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Data Storage Hardware

Flash Memory to Rival Hard Drives 407

Posted by CowboyNeal from the solidly-stated dept.
Skal Tura writes "Samsung will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year, nudging the memory technology towards use in notebook PCs and maybe even edging out hard drives in some products in the next few years."
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Flash Memory to Rival Hard Drives More

Flash Memory to Rival Hard Drives

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  • Gb or GB? (Score:5, Informative)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:23PM (#14460704)

    Some more information about the NAND flash memory can be found here [com.com].

    One nice thing about this article is that it clearly explains the difference between a gigabit (Gb) and a gigabyte (GB)...something the article referenced in the story seems confused about.

    From the article referenced in the story:
    Samsung will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year...

    Gartner estimates that 16GB Flash drives will cost from about $90...

    And from the article referenced above:
    Memory chips are measured in gigabits, or Gb, but consumer electronics manufacturers talk about how many gigabytes, or GB, are in their products. Eight gigabits make a gigabyte, so one 8Gb chip is the equivalent of 1GB.

    Sorry to be picky, but I'm a stickler for detail.

    • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Also some good insight on NAND here [slashdot.org].
    • The difference between gigabit and gigabyte needs to be explained on Slashdot about as much as the difference between the Moon and the Sun needs to be explained to astronomers.

      • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:5, Funny)

        by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @11:57PM (#14461149) Homepage Journal
        The difference between gigabit and gigabyte needs to be explained on Slashdot about as much as the difference between the Moon and the Sun needs to be explained to astronomers.

        Judging by that +5, insightful, I'm tempted to make a snide remark about the ruling class (moderators). Why yes, I do have karma to burn.
      • Once, you would have been correct, but I think that day is past.

      • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Firehed ( 942385 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @12:08AM (#14461210) Homepage
        Doesn't stop the article from using the wrong one, though. I always question something that seems a bit out there. So they will indeed be 16 gigabyte flash drives? My uncle keeps going on and on about his "80 Gigabit" hard drive. Boy could I nail him on ebay reselling 4Tb hard drives. And eight gigabits of ram on one module. And... oh, why not... the 11.5 megabit floppy disk.

      • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by scbysnx ( 837275 )
        whoever modded parent up hasn't got a clue. Not trying to insult parent but its wrong. I've seen plenty of people on /. use GB and Gb interchangebly.

      • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Propaganda13 ( 312548 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @12:39AM (#14461320)
        If it doesn't fit into a 4 step profit plan or Soviet Russia joke, I'm not really concerned with the technical aspects of anything on Slashdot.

        In that case, in Soviet Russia Gb is greater than GB.

        • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:3, Funny)

          by iocat ( 572367 )
          I am out of the country and homesick. Slashdot is not being true to form, and thus clearly it falls to me, reluctantly, to post teh followng response:

          1) Confuse people about Gb vs GB
          2) Invent second step
          3) ???
          4) Profit.

      • Also, I'd venture to say that most astronomers know the difference between Gb and GB and use them daily, but when was the last time most slashdotters were even exposed to the sun?
         
      • For me it was very helpful to see it posted -- I'm very much aware of the differences but missed the word gigabit in the article when I quickly read it. Reading that post was in fact "inciteful" to me and if I'd had mod points at the moment I'd have marked it so.

    • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pdbogen ( 596723 ) <tricia-slashdot@cer[ ]us ['nu.' in gap]> on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:44PM (#14460807)
      The missing element here is that most flash drives, especially something in a hard-drive form factor, will have more than one flash chip. The news here is the new (much?) higher density flash chips.

    • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jozer99 ( 693146 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:44PM (#14460809)
      The problem as I see it is not really chip density, but cost. If you think of the size of each of these chips, you could easily fit 60 or so GB into a 2.5" drive shaped device, and 100's of gigs into a device the size of a 3.5" drive. The problem is that these devices would cost astronomical ammounts. If we could make 1GB flash chips that cost $5, then you could have $300 30GB flash drives.

      • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Feyr ( 449684 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:58PM (#14460876) Journal
        in some applications this is actually not a factor.

        i could even see myself replacing my OS disk with a flash based one, and have a secondary larger hard drive for the less-accessed files with gobs of ram. that would be a real blessing to my poor ears! give me a 4gb flash drive and i'll be all over it!

        • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Jozer99 ( 693146 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @11:07PM (#14460918)
          You would be supprised. Although linux can be built to use a flash (ie minimum writes to firmware) drive, Windows cant, without using Windows CE. It would be nice if Vista supported such ideas. The problem with windows is that many programs install system files. I installed XP on a 9.1 GB scsi disk, with an 80 GB IDE disk for everything but the OS. Even though I installed all programs on the 80GB disk, the 9.1GB disk was full within a year, as MS Office, Photoshop, and other stick stuff into your windows install.

          • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by cdrudge ( 68377 ) *
            I beleive you are confusing flash memory with some form of read-only memory (EEPROM, EPROM, etc). Windows can be installed to a flash memory device, such as a CF memory card via a IDE adapter or a solid state hard disk for instance. It use to be that it wasn't recommended to use the flash card as your swap space as the constance reading/writing would eventually "wear out" the card, but apparently it's not as much of an issue as it use to be.

            • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:3, Interesting)

              by 6*7 ( 193752 )
              My guess is that the parent is trying to point out that Linux has filesystems like JFFS2, which try to prevent wear of sectors: http://sourceware.org/jffs2/jffs2-html/ [sourceware.org]

              • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:3, Interesting)

                by Anonymous Coward
                XP can be installed to use minimal writes to flash and spread writes out to avoid wear on specific sectors. This is standard for XP embedded development.

          • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:3, Interesting)

            by mythosaz ( 572040 )
            Incorrect.

            XPe (embedded) [or XP a'le carte] specifically has support for non-writable and limited-writable OS partitions, and cam be engineered to fit nicely on modern DOCs.

            I've done several builds myself.

      • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Z34107 ( 925136 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @11:39PM (#14461071)

        Bah. Stupid n00bs. I was in awe when my 80486 machine could, at long last and at great expense, support a whopping 550 MEGAbytes of FAT16 bliss! It was the size of a brick, and pretty dense, too, if I'm not mistaken. Of course now, I carry around more in a device so small that it's not a mere choking hazard, but an inhilation concern should anyone inhale too deeply around it.

        As for cost, right now they're being used in conjunction with existing hard drives [eet.com] as extra large buffers, so that anything "written" to the HDD very rarely needs to cause it to spin up.

      • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Belseth ( 835595 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @01:39AM (#14461524)
        There's other uses than computers for large flash drives. I'm getting ready to pick up a Panasonic HVX200. They use a P2 memory cards as their primary recording medium. For 1080 your only other option is external hard drives. It's about 1 gig a minute at 1080/60. That translates out at 8 minutes for the largest card availible the 8 gig P2 which uses 4 2gig cards. Right now the cards are running around $2,000 but they'll drop fast as capacity goes up. They really start getting interesting when you can get a 32 gig card for $500. Even in today's market it isn't a competitive price for a hard drive but for video use given the advantges it would be very attractive. Cameras will help get capacity up and prices down so may be one day they'll make sense for computer hard drives. Everytime some one says we don't need more memory another use is found and need goes up. Terrabytes will start maxing out need for most traditional uses though. The problem will start to be organizing files since in the terrabytes most people wouldn't need to delete files. Video and graphics people are the only ones that may never be happy. Storing a single full res feature would still take quite a few terrabytes to store so if you do it professionally or are simply a serious film fanatic there's no practical limit to the storage that could be used.

    • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Domini ( 103836 )
      Yup, saw that too...

      But then everyone (including you probably) also seems to confuse gibibyes and gigabytes [nist.gov] anyway.

      Slightly off topic:
      It's similar to the markings on watches where the maker claims 100M water resistant, but this is a ploy, since the 100M does not mean 100m and the measurement only indcates 'safe to bath'. Most buyers don't know this and this confusion has also spread to other cheaper manufacturers...

