Hynix 48-GB Flash MCP

Hal_Porter writes to let us know that the third-largest NAND chip maker, Hynix, has announced they have stacked 24 flash chips in a 1.4mm thick multi-chip package. It's not entirely clear from the article whether the resulting 48-GB device is a proof of concept or a product. The article extrapolates to 384 GB of storage in a single package, sometime. Hal_Porter adds: "It's not clear if it's possible to write to them in parallel — if so the device should be pretty damn fast. The usual objection to NAND flash as a hard drive replacement is lifetime. NAND sectors can only be written 100,000 times or so before they wear out, but wear leveling can be done to spread writes evenly over at least each chip. I worked out that the lifetime should be much longer than a typical magnetic hard disk. There's no information on costs yet frankly and it sounds like an expensive proof of concept, but it shows you the sort of device that will take over from small hard disks in the next few years."

Re:swap space / tmpfs / cacheing

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Have you actually bought a sizeable flash drive? 4GB CD cards are starting to be common, I think CF cards are the most affordable flash drive that you can reasonably use as a system drive. But for the same price, you might buy a 300GB hard drive. Not only that, there doesn't seem to be any affordable SATA-based flash drives, which is quickly becoming the only drive connection type found in computers.

So it would work great for a network terminal, there doesn't seem to be enough for most people to use just yet.

Re:Database servers

[CastrTroy]

You'd have to look at how much actual reading or writing to the drive is done by a computer from that era. Currently, hard drive space is really cheap, so we write lots of stuff to the disk, like temp files, log files, swap out programs, and even with some filesystems and operating systems write to the drive every time a file is accessed. A computer from that era wouldn't be writing so much stuff too the hard drive, as hard drives were small and expensive. It would likely only write to the drive when you need a program to save actual human created data, or when you install a new program. Reading would only be done when you start up the computer, a new program, or load a file.

media storage

[Floritard]

It is just writing that is limited right? Myself, I'd love to have the space to host all my media, most of which just sits archived on dvd-r. I'd only need to write to the disk once. Seems most people, aside from those who do video production, really only need large amounts of space to serve/store media. Be cool to just keep a 200 gig SATA for regular use and just keep buying these suckers and fillin' them up for all that media. Later, when they're cheap that is.

Re:48 GB = 384Gb

[timeOday]

But these appear to be be tiny (for mobile applications).... you could fit an enormous number of them into a 3.5" (or even 2.5") hard drive enclosure, if you can afford it. Put in a controller that can read and write to, say, 16 chips in parallel, and you would have a monster hard drive in every respect.