what are prospects for high capacity flash mem?

[majortom]

i was just thinking. the benefits of flash memory would greatly outweigh the current hd model. theyre smaller, they have no moving parts, so any heat generated would be minimal, if any. and once the capacity and transfer rates match/exceed traditional hard drives, it looks like the logical way to go. what do you guys think of using flash memory as a hard drive?..oo, ill just make a poll.

[msxyz]

Eventually hard drives will be replaced by some form of EEPROM, but I don't belive flash to be a viable solution, even if in the near future we will see flash cards of the size of a small (by today standards, that is) HD.

The most promising technology in a rather distant future seems, so far, a sort of crystal reticule memory. This would be a serious candidate as the density would be much higher than anything else. But one of the problem associated with molecular microstructures is retaining the information over long times, as the entropy works against this.

[Clay]

MRAM is also very interesting on the horizon. You can buy solid state HDs (going back years) but they're usually proprietary and VERY VERY expensive. ;)

[majortom]

i guess i should have been more general. what i meant was not just flash mem, but solid state (ie no moving parts) memory. i guess most of you already figured that out. 4 days till doom3!

[nvnews-reader]

I don't think there is any tech that can compete with HDD when it comes to size and cost. Besides I don't think we would see much benefit by moving to a solid state HD.

But I think new memory tech would be a big plus. If we could replace DRAM with a new version that has the speed of SRAM it would be a major boost.

I remember hearing about MS trying to get HDD manufacturers to add a little flash mem to their HDD to conserve power. Could be a nice boost for laptops in terms of battery drain if the HD didn't need to spin up very often.

[Clay]

Solid state would/will be of significant benefit. No moving parts is always a plus, not to mention the potential of MRAM..can you say "no bootup time". Instant on is a big plus. :)

[nvnews-reader]

Solid state would/will be of significant benefit. No moving parts is always a plus, not to mention the potential of MRAM..can you say "no bootup time". Instant on is a big plus. :)

True but you are not going to find Terabyte sized MRAM devices for $100.

[cthellis]

I expect it to be integrated into the computing experience in some ways as costs go down (though who knows just when it will catch up and surpass what is needed from it--so it might just be in higher-end systems commonly with lower-end systems ignoring it), but I don't in any way see a "replace" of HDD's without a fundamental shift in processing; the $/GB storage lies heavily in the hard drive's favor. And people can always use excessive storage.

The only one I see able to catch up and possible replace hard drives are optical drives, should they be able to give plenty of storage and match their reusability and access times easily, as optical drives will always be able to expand--cheaply--on a whim.

I don't see the chances of that happening too quickly either, but if they get close enough we might see integrated flash units as the workhorse and optical drives as the mules.

There's still a lot of money at stake, though, and computing models don't go through paradigm shifts often or well... Expect it to be a long time in coming.

Granted I do expect us to move to a solid state medium of some sort in the future, but I don't expect it to be flash. I assume breakthroughs in other methods will supercede flash before we ever got to the point of phasing out hard drives and the like.

[Gator]

crystaline based hard drive technology (was being developed by IBM I think) is in the future, maybe in the next ten years if we're lucky. As for flash memory based drives, although prices have gone down a little, a 1 gig USB stick runs about $95us. That's a alot of money for only 1gig, considering these days nobody wants to buy a hard drive smaller than 80gig. Additionally, but yes it would be nice, if you had a fast enough interface and no moving parts... you would turn on the computer and it would instantly be in windows, you would click your favorite game and instantly be at the main menu, etc. But as mentioned, the cost is too great right now, but in time anything is possible :)

Another added benefit to no moving parts, the drives would probably run a LOT cooler. Considering the heat a WD Raptor 10K rpm drive can produce, flash would be a very welcomed change.

[nutball]

Another added benefit to no moving parts, the drives would probably run a LOT cooler. Considering the heat a WD Raptor 10K rpm drive can produce, flash would be a very welcomed change.

Ummm... doesn't flash memory (specifically flash, not sure about others) have a finite lifetime, in terms of read/write cycles that can be applied to each "bit" before it dies. It's of order a million cycles if what I've read elsewhere is correct.

Weren't Microsoft proposing hard-drives with large (100MB+) flash memory caches in them, particularly for the mobile/laptop market, but you could see the potential benefit for desktops too. For "typical" use the use h/d could probably power down a goodly fraction of the time.

Personally, I'll be suprised if non-volatile semiconductor-based memory replaces magnetic memory for bulk storage in the relevant future.

[GlowStick]

You can buy SCSI solid state flash hard drives today, however i want to say about 40gigs is 100k us?