      Grr. Know your SI units and you can't get fooled!

    • Re:Gb or GB? (Score:5, Informative)

      by nacturation ( 646836 ) <nacturation@gmai l . c om> on Friday January 13, 2006 @03:45AM (#14461867) Journal
      Samsung will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year...

      Gartner estimates that 16GB Flash drives will cost from about $90...

      Where's the conflict? Flash chip != flash drive. Flash drives can often comprise multiple chips. Let's say we stack 8 of those 16Gb chips into one drive. How big is the flash drive going to be?
       

  • One Thought... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Architect_sasyr ( 938685 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:24PM (#14460711)
    Burnout.

    What is the burnout like???

    • Re:One Thought... (Score:5, Informative)

      by BadassJesus ( 939844 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:59PM (#14460879)
      Flashdisks are much more reliable then any conventional harddrive. They claim >5,000,000 write/erase cycles and unlimited reads. Unites States defence department is using them for reliability issue alone.

      M-Systems (top flash disk producer) states this:
      (copied from the website)

      Top Reliability & Endurance
      ** 99.999% reliability
      ** >1,400,000 hours of actual (in the field) MTBF
      ** Embedded EDC/ECC, based on BCH Algorithm
      ** Data integrity under power-cycling
      ** TrueFFS® technology: bad blocks mapping-out and dynamic wear-leveling algorithms
      ** >5,000,000 Write/Erase cycles; Read unlimited
      5-year warranty


      Source link:
      http://www.m-systems.com/site/en-US/Products/IDESC SIFFD/IDESCSIFFD [m-systems.com]

      • Re:One Thought... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by AuMatar ( 183847 )
        Having worked on flash memory in embedded projects, I know of no product with that long a life cycle. Additionally, as size increases burnin problems tendto increase as well.

        And that MTBF you site would be 160 years. So I see no way in hell that can be in the field, flash didn't exist 160 years ago. That throws all the other numbers into the trash.

        • Re:One Thought... (Score:5, Informative)

          by cdrudge ( 68377 ) * on Thursday January 12, 2006 @11:17PM (#14460956) Homepage
          MTBF isn't absolute. It's a statistical estimate. A hard drive may have a 500,000 hour MTBF. That particular model of drive wasn't tested for 57 years to see if it failed.

          Any type of failure rate is also representive of the collection of all products being tested, not a single one.

          Read the Failure Rate Wiki [wikipedia.org] entry for more information.

          • Re:One Thought... (Score:5, Informative)

            by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @07:20AM (#14462422)
            '' MTBF isn't absolute. It's a statistical estimate. A hard drive may have a 500,000 hour MTBF. That particular model of drive wasn't tested for 57 years to see if it failed. ''

            Also important: Products like harddisk have a limited life. That harddisk with 500,000 hour MTBF will wear out after five years or 50,000 hours; no way will it last 500,000 hours. The MTBF only means: If you buy 500 harddisks and run them for 1000 hours, you can expect one to fail.
      • "Unites States defence department is using them for reliability issue alone."

        Boy I'm sold!

      • Re:One Thought... (Score:4, Funny)

        by grcumb ( 781340 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @01:12AM (#14461438) Homepage Journal

        "** >1,400,000 hours of actual (in the field) MTBF "

        Hmmm. 1.4 million divide by 24... that's, uh, carry the one... about 58,333 days. Which would be, uh... ah, ignore the leap years... Almost 160 years. That means they've been testing this hardware since before the Civil War!

        Wow, now is that dedication or what? Where do I buy me one of these babies?

      • That's another notch off the old power meter as well. I'm fairly sure flash-based media uses a lot less than the spinning of drive heads etc on a standard hard-disk.

        With all the advancements in computing that tend to require more power, that's a nice change. Especially since my mini-ITX system currently uses around max 35-40W already, including drives... this would likely be less if I used flash drives (an quieter).

  • gigawhat? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) * on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:25PM (#14460717) Homepage Journal
    Seems like they're playing fast and loose with capacity: "will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year" vs. " currently in products such as USB drives and digital cameras in capacities of up to 8GB." Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't 16 gigabits = 2GB?

