Flash Memory is Slow and Unreliable when

holoman

12th September 2005 - 02:56 PM

http://www.physorg.com/news6388.html

compared to Hard Drives.

Flash chips provide a great non-volatile storage device but using them for replacing hard drives is bad engineering doomed to failure.

Flash devices dont have infinite read and write and they are aymetrical in their data transfers.

guiding_light

13th September 2005 - 10:52 AM

While there is asymmetry flash access is still faster than the hard drive. But hard drives have lower cost per byte. If that ever goes away, the HD could be in trouble, with the following caveat.

Flash has a million-cycle reliability. If you access your drive every 5 minutes or so, this would warrant a replacement in 10 years. If there is frequent thrashing it could be much sooner.

Michael E. Malis

30th January 2006 - 12:11 AM

When it comes to innovation...........human beings will always find a way to make it work. Multi-billion read/write cycles will be on the shelf I would guess in about 4 to 5 years. This will be coupled with 400x speed, 0.5TB chips and $4/GB. Solid-state hard drives are the future. The only question is.........how long?

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