Forget Flash: Resistive RAM Crams 1TB Onto Tiny Chip 287
nk497 writes "Flash memory could soon be a thing of the past, according to U.S. startup Crossbar, which claims it's close to bringing resistive RAM (RRAM) to the market. Crossbar is touting impressive specs for the RRAM technology, promising 20 times the write performance at a fraction of the power consumption and size of the current best-in-class NAND flash modules — and squeezing terabytes of storage capacity onto a single chip the size of a postage stamp. The company also claims its technology can retain data for up to 20 years, compared with the standard one to three years with NAND flash."
but what about the cloud? (Score:5, Funny)
why do i need this if there is the cloud to keep my data? why carry 1TB on my iphone when i can just pay at&t more money for more data to stream my music and netflix?
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Because you might want to listen to your music -- or watch your favorite movies -- even when you're in locations/situations where you can't easily/cheaply stream your data. Such as on an airplane, or deep inside a building where there's no reception.
This is not to say that the data wouldn't live in the cloud. Think of your portable device as simply containing a cache, which is loaded on demand. The bigger the cache, the better.
Re:but what about the cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because technology alternates back and forth on this stuff.
Early Computers did all the work. You had a computer it did all the work for you and only you.
Then we got the mainframe One Big computer with terminals so people use the terminals and the data gets saved on the Mainframe(s).
Then came the PC, we started to move off the mainframe and ran programs directly on our computer again.
Once broad band became cheap enough and popular services began to move to the cloud as on the average your data was safer there, and easier for the company to manage the software.
So with cheap and a lot of data we could go back to more of a Personal computing role again. Probably keeping the strong points from the past and making using computing a little more different.
Say you now have a Netflix app that will in the background download what it expects you to watch. Then if you want to watch it it is available even if it is offline.
Or your system will host an archive of your data in cases your networks speed is too slow or are offline.
Will their be trade offs you bet. But this type of stuff cycles around. CPU+Storage+Networking+Price Fluctuate over time. So the popular solution will change base on the systems strong points.
Desktops for average Joe Web Browser user, is starting to get out of fashion, and going to Phones and Tablets (I am not touting death to any technology here). But to get the optimal conveniences we are trading off Slower CPU, and Storage to get small form factor at a good price. So many apps are popular on the cloud. Because the servers have the Big CPUs and storage and will just send output to the low end Tablets. Now these tablets are getting faster and more storage so people will want to run more apps on them, thus more apps will be created.
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You might need it if you use your computer as something other than a toy or care about security or performance.
Number of re-writes? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do the memory points wear out after a certain number of re-writes?
Re:Number of re-writes? (Score:5, Informative)
Do the memory points wear out after a certain number of re-writes?
Yes, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], but new developments have been increasing the material endurance while decreasing the power consumption (less power == less harmful heat).
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Hype reserved until I can buy it from Amazon (Score:5, Insightful)
Cool announcement.
But...
Given how often we hear researchers exclaiming they've invented the next "Greatest thing (TM)", I'll reserve judgement until I can purchase what comes out of their research.
I'd bet given the patent landscape at the moment that no matter what they have they will be sued for infringement by somebody. It's the way of things today.
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Re: Hype reserved until I can buy it from Amazon (Score:3)
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I believe they mean unpowered and on the shelf. That would allow this new stuff to be used in place of backup tapes.
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Informative)
unpowered the flash cells will leak electrons off their floating gates (powered too if the device doesn't do some sort of maintenance cycle). with as few as 100 electrons making the difference on a cell...
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)
But all the flash devices I've used have a retention period of at least 20 years (disclaimer: I'm thinking of flash ROMs and CPLDs and SPI flash for FPGAs, but the way they store bits is the same as a USB flash drive). I've never seen any as short as 1-3 years.
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They are not cheap NAND flash though. That's why they cost so much, relatively speaking. An Atmel Dataflash 1MB chip costs about $1, which is $1000/GB.
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Yes, and yes. I have no idea if it half a decade, or two decades, but that's the timeframe.
HDs also lose their data, but that takes a lot longer.
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Genuinely: what's this about regular old Flash being unable to store data for more than a year or three? Have I seriously misunderstood or is this a real problem I've been extremely lucky to avoid thus far?
I only know about embedded NOR flash, but in that case the rated lifetime is after the max number of write/erase cycles with storage under worst-case conditions on the worst units to come out of the fab. Note that commodity NAND flash is heavily dependent on ECC, so the spec number might not reflect the true lifetime of the bits themselves. At reasonable temperatures and usage patterns with a more typical unit, the data will likely last much longer.