    • Re:gigawhat? (Score:3, Informative)

      by kf6auf ( 719514 )
      It is my understanding that individual chips currently max out at 8 Gb; so t have an 8GB capacity right now you need 8 chips in your USB drive/camera/whatever. "Tomorrow" you will only need 4, meaning it should cost about half as much once the fixed costs are paid for.

    • Re:gigawhat? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Mantus ( 65568 )
      Your problem is the assumption that a device may only use one chip. There are 12GB (~$7300 USD) CF cards available and they use chips with less capacity than 16Gb. This will allow higher capacity/cheaper devices.

  • I think the post needs a correction. It should probably read:

    maybe even edging out hard drives in some PAINFULLY SLOW products in the next few years

    • Re:A Correction (Score:3, Informative)

      by Fishead ( 658061 )
      Ummm.... prolly not.

      I don't know any specifics (but neither did your post, so we are even) but I build computer controlled devices that need to work in a fairly high vibration environment. Our current product runs off Win2K, and boots relatively quickly off a 2GB solid state Laptop size HDD.

      We are building a new product that will be running Linux off a 256MB CF card. We are not quite done development, but it seems to run OK. It isn't working that hard though, just polling a USB control panel and outputti

  • Vista Won't Fit? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by students ( 763488 ) *
    This article indicates that Windows Vista won't fit on a 16 Gigabit drive? And I thought MS was disk space hungry today. I used to use a gigabyte partition for Mandrake Linux - including applications and configuration - but not user data. Windows XP needs a gigabyte without applications. MS is crazy.
    • If you move the "Documents and Settings" and "Program Files" folders and the page file to other partitions then it might be possible to trim an XP install to under 2 GB. I do that on my XP installation (moving those folders is a pain, but possible), and it usually stays at about 3 GB used space. If you disable hibernation support and made sure no Windows Update files were there then you might be able to fit an XP install on a 16 Gb drive. If you started moving .dll files then you most certainly could. I

  • Flash is ready even now (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:30PM (#14460739)
    There are linux distros that happily run on flash. Damn Small Linux comes first to mind. It's possible, in fact many people have done it, to build a computer with no hard drive; just flash.

    The current problem is that you get only a limited number of writes to flash. TFA doesn't mention that. It is a problem but not an insurmountable one.
    • It depends on who made it and how much you want to pay. Twenty years ago NAND was good for 100,000 write cycles. Now most manufacturers claim about 1 million for comodity chips and bandwidth around 100/50 MB read/write per second.

      With some memory management changes (swap is a crutch anyway ;) it shouldn't be an issue for the vast majority of people to move to a fully flash based system.
    • I am no linux expert. Just a geek, who spends most his time with windows. (oh boy, I'd better put on my flame suit) But, with such a small distro, what can you run? With so little space, what users who's not a geek, will find a system usefull? I can't imagine surviving with anything less than 20GB or so these days.

  • Congratulations! (Score:5, Funny)

    by dbucowboy ( 891058 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:30PM (#14460740) Homepage
    Good job Samsung. I've got to NAND it to you...

  • Flash is a complementary technology, not a rival (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BadAnalogyGuy ( 945258 ) <BadAnalogyGuy@gmail.com> on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:31PM (#14460746)
    Hard disks may be physically larger and slower for random access, but they are faster than Flash for large sequential reads, much in the same way that the hare is faster than the turtle in that old fable.

    We'll most likely see Flash storage grow in cell phones and PDAs, not in notebook computers. If you were a pilot, you wouldn't just have the mechanic swap out the propeller for a Rolls Royce jet engine. You'd want the whole plane overhauled to handle the increased stress on it. Better to have a system designed from the ground up that could handle the new engine rather than try to bolt it onto an older, proven design.

