Posted on 10/23/2007 4:28:47 PM PDT by gridlock
They will end up calling it i-Gig
Initially, it will cost over 500 dollars. Then they will realize they made a huge mistake and will lower the pri...
oops, wrong company!
Word has it that booting Windows is nearly instantaneous.
This kind of solid-state drive would also be ideal for small robots, if you didn’t have to make them for $100 ;)
Without going into specifics. My employer did considerable testing before deploying tens of thousands of special purpose machines, using flash memory, which is written over and over again. We've had them in the field for a few years now. I've not heard of any problems.
I am so impressed with the electronics from South Korea. Seriously, a few years ago I considered Korean products as cheap, second-rate products. But now I place them squarely as good as anything from Japan or the USA. Anything from Samsung or LG is as good as it gets. Kudos to the Koreans for truly achieving superiority in many markets.
http://portableapps.com/
There are some tricks to getting a OS on a Flash Drive.
Windows CE and some loads of Linux will work though.
BUMP!
And I haven’t heard any stories about slave labor, forced abortions, pesticides in breakfast cereal, or lead in teething rings.
Sounds like MP3 players would be a good application.
Samsung’s been coming out with a number of amazing products this year. If Sony’s OLED product doesn’t take off, they had better watch out!
The durability of one of these flash memory drives is only about 100 years, so, no, the problem hasn’t been solved.
Whew!
I remember working on a driver for a 5 MB hard drive (the 8" floppies only went up to 1.2 MB); the supplier had up to 20 MB drives (which our computers supported but were out of my price range).
Perfect. That is essentially the approach used for the iPOD Nano and Shuffle. It will now be reasonable for the higher end iPOD devices. Less power and nearly indestructible.
Flash drives use wear-leveling algorithms so that the 100,000 write cycles/page ends up allowing trillions of writes total. Unfortunately, the flash-leveling algorithms are used to emulate a sector-writable device which is then used with a FAT16 or FAT32 file system. If I remember correctly, a 256MB SmartMedia card is divided into blocks of 256 pages of 512 bytes each; each of the page on a block may only be written twice before the entire block is erased. When DOS or Windows wants to write e.g. sector 1234, the flash file system finds a blank page someplace and writes the data there along with a tag saying it's sector 1234; it then marks the old sector 1234 to indicate it's no longer valid. At some point many blocks are going to be full but contain a number of invalidated pages. The wear-leveling algorithm will periodically copy the data from such block into fresh pages. Indeed, to ensure that wear is distributed evenly, even blocks that don't have any invalid data will be periodically moved elsewhere. This ensures that even if a disk is 90% full of files that never change, the "churn" won't always occur in the same 10% that remains.
While wear leveling is certainly a good feature, the approach of emulating a sector-based device and putting a FAT file system on it is a bad one. For good performance, free space should be consolidated, but the sector-based flash systems don't know what sectors the PC file system considers to be "free". Fragmentation can often be a severe problem with older flash drives; had the drives implemented some sort of direct file system, such a problem could have been avoided.
Apacer modules act like a parallel ATA disk drive. The ASIC performs the "wear leveling" transparently. It works fine with Linux, QNX and Windows.
Well it's not all good. The government will start remembering everything about you, all your cell phone pings from everywhere you go, every expression on your face and everything you look at as you walk down every street. It's a socialist dictator's dream.
The mechanical disk drive is the slowest most unreliable part of a computer. The problem is they keep growing in capacity while dropping in cost, so they never seem to go away.
It's possible right now to convert the entire text content in the Library of Congress, every newspaper and book ever copyrighted in America, onto a single $150 disk drive. I would think that would greatly extend the amount of knowledge everyone could data mine. This would be bad for leftism because the patterns of failure couldn't so easily be hidden. Sadly the Library of Congress has no plans to digitize their collection.
Very clever! 82 on funny.
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