But again, I haven't seen anyone's internal NAND reliabilit
But... (Score:2)
is it agile???
CEO information (Score:4, Informative)
one to three years? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have SD cards and USB thumb drives far older than 1-3 years and can still read the ancient data that was on them just fine.
Where did this "1-3 years for NAND flash" figure come from? It's a bit concerning.
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Some really cheap types of NAND used in SSDs do have that limitation, but the controller just re-writes the data periodically to refresh it. Of course if you leave it on the shelf for 3 years you might be screwed.
In fact HDDs do it too, or at least used to. My old Seagate drives used to periodically start ticking as the drive did a surface scan and read/rewrite cycle, during which bad blocks would also be remapped. All my newer drives are in a NAS now so I wouldn't notice if they still did it.
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That's the standard warranty period on SSDs. SSDs often get much more written to them (dozens of gigabytes per day, in some cases), so they can run through their limited endurance much faster, even though they generally use more-durable MLC instead of TLC. With care, they can last much longer, but if you're using them as swap or something, it can run out after a year or two.
Good news everyone! (Score:5, Informative)
a few notes:
- RRAM (aka ReRAM) is memsistor based RAM
- super simple design
- requires less power (lower voltage too) than FLASH and racetrack memory.
- 10ns switching (faster than DDR some DDR RAM)
- 1 trillion write operations according to US startup Crossbar [semiaccurate.com]
- possibly scaled down to 2nm (when they invent the manufacturing process)
so if this really works out, it may be a replacement for RAM and FLASH memory in lots of stuff. i'm not sure if this includes computers but at the very least, it could be used to retain data on RAM sticks (hopefully directly on them) when you turn off your PC.
RAM data retention (Score:5, Insightful)
So not only will they sell new computers without a Windows install disc, they won't even install it on a disk drive, it will be preinstalled in RAM and all you have to do is turn it on.
Although it is kind of an interesting idea to consider a computer where there is no distinction between mass storage and RAM, where RAM is rewritable but permanent.
You could even leave programs in a running state but just stop executing them on the CPU. You could install new software in an already-running and configured state (how's that for a backup?).
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Although it is kind of an interesting idea to consider a computer where there is no distinction between mass storage and RAM, where RAM is rewritable but permanent.
That is an interesting idea. Maybe you could call it Multiple-Capability Storage, or Multics for short.
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So not only will they sell new computers without a Windows install disc, they won't even install it on a disk drive, it will be preinstalled in RAM and all you have to do is turn it on.
Although it is kind of an interesting idea to consider a computer where there is no distinction between mass storage and RAM, where RAM is rewritable but permanent.
You could even leave programs in a running state but just stop executing them on the CPU. You could install new software in an already-running and configured state (how's that for a backup?).
Hmmm...makes me wonder what types of new and exciting malware and viruses will be making the rounds...
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Someone else has noted that the Commodore 64 and Apple II and other computers of that vintage had this feature. A computer as late as the Mac Classic [wikipedia.org] (released in 1990) also had this feature. You could boot the system software off of a hard drive or a floppy, but without these it would boot from a ROM to System 6.0.3. It wa
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Well, pre-installed ROMs aren't exactly the same thing. Apple ][s would run a flavor of BASIC from ROM, but software was executed from RAM. It was also immutable, so any variables or data had to be stored in RAM and were subject to loss with power. DOS required booting from media, although I'm sure somebody figured out a way to pack DOS into maybe INTBASIC and burn to an EEPROM that would be the active boot ROM in slot 0.
I don't recall any of my early Macs (starting with the Mac Plus) bootable to Mac O
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How do you 'Reboot' windows if not even unplugging the machine can re-set your state?
This will cause every windows Help-Desk script to be re-written, and I can only hope that the new script does not change to 'go out and buy a new machine'.
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I'm old enough to have seen this done in moving a running program from one machine to another. The computers involved were old (even then) DEC PDPs (I don't remember whether they were 8s or 11s), and the program was running on a 8KB (IIRC) magnetic core memory card - literally, a thousands of little tiny magnetic toruses strung on what seemed like billions of hairlike laquered wires.
It went like this:
1 - Program running on computer one
2 - Halt computer one (stop program counter), pull out memory card, carr
big deal, I have unlimited memory (Score:4, Funny)
write-only memory has an infinite density.