    • Re:Flash is a complementary technology, not a riva (Score:5, Interesting)

      by joto ( 134244 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:50PM (#14460833)
      We'll most likely see Flash storage grow in cell phones and PDAs, not in notebook computers. If you were a pilot, you wouldn't just have the mechanic swap out the propeller for a Rolls Royce jet engine. You'd want the whole plane overhauled to handle the increased stress on it. Better to have a system designed from the ground up that could handle the new engine rather than try to bolt it onto an older, proven design.

      It's not like it's something new and completely unproven. Solid-state disks (SSDs) have been used for years in server-applications, especially for large databases, where the speed of harddisks or RAID just won't cut it. This is an expensive solution, but if you have gazillions of transactions (think mastercard), it might still be cheaper than more traditional solutions (add more servers, add more disk-cache, make sure things don't fail).

      Given that it has worked pretty well at both the server-side as well as in gadgets and appliances, I'd say flash-memory notebooks are going to happen pretty soon. It's just a matter of hitting the right pricepoint. Today you can (theoretically) get a 2GB SSD for the same price as a 200GB HD. This is pretty uncool, although I would believe many enthusiasts would buy it, if there were producers of cheap SSDs (today only high-end SSDs exist).

      But if you could get a 20GB SSD for the same price as 200GB HD (which is a sane estimate, given the article), things start to make sense. It would be enough for running MS office on a laptop, and seriously reduce startup-time, as well as battery usage. Given it's performance, it would also be a great add-on for desktop computers (put the OS, most used applications, and swap-space on it, and use traditional harddisks for your videos/music/porn).

      • You're comparing apples and oranges. The solid state disks you're referring to all use regular DRAM with battery backup. DRAM is a few thousand times faster than flash.

        Flash-based drives aren't even up to UDMA66 speed yet. For notebooks, my 60G Hitachi 7200rpm drive will be faster than flash in every situation.

    • Re:Flash is a complementary technology, not a riva (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think it's worth mentioning that the bottleneck in reading/writing large files is an interface problem (usb et.al.) and not actually an issue with the ram. Currently the thing spinning drives have going for them is cost per GB.

      • I think it's worth mentioning that the bottleneck in reading/writing large files is an interface problem (usb et.al.) and not actually an issue with the ram. Currently the thing spinning drives have going for them is cost per GB.

        100+MB read and about 50 MB write last I read.
        For comparison, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 3.5" desktop drive will do about ~47 MB per second.

    • No, I think you are quite mistaken. Read up on Hybrid Drives. [wikipedia.org]

      The future of laptop hardrive technology is going to be a mixture of hard disk and flash memory technology.

    • Re:Flash is a complementary technology, not a riva (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If you were a pilot, you wouldn't just have the mechanic swap out the propeller for a Rolls Royce jet engine.

      Well done, you have truly lived up to your username.
    • I'm not sure your analogy holds. These sorts of flash drives would be beautiful in portable devices, but I can see a terrific value using them in laptops. Imagine putting 5 x 16gb flash drives in a laptop in a RAID 5 array, giving 64GB usable space (more than enough for most laptops). You'd have a few huge advantages.

      1. You'd save a terrific amount of power (spinning CDs and HDs kills batteries faster than about anything).
      2. In a RAID 5 array (so long as only 1 drive fails at a time), if you have a drive
      • To be honest I can only see Apple implementing something like that now, but eventually it'd hit the PC market. HP still innovates even if Dell doesn't.

        EDIT PARENT: I'm sure there are other advantages too, but this is what came off the top of my head. If we could get read/write speeds on flash drives up to the speeds DDR RAM has you could have a computer that, when unplugged unexpectedly, doesn't lose anything it wasn't writing at that very millisecond. Boy wouldn't that be a leap ahead. (Windows Vista has

  • Not a total replacement (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Shamashmuddamiq ( 588220 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:35PM (#14460765)
    Hard Drives will be useful for the forseeable future in lots of areas. Hopefully, however, in many applications, we can get rid of them altogether. With the correct wear-leveling algorithms, flash can last a long time. And there aren't big seek penalties like in hard drives, so read performance can be much better. And for applications where seek times dominate, this will boost performance big time. You'll be able to get good performance out of a fully normalized database without requiring nearly as much cache.

