Cool stuff. My next computer will not have spinning drives.
Posted on 10/23/2007 4:28:47 PM PDT by gridlock
Those geniuses at Samsung are at it again, and this time they've crammed together so many memory cells so tightly, they've come up with the world's densest flash memory chip. Using a process that packs the cells just 30 nm (30 nanometers, about the length of the smallest virus) away from each of their closest neighbors, now they can pack 64 gigabits of flash memory onto one chip. Layering together 16 of those cells results in a memory card that can hold an incredible 128 GB.
This is a big deal. When more memory can be packed into a smaller space on flash memory cards, the price-per-gig drops. As the capacity of these energy-sipping memory cards increases, they become more practical for use in everyday devices such as laptops, replacing spinning hard drives and promising such features as instant-on, smaller size, less heat and enhanced energy efficiency. We can't wait to see the impact of this technology, expected to hit the market by 2009.
Cool stuff. My next computer will not have spinning drives.
Have they ever solved the problem that after you had written to the same spot on the drive a number of times that spot was now no longer viable?
I remember that being an issue early on; it’s why I don’t own any of these devices.
Nope.
Supposedly NAND flash, the type used for these HD replacements, is not subject to the wearing-out problem.
That same problem would certainly apply to a mechanical device like a hard drive.
I have several 1G and 2G SD chips in various devices, and have never seen any decreases in capacity. And I over-write a lot.
Are you sure you're not thinking of re-writable CDs?
One gets many more write-read-erase-write cycles with spinning media than with the current flash devices.
What, something about how 30 cm diameter highly powerful magnifying glasses are the latest hot sexual aid in Japan?
There was a show on one of the cable channels more than a year ago about futuristic computer technology. One technology used magnets as storage devices. The capacity for storage was virtually limitless.
How soon will they show up at Wal-Mart? And for how much?
To put that in more down to Earth terms, that would be about 28 single layer DVD quality movies on one of those chips.
At that point, it would seem that having a faster bus becomes much more important. For this reason it is probably going to be USB3 4.8Gbit/s instead of USB2 480Mbit/s.
I had a whole flash drive just go totally dead on me a few months back. Nice surprise. Did have a backup, though.
A good application for this kind of device would be to hold a navigation database that normally resides on a CD ROM or DVD ROM. Access times are faster. The operation is mostly read. Updates might only be necessary annually as new databases are offered by the supplier.
It’s still a problem, but it’s 100,000 write cycles, and various techniques can increase the life of a chip to longer than you’ll probably be using it.
Wow. That’s something. I still remember buying my 100MB hard drive in college in ‘93 and thinking it would be impossible to fill that up. lol
I’ll have the one on the right with a side of shrimp fried rice :)
Dang, and I just forked over 40 bucks for a 4 gig Cruzer. I coulda had a vee-eight!
Seems like having a Computers OS located on Flash memory would be an ideal application.
The OS is rarely over written and having it on Flash would mean quicker boot up.
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