Now this (Score:2)
At The Limit (Score:3)
"20 times the write performance"
I wish we could actually use that performance instead of being hamstrung by the limits of SATA 6gb. Even with today's flash memory we have hit the limits of SATA 6gb (around 600MB/sec). Can we please get cheap bootable PCIe x4/x8 cards instead of SATA. And stop making PCIe cards that are nothing more than SATA RAID + SATA SSD's. Design an ASIC that looks like an ATA or SCSI controller and directly talks to the memory and PCIe bus. If a 1 terabyte PCI card which has at least 2GB sec read speed for around $300 came out I would buy it immediately on impulse. I want to jump into a game and not even realize its loading. I want my programs to simply pop up. I want to forget that there is a difference between main memory and storage speeds.
At that point I won't have to worry about space limits on my SSD and eliminate the need for mechanical storage for non critical stuff like multimedia, backups, archives etc. That is how I do it today, one 256GB SSD for just my games, 1TB for boot/programs/VM's etc. I also use a 2TB eSATA drive for extra stuff when I ran out of room on my 1TB (too many experimental VM's). A high capacity SSD would allow me to stop juggling which games I have installed on my SSD. I mainly use steam so its not that big a deal but sucks when you want to dust off a game and wait for it to download.
Maybe in the future AMD or intel can provide Hypertransport or QPI connections to SSD's or like in that article a few months back, put the non-volatile memory on the main memory controller along with RAM. Then we can finally shed the need for mechanical disks.
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The new Mac Pro attached SSD storage through PCIe, if you want to see it in action...
It had to be said (Score:2)
Don't they know that resistance is futile?
Pfft. Hand in your geek cards at the door, please... :p
Pair of Dimes Shifting (Score:2)
This is the thing that could cause people to ditch Facebook.
Just imagine an FB-like app on a mobile device that can store all your data, your friend's data and your family's data.
Who needs a cloud?
vaporware (Score:2)
Re:Will we finally get a replacement for hard disk (Score:5, Insightful)
The first one we already do. SSDs are great.
The latter two, what would you replace them with? A trackpad could work I guess, but I can't see a replacement for a keyboard. Speaking is way slower than typing, typing on a touch screen is an error prone suckfest, and those are pretty much the only options right now.
Re:Will we finally get a replacement for hard disk (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand why you would even want to replace them. Mechanical switches are the best thing available in terms of providing input with tactile feedback. The only reason to use anything else is cost or space constraints.
Touch screen fanboys (Score:2)
Mechanical switches are the best thing available in terms of providing input with tactile feedback.
Until the fanboys come out and claim that tactile feedback is overrated, that platformers, fighters, and other video game genres whose control relies on tactile feedback are outdated genres, and that video game developers should just accept this and design their games around the lack of tactile feedback. Every Slashdot discussion of the handheld gaming market seems to bring out fanboys on both sides: fanboys for the mechanical switches in PlayStation Vita or Nintendo 3DS and fanboys for the flat sheet of gl
Re:Touch screen fanboys (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting this comes up. Over the weekend at Quakecon John Carmack addressed the evolution of controllers and his thoughts on the subject in his keynote. My favorite was when he was mocking Apple having the one button mouse and then one upped that by saying the kinect was "like a 0-button mouse."
My main argument would probably be, when you have a physical key/button with tactile feedback you can much more easily ensure an intentional action on the part of the user. Whereas touchscreens you are much more prone to fat fingering the wrong key (although this happens sometimes on keyboards too to be fair, just not nearly as often in my experience). A promising tech I remember reading about I think on slashdot was the touchscreen that could bend in such a way as to give tactile feedback at any point of the screen for a variety of sizes and shapes. Arguments could still be made to have solid keys/buttons still, but brings the two a little closer together at least.
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Apple's Magic Mouse is a one button mouse. Literally. The entire top surface depresses a mechanical switch. The fact that it's also a multi touch surface doesn't change that.
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Really? Then do this: Click the left button and hold it down. Now click the right button and hold it down. Release the left button. Then release the right button.
I have one of these, it came with my iMac. I have a MacBook Pro. I bought the magic touch pad for the iMac. I have some fucking idea what I'm talking about.
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Then there's actually computer users, clutching the real, full-size keyboad in fear while glancing on Ubuntu's and Windows' rapid and rampant move from sanity to the insane "everything is a touch screen" interface, which no computer user ever asked for but seems oh-so-trendy if you're a marketing drone who mostly use the computer for playing games on facebook or following blogs.
That's probably the longest sentence I've ever written, btw.
Re:Touch screen fanboys (Score:5, Interesting)
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I am not suggesting you should. I am typing this on a keyboard likely older than many other posters. My company now has IT employees younger than this keyboard.