    I, for one, welcome... oh never mind.

    As flash drives become more and more popular, more dollars will pour into flash research and development. And applications will learn to accomodate the strengths and weaknesses of flash. I think we'll be seeing some really neat things over the next 10 years. Terabyte flash drive, anyone?

    • I'm not a hardware guy, but it strikes me that this would be a nice thing to have in the various boxes that are sprouting up all over the place. I had a professor once that had some insane number of obsolete computers running Linux and some other OSS, performing all manner of Internet appliance type chores (firewall, intrusion detection, cycle server for student projects, what have you). Some of these seem like good candidates to yank out the hard drive from -- all the firewall needs is a Linux distributi

  • Rival? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Transcendent ( 204992 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:53PM (#14460849)
    How is a 2GB flash drive with only 100,000 erase cycles supposed to rival a much faster 500GB hard drive with a much, much longer life span? I think someone just wants to push their product...

    • Re:Rival? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pilkul ( 667659 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @11:09PM (#14460923)
      Much longer life span in principle, but if you get a lemon it might crash 2 weeks after you buy it... At least the flash memory will be able to warn you before it is close to expiry.

    • Re:Rival? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Dun Malg ( 230075 )
      How is a 2GB flash drive with only 100,000 erase cycles supposed to rival a much faster 500GB hard drive with a much, much longer life span? I think someone just wants to push their product...

      Well, NAND flash like this is good for 1,000,000 writes rather than the 100,000 of NOR flash; but yeah, even that doesn't sound like enough. I don't know though. How much is enough?

    • "How is a 2GB flash drive with only 100,000 erase cycles supposed to rival a much faster 500GB hard drive with a much, much longer life span?"

      Smaller/thinner/longer lasting laptops. I know we're not there yet, but if I could spend $300 for a 16 GB (byte, not bit) solid state drive, I'd happily plop it into my TabletPC. The desktop can be the storage device.

    • 10,000 writes/second for 13 years (Score:5, Informative)

      by morcheeba ( 260908 ) * on Friday January 13, 2006 @12:32AM (#14461298) Journal
      That's 100k per block, not for the entire drive. The wear-leveling algorithms will make sure that even if you constantly re-write the same file, that part of the memory won't get worn out.

      With a 512-byte erase block size, that is 419 billion writes. With a 4K erase block size, that's 52 billion writes. Use a 20GB drive instead of 2GB, and you'll get 10x the writes. And, the computer can warn you before the memory stops re-writing.

      5 trillion writes is 10,000 writes/second for 13 years.
    • How is a 2GB flash drive with only 100,000 cycles supposed to rival a much faster 500GB hard drive with a much, much longer life span?

      It's bigger than that, it's not going to rival something so big, it's going to be faster than most drives and you are so silly I wonder if you are that way intentionally. Let's quote the article:

      For mobile PCs - particularly thin-and-light models that do not require the larger hard drive capacities - the technology could extend battery life because solid-state Flash desig

  • peace and quiet (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SimonInOz ( 579741 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @11:09PM (#14460924)
    No moving parts = no noise.
    No moving parts = tough.
    No activity when quiescent - no heat.

    I, for one, welcome our new NAND overlords
  • I'd expect an announcement for new higher calibar bar-lifting hardware performance to come from the company that does this pretty much exclusively (unlike Samsung and all the others who dabble in flash memory). That notwithstanding, I'd also expect the bigger guys who are spread out into other products to buy out a threat slash potential asset like Sandisk. Does Sandisk no longer have top-notch proprietary R&D having been beaten to the punch? Or is this a very specific kind of advancement that it isn't

  • OFFS! This is stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @11:12PM (#14460940)
    Newegg, Maxtor 300 GIGABYTE sata $125. Available NOW.
    Vapordeals, Mysterymem, 16GB(?) $90. Available ???

    What's the R/W speed of these things? What's the R/W burnout on these?
    How many writes will they take before they fail?

