Disk Drives Face Challenge From Chips

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

Technology description

[in2mind]

From the company developing it - Ovonyx:

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

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

Re:The real challage is price.

[WuphonsReach]

Hard Disk Drives now are about $0.50 a Gigabyte.

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

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

Re:Cost is what matters

[kansas1051]

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

Re:Formats

[KozmoStevnNaut]

I have a 200GB disk formatted as FAT32...

It is only Microsoft's own cut-rate implementation of a disk manager that insists on making FAT32 volumes a maximum of 32GB in size, and I suspect it is solely because they want people to use NTFS instead.

Re:Formats

[dextromulous]

You may only be able to format FAT32 up to 32GB using the default Windows utilities, but the maximum volume size for FAT32 is 8TiB. [wikipedia.org] However, you are still limited to a maximum 4GB file size and 268,435,437 files. I'm sure you would run into efficiency problems with a gigantic FAT32 drive, but that doesn't mean that 32GB is the limit.

NOT BUNK!

[itlurksbeneath]

While the actual flash technology might be capable of that kind of speed, the entire stack isn't. Compare the MB/s throughput of several hard drives here [hothardware.com] with the throughput of several USB flash drives here [arstechnica.com] (both benchmarks done with SiSoft's Sandra).

Bottom line: The USB drives are topping out at an average of 8 MB/s, the hard drives are in the 60 MB/s range. That alone puts hard drives an average of 7.5 times faster.

Flash drives have great single block seek times because they don't have to move a head, but most benchmarks show that their ability to move large quantities of data quickly sucks.