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They have been getting some sort of a comeback recently, with Das Keyboard becoming mainstream and a lot of companies following them to grab a piece of the market. I wouldn't trade my Das Keyboard for a "normal" keyboard, although it would be interesting to try one of the newer, "silent" versions. Supposedly they have an almost identical tactile feel to them, at least when comparing the graphs.
Re:Will we finally get a replacement for hard disk (Score:5, Funny)
"Glass, check forecast for rainstorm"
'[OK, searching for cast of gay porn]'
Dictation versus typing (Score:3)
Speaking is way slower than typing
Dictation can be quicker than typing in the right circumstances. My wife dictates reports all the time for her job precisely because it is quicker and she is a very good typist. Dictation is however a learned skill (like typing) that takes some practice to become proficient. You have to be able to form complete coherent sentences prior to speaking.
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I have some trouble believing this. Does she sound like the micromachines guy?
The issue I have with believing this is not the forming complete sentences before speaking, but the simple fact that speech is slow and error prone. Even two humans from the same region will ask each other to repeat things from time to time. That only even works because there is so much error correction going on. With a machine it only gets worse. Then fixing those mistakes is even slower than fixing a typographical one.
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Faster than typing on a phone sure, but how is it faster than typing on a proper keyboard? I cannot speak as quickly as I can type.
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If that's actually true, you're an extreme outlier. Most people can speak much faster than they can type, and that's true for even very fast typists.
Talking is faster than typing (for most people) (Score:5, Insightful)
how is it faster than typing on a proper keyboard? I cannot speak as quickly as I can type.
You probably can and do speak significantly quicker than you type unless you have some sort of speak impediment. Most people can comfortably speak at around 150 words per minute which is far faster than most can type. Dictating however does take some practice so you quite likely would be slower at first until you get comfortable dictating.
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Well, I have a speech impediment, while not to the degree that it was when I was younger, I have a stuttering problem, especially when nervous, upset or angry. That would be horrible for dictation (now if only I was a good speller I might be ok).
Yes talking is faster than typing (Score:5, Informative)
I have some trouble believing this. Does she sound like the micromachines guy?
Listen to physicians dictate some time, particularly pathologists or radiologists who tend to do a lot of it. Yes, they often do speak very quickly - 200+ words per minute is not rare. Once they get good at it, they can easily rattle off a report in far less time than they could possibly type it no matter how quickly they type. Transcriptionists normally have to slow the recording down while typing to get what is being said. It's very easy to talk faster than anyone can type. Takes some practice to do so in a useful manner though. Helps too if there is some consistency in what is being said - like if you have to produce a consistent type of report. Lawyers and doctors very often use dictation systems to good effect and they do it 100% because it saves time, even for good typists.
The issue I have with believing this is not the forming complete sentences before speaking, but the simple fact that speech is slow and error prone.
Not once you are used to dictating. With a proper dictation system you can easily start, stop and record over what you've already done if you make an error. (People make a lot of errors typing too) Typically you get the report sent back to you for review and correction after transcription. However even including review it is still usually faster than typing it yourself.
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If you have another human doing the typing then it is not really faster either. Maybe cheaper, but surely not faster. Since you have to wait for them to do that.
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If you're writing for the New Yorker, fixing mistakes takes weeks. But then they get into not just whether the noun itself should be in the possessive form, but whether your sentence should require a noun in the possessive form in the first place.
The kind of mistakes you're talking about are specifically keyboard level mistakes. Spelling, orthography, and missing or duplicated words.
It's a tremendous cognitive burden to type at 120
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Have you had a SSD fail? Not so great
Re:Will we finally get a replacement for hard disk (Score:5, Insightful)
How is that different than any other storage device failing?
This is why backups exist.
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With (at least in the previous generation) the controller of SSD it is a lot worse.
With harddisks the are first soft faults, later there are hard faults, but often most data can be retrieved from a disk.
With SSD, from one second to the next the whole thing will not work anymore, you can't even read from it anymore, nothing.
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SSD has its uses, but long term storage isn't one of them. Hard disks can be recovered, but a SSD, good luck... that data is gone.
Of course, the trick is to have some media for backups or just even snapshots, except that it seems that IT shops are embracing geographically separate SANs and async mirroring as opposed to archive-grade media. Virtually every shop I've worked with, no matter how big a SAN they get, if one doesn't watch out, it will get full overnight.
Since it appears that the pendulum finally
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Spun-down discs. Disconnected.
Use them just like tape media. You can even have a robot to pull them out of storage, or plug a small SATA controller and power device into the one you need to access.
Re:Will we finally get a replacement for hard disk (Score:5, Interesting)
On a side note, a few years back, I was working on designing a tape robot that would be able to use bare 2.5" drives.