    Maxtor is claiming a 1 million MTBF / 5 year warranty on their 300gb drive.
    No way in hell flash or any other memory is every going to compete with that,
    not in price, performance, capacity or endurance.

    Hard drives are so big and so cheap now that they are cheaper than blank DVD media. You're better off to archive to big drives then store them in fireproof safes than ANY other backup method. I have harddrives from the 80's that STILL have data on them that I can STILL retrieve and use, right now and I've made no serious effort to be overly protective of the drives. In other words, they've been kicking around the house in boxes on the floor. And they are still good. 20+ years later.

    Flash memory may have an indefinite SHELF lifespan but you can only write to them X number of times before they fail and they are slow.

    Someone is trying to sell the neophytes a bill of goods.
    When Vista releases there is going to be a rush to sell more silly crap to people. More upgrades.. Oh boy..
    In the meantime, I'll make due with my current system and my Linux.
    And as hard drives continue to get bigger and faster and cheaper I'll just add em as I need em.
    • >Newegg, Maxtor 300 GIGABYTE sata $125. Available NOW.
      >Vapordeals, Mysterymem, 16GB(?) $90. Available ???

      No, it is 16Gb (2GB), not 16GB. That is an order of magnitude larger... making your argument even more correct. Flash memory will probably never (in the foreseeable future) overtake or even come close to what you can do with rotating magnetic media.

      Someday there might just be a 20GB flash drive for $200, and at that point in time, there will probably be a 20TB hard drive that is 10 times faster f
      • Yes indeed on all accounts.

        As for what you can do right now, ONE TB will run you about $500.
        Just 5 years ago that amount of storage capacity was SciFi movie stuff of the future.
        Now it's only $500 and 3 days UPS ground away from reality.
        And with HTPC here, 1TB isn't all that big of a deal.
        SERIOUS HTPC people will probably want 2-3TB..

        As for notebooks/laptops, 2.5" drives are growing/shrinking too.
        I do not believe for a minute that NV memory drives will ever replace mag drives.
        I've seen these nonsense pie in

    • Re:OFFS! This is stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by matt21811 ( 830841 ) * on Thursday January 12, 2006 @11:37PM (#14461060) Homepage
      Nice rant but you totally mised the point.
      A 300 Gig IDE drive doesnt fit in a laptop.
      A 300 Gig IDE drive uses loads of power.
      A 300 Gig IDE drive has faster sustained transfer speed but much a longer access times than flash. Horses for courses.
      Wear leveling algorithms can make the write limit of flash irrelevant.
      That the interface (eg, ATA) for accessing storage media usually goes out of date before the media wears out is true for both disks and flash.
      The real story here is that flash is trouncing disk in improvements in Megs per $ and will one day catch up to and overtake disk. And it will be sooner than mmost people expect.
    • Flash memory may have an indefinite SHELF lifespan but you can only write to them X number of times before they fail and they are slow.

      Yes, because 1 million writes is so not worth the 100+ MB per second read/ 50 MB per second write speed. That's the industry standard. For some extra money you can bump that to 5 million with a 5 year warranty [slashdot.org].

      What does my brand new laptop do? About 20. Even the newest fancy pants Raptors peak at 80 MB per second at the edge of the disk.

      Considering how late your comme

  • 11 years to replace 3.5 inch drives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by matt21811 ( 830841 ) * on Thursday January 12, 2006 @11:17PM (#14460959) Homepage
    I did a study which estimates that flash will surpass 3.5 inch IDEs in every price by 2017.
    Read about it here:
    http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddisk .html [mattscomputertrends.com]
  • Remember your first Nintendo "Mario's"? Plug em in n out, not enough gold on the contacts, but the chips still play if you blow on the contacts.How many disk games have worn out since? How many Hard drives still work with the old games on em? Maybe optical storage or quantum computers will come along., but I can see what has lasted the longest so far.
    • 'Remember your first Nintendo "Mario's"? Plug em in n out, not enough gold on the contacts, but the chips still play if you blow on the contacts.How many disk games have worn out since?"

