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Samsung breakthrough packs 128 GB on one flash memory card
SciFi.com ^ | 10/23/07 | Charlie White - Gizmodo

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.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Extended News; Japan
KEYWORDS: flash
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To: TheZMan
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.

They're generally using a round-robin scheme for allocation to ensure even wear of the individual sectors now. Pretty much true across the board: PDAs, cameras, USB drives, these new solid state hard drives.

That was mostly an issue in the first generation models.
41 posted on 10/24/2007 5:19:29 AM PDT by George W. Bush (Apres moi, le deluge.)
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To: ShadowAce; Ernest_at_the_Beach; gridlock

Scrumptious Hardware Ping

42 posted on 10/24/2007 6:30:44 AM PDT by martin_fierro (< |:)~)
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To: upchuck
I’ll have the one on the right with a side of shrimp fried rice :)

And I'll take the one on the left, leaving the one in the middle for Keith Olberman...

43 posted on 10/24/2007 8:19:17 AM PDT by BlueMondaySkipper (The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. - George Orwell)
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To: gridlock
promising such features as instant-on, smaller size, less heat and enhanced energy efficiency

I had all this in 1983...


44 posted on 10/24/2007 8:25:23 AM PDT by HamiltonJay
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To: pgobrien

interesting link....I may have to mull that one over.


45 posted on 10/24/2007 8:30:17 AM PDT by ErnBatavia (...forward this to your 10 very best friends....)
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To: HamiltonJay

I Adore My 64.


46 posted on 10/24/2007 9:21:54 AM PDT by gridlock (ELIMINATE PERVERSE INCENTIVES)
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To: rdb3; chance33_98; Calvinist_Dark_Lord; PenguinWry; GodGunsandGuts; CyberCowboy777; Salo; Bobsat; ..

47 posted on 10/24/2007 2:30:42 PM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: Reeses
Sadly the Library of Congress has no plans to digitize their collection.

Cripes, why the hell not??? Talk about making it immune to any Alexdria issues.

48 posted on 10/24/2007 2:41:03 PM PDT by Centurion2000 (False modesty is as great a sin as false pride.)
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To: gridlock
Check out Fusion I/O
49 posted on 10/24/2007 2:54:17 PM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: djf
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...

You're actually close. Apple is probably Samsung's biggest NAND customer, and has a long-term, high-volume contract with them.

50 posted on 10/24/2007 3:12:03 PM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: gridlock

OMG, I want one!


51 posted on 10/24/2007 4:46:14 PM PDT by zeugma (Ubuntu - Linux for human beings)
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To: gridlock
No he's not. The earlier FLASH memory chips suffered from a relatively short MTBF of R/W cycles.

Newer chips are addressing that shortcoming. This IS exciting news. I wonder what their DRAM is going to be like. 1TB of RAM on the desktop would be most welcome.

52 posted on 10/24/2007 4:51:29 PM PDT by AFreeBird (Will NOT vote for Rudy. <--- notice the period)
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To: gridlock

Nice!! The memory cards are impressive too!


53 posted on 10/24/2007 7:00:59 PM PDT by KoRn (Just Say NO ....To Liberal Republicans - FRED THOMPSON FOR PRESIDENT!)
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To: ShadowAce

Sweet looking card.(the model holding it isn’t too bad either) And the specs are fantastic, but at $30/GB, the 640GB card will run you a cool $19,200. Doesn’t look like I’ll be picking one up when they come out. :(


54 posted on 10/24/2007 8:24:36 PM PDT by AFreeBird (Will NOT vote for Rudy. <--- notice the period)
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To: AFreeBird
Doesn’t look like I’ll be picking one up when they come out. :(

heh. That's my thinking! :)

55 posted on 10/25/2007 4:45:08 AM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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Don’t Forget to Back Up Your Brain
Fox News | Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Corinna Underwood
Posted on 11/16/2007 11:27:29 AM EST by Ancient Drive
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1926751/posts


56 posted on 11/17/2007 2:22:03 PM PST by SunkenCiv (Profile updated Thursday, November 15, 2007. https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: Myrddin
Access times are faster.

As I understand it, although the access times are near instantaneous, the read times are quite slow. In other words, you get the first byte in a hurry, but it takes a long time to read a substantial number of consecutive bytes, so long that these devices are not suitable replacements for HDs in most applications even if the limited writes issue was resolved.

57 posted on 11/17/2007 2:30:45 PM PST by SergeiRachmaninov
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To: HamiltonJay
I've often thought that my Commodore64 was my most satisfactory computer.

Of course, I demanded little from it -- really sort of a memory typewriter -- but that was real word processing, even if it wasn't typesetting.

And this it did beautifully with a shareware program. I am not sure that it ever hung even once, and I certainly spent no time whatever fretting with issues of any sort. It was very easy and obvious how to get it to do the few (with my application) things that it did. No viruses. No manuals needed. No problems. No updates. Life was simple, but sweet.

58 posted on 11/17/2007 2:36:49 PM PST by SergeiRachmaninov
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To: SergeiRachmaninov
Access times for FLASH memory are faster than CD or DVD ROMs when used in a navigation application. Sentence fragments are a bad way to convey an idea.

BTW, I was just at my local computer surplus retailer. He moves a lot of laptops that have been turned over by big corporations in an upgrade campaign. Most of them have smaller hard disks than are currently supplied with new laptops. He does a brisk business in updating them to a larger disk and more RAM to make them relevant. He was just informed that Seagate and Western Digital are bailing out of the parallel IDE laptop drive business in February. That's not good news given that 90% of current laptops use an IDE drive. The "also ran" suppliers e.g. Fujitsu may remain in the game, but he doesn't want any part of their products. He was financially burned by a run of bad 20GB laptop drives from Fujitsu. He ate the full retail value of over 300 of those bad drives.

59 posted on 11/17/2007 2:49:08 PM PST by Myrddin
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