It had almost zero time to load (once it was plugged into a reader slot and spun up.)
It also had various uses it could work as, be it a VTL, the disks presented as tape libraries, spanning disks where data that wasn't used would be moved to platters, then demounted.
The problem was the robotics. Only one company was able to make the robots that could reliably grip, move, and ungrip the drives, and they were asking $10,000 per unit for starters.
Eventually, the project got shuttled aside, but having a silo that was able to use disks without any special enclosure required would have been nice for the enterprise (IMHO, of course.)
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Virtually every shop I've worked with, no matter how big a SAN they get, if one doesn't watch out, it will get full overnight.
I fixed that long ago. I buy 10x what they expect to ever need, and then connect everyone to it over a shared 10Kbps link.
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So?
If the hard disk is faulty use backups. Don't trust that it is still working if you get any faults.
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Yeah, but you also should not trust spinning rust that is starting to fail. In that case you always go to backups.
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Have you had a SSD fail?
No, I have not. Which is why I think the claim in the summary that NAND flash will fail in "the standard one to three years" is BS.
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I've never personally had one "fail" as such but i've seen mysterious corruption where files are no longer accessible or no longer contain what they should contain far more often than i've seen such things on hard drives.
My feeling is that the wear leveling algorithms are not handling some corner cases (such as powerloss) correctly.
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The latter two, what would you replace them with?
Silly question! Holographic projections with resistive force fields for feedback. Saw them on TV. Im pretty sure they use green zero-point energy somehow.
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Troll about?
SSDs are far cheaper than hard drives were for most of my life. Speed costs.
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Not to mention are increasing rapidly in capacity.
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You mean a tablet? Cause those are all over the place.
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Does your phone have a fan? How about your tablet? How about Ultrabooks..?
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My ultrabook sure does.
Most of them do, just very well hidden. The Macs for example vent right infront of the screen hinge. The Dell ultrabooks vent right out the back.
Chrome for Android misbehaves in low memory (Score:2)
Chrome on my tablet also likes to reload any browser tab that isn't frontmost, causing me to lose scroll position, state of collapsed and expanded divs, and (worst of all) text entered into a form. And sometimes it can't load the page again until I get to the next Wi-Fi hotspot, as it has expired from cache. I've read that Chrome does this because it purges the DOM for all tabs that are not currently visible when Android notifies Chrome of memory pressure. Strangely, Chrome on my netbook, which has about t
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Honestly, computers are so efficient these days that fans shouldn't be necessary. I guess it's some sort of evil spiral. "Oh, the computers are so fast anyway, we don't have to bother optimizing this, it's just unnecessary developer time". Then you get to a situation where people write applications in a framework running on javascript running in an operatingsystem that is running *in* a web browser which is running on some other type of virtual machine ad absurdum.
And it's slow, but who cares, do you have
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Wait until you start using brain scanners and continue to "type" after you've fallen asleep. I cringe to think of how the conversation changes.
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What would make it more entertaining is when the computers "overhear" each other and now you have a logic block for two completely different problems being entered simultaneously. Sad part is, I have seen some people that probably wouldn't notice, would check the code in, and resolve the issue they were working on.
Re:Will we finally get a replacement for hard disk (Score:5, Funny)
I can type faster than I can talk by a multitude, sometimes even faster than I can think
A quick look through YouTube's comments section reveals that you're not alone.
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Between Battery Backed SRAM and Linear (NOR) Flash you forgot: Bubble Memory.
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Bubble Memory.
Is that the kind that sells address space to bits at sub-prime rates until the whole thing collapses in on itself?
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It will only hit market when there is some new DRM standard applied to it, similar to SD cards with 20% of their capacity set aside for encrypted stuff.
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It took decades for solid state devices to start to eclipse magnetic storage
That was not a fair contest. Because of the development of GMR [wikipedia.org], HDDs increased in capacity far faster than the Moore's Law rate of solid state. But GMR is now pretty much played out, which should give other technologies a chance to finally catch up. The future of storage is unlikely to be a repeat of the last two decades.
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Flash works quite well. Not ideal, but good enough. Faster than spinning discs, no significant seek time, durable enough to last the expected life of a laptop now.
Unless you mean the other flash. In which case, death is too good for it.
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Micro SD cards are already quite a bit smaller than postage stamps lol.
Are there any with a terabyte of storage space?
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http://www.crossbar-inc.com/events/press-releases/crossbar-emerges-from-stealth-mode.html [crossbar-inc.com]
They have a production sample ready for the SOC integration, that looks all nice, but does the production scale well? Could this actually is be price comparable or cheaper then the NAND flash?