      Amusingly, the reason why blowing on the contacts worked was because you were causing condensation to accumulate on the contacts. The reason the contact would lose connection is that if you rub two sheets of copper together, it produces a buildup of this dark gunky substance. Instert a cartridge a few times and enough buil
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • As much as I prefer flash for an MP3 player over a HDD I admit that funny stuff happens to it. I have had some camera CF cards do peculiar things. Especially if there is a power problem when they are writing. Remember the mars rover was hamstrung for awhile with a flash problem. They sorted it though.
  • If you read the specs on typical flash memory, the stuff can last around 10 years until the data isn't necessarily correct.

    Doesn't that make them about as good as the dye based CD-Rs that people fear will not be good for archives?

    I'm not saying I'm the expert on this -- I'd appreciate it if someone could explain to me that the flash memory will actually last 40 years or so. But I doubt it.

  • Secured OS? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12, 2006 @11:31PM (#14461032)
    When I see some more knowledgable people here talking about putting the OS on flash, reading it to active memory, etc. the first thing that comes to mind (especially given the limited writes) is that it's the right technology to introduce the "trusted" OS - you don't want to write to the OS unless it's a patch, you don't let the user change much if anything, it's in a stable form that is quickly loadable, probably faster that OS on harddrive now that is the technologic foot in the door to entice people to upgrade to it. If they limit the writability with some sort or authorization scheme that is changable with the update, ANY writing can be limited to over a connection to the home server. Sure, a business wouldn't like/allow/purchase that, but I think that the whole trusted computing idea is aimed at controlling home computers, not the business machines, yes? It would seem to be an elegant fit with (my understanding of) trusted computing.
  • Sure the Flash memory are growing in size at some rate r per year, but at the same time the need for more and more disk space is also growing at some rate r'.
    I can't say if r > r' so much that in the course of the next few years we'll see HD disapear ... I doubt it.
  • You know, I wonder, can someone please make NOR flash? I mean it's functionally complete too. Anyone know of any available NOR flash?

    I wonder if I'm misinterpreting the meaning of NAND in this instance, where the hardware uses chained NAND gates to store values. Can't the same design be implemented using NOR's?
    • The traditional flash devices are NOR flash devices. They are by nature more reliable than NAND flash but are expensive to amnufacture. NOR flash devices can withstand more write write cycles than a NAND flash. BIOS flash are NOR, as are most of the solid state flash drives used in telecom and aerospace. This is why NOR flash is marketed to embedded/industrial customers and NAND flash is marketed to the consumer market.

    • Re:How bout NOR Flash? (Score:5, Informative)

      by hyc ( 241590 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @01:56AM (#14461567) Homepage Journal
      NOR flash is extremely slow for writes. This Samsung appnote
      http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/Memo ry/appnote/onenand_features_performance_051104.pdf [samsung.com]
      compares I/O performance of the various technologies (the chart is on page 28, so scroll down...)

      For their test rig, NAND flash yields 8.8MB/sec writes vs NOR at 0.14MB/sec. That's why NOR flash is only used for BIOS memory and other things you don't have to rewrite very often. On the flip side, NAND flash gets reads at 16.5MB/sec vs NOR at 23.9MB/sec (or 108MB/sec, presumably in some kind of burst mode - that part isn't explained).

      If their OneNAND performs as well as they claim, I could see using it for a boot drive; 68MB/sec read would be fine there, 9.3MB/sec write would be ok as long as you weren't paging to it or doing much of anything else. Linux would run pretty well with those parameters, its buffer cache is good at absorbing and deferring writes; Windows 2K/XP's memory manager/cache manager purges pages too aggressively though, which would make the write throughput a serious system bottleneck.
  • 6000 networked desktops at my place of work, Windows XP notwithstanding, almost all 40G+ hard drives, most probably 90% empty, >200,000G of empty disk, bumps up the $/useful G somewhat, must be some market for 4-8G "drives" right now [again]!

  • Gordon (Score:3, Funny)

    by coofercat ( 719737 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @05:23AM (#14462158) Homepage Journal
    "Flash! Flash! I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the earth!"

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