how it may now be possible to sell a alternative PC.

      I've read it is possible to the Unattended Answer File (WinNT.sif) to put the Profiles (D&S) folder on a separate partition in Windows XP (and likely 2000) but I've not been able to find a li

  • Hybrids? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by RickPartin ( 892479 ) *
    I think what we'll be seeing is hard-drive/flash hybrids. Flash to store the OS on for quick energy conserving access and the hard drive for everything else. Flash just isn't ready to handle large amounts of data and it has a limited ammount of writes before it goes bad.

  • This is the year of solid state drives (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Everyone keeps mentioning their personal/private computers. Solid state memory will be big in corporate desktops. I'm a system administrator and where I work most of the computers use less than 2 GB. That's because only Windows and Office goes onto the drive. Very few additional programs are installed and documents are stored on a network mapped drive. This is what it's like at most of the larger workplaces.

    I and my users would love to swap those 40-80 GB harddrives for 2 GB solid state drives and enjoy the

  • My Laptop is already Flash (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @06:40AM (#14421027) Journal
    I got a 2.5" IDE<>flash adapter and installed a 1GB cf with miniBSD [neon1.net]

  • Topped out a 30GB harddisk? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by el_womble ( 779715 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @07:44AM (#14421146) Homepage
    I think this is really interesting.

    The role of the home desktop is changing. It used to be the powerhouse. The computer you used when you really wanted to get some work done... but that came at a price: working in an office. Laptops work for me, because when faced with a block the best way of solving it is a change of scenery. Sitting in the same place for hours on end for "fun" is less appealing now I have to do it at work as well.

    My G5 is easily twice as powerful as my G4 Powerbook, but I use my laptop 80% of the time. So why have a the G5? It's a home server. I have over 40GB of music, 10GB of photos, 100GB of home movies and PVR, and its incredibly useful to have a single point of access for the whole household, and because its a desktop its always in the same place, always on and permanently connected to the internet meaning that not only does it server the house, it serves us whilst we're on the move as well.

    Even if my laptop could match the desktop for storage, I wouldn't want it to be bogged down with running the services, and all the laptops in the house having independant media store is just plain bad management. Also, tasks like media recompression, code compilation and games are still done best on a machine with more RAM than sense and a processor thats designed for performance not low power consumption: you use a push bike to get to work and for fun, you use a car to do the shopping. Sometimes you need the heavy lifting.

    In fact I now have a couple of home servers, but thats because I'm a nerd: I have a PIII running debian to provide the low power services like a front end for Azuereus, a few small web apps and LAN facing NFS server. Which is why I can't wait for a 20GB NAND drive that improves the battery life of my laptops. I just don't need that much storage on teh move providing I've got a decent wireless network connection.

    As for, when was the last time I topped out a hardisk... yesterday. I hve 300GB of storage available to me and I use all of it. You can never have too much storage, you just don't need all of it, all of the time, providing you can access it from anywhere in the world network latency and speed is more of a barrier than local storage.

  • Deja Vu (again) (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @07:53AM (#14421163)
    How long is it before the notebook has solid state memory? Five or six years,

    I think I have heard this story ever January since 1970, and it was probably around before that.

    A brief revue of the literature will reveal that, although its perefectly true that solid state memory follows More's law. HDs appear to as well.

    At the time Bill Gates said "640k should be enough for anyone", a 40MB HD was the size of a Bendix washing machine, and cost about the same as a Ford Galaxie 500 with all the extras. 64k of RAM cost about ten times as much as a PC with no RAM.

    In 1974, (check your library for old copies of Dr Dobbs) there was a serious debate as to whether the laws of physics made it impossible for memory to EVER cost less than 1c per bit!

    And for those of you stupid enough to think solid sate means slow - ask someone what Google store their data on! People who know nothing about history are condemned to repeat it. The rest of us get shiney new USB thumb drives.

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