The future is NAND

[Rob Williams]

Over the past few months, we've seen dozens of announcements about solid-state hard drives. PQI has already announced a 64GB flash drive (which coincidentally, is based on Samsung NAND), which ASUS, Fujitsu, SamsungSandisk have all announced products based on solid-state hard drives. Given the fact that the hard drive has been the bottleneck on PC performance for years, the question has to be asked is solid-state technology ready to take us out of the dark ages of storage?

This article (http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=4962) doesn't just go into performance and reliability benefits, although those are very obvious, but also the power consumption. A NAND drive can use 0.2W per read/write... compared to the 9W current drives suck out of your PSU.

The future will be interesting... if we can get these things larger than 64GB :rolleyes:

[Jakal]

Digital and solid state devices have grown smaller and more efficient in the past few years. The technology boom has pushed their performance farther than thought possible. The NAND technology is something that's been around for a while, but not put to such a use. Simple storage of programming, small stuff.

With the want of pc's to become smaller and faster, it's pushed this piece of technology farther and farther. We started with EEPROM so many years ago. Then NOR and NAND memories came along. Flash drives were born, as well as, a way to store data, almost indefinitely, without power.

The only thing this lacks is speed. Memory reading and writing is considerably different, and slower. It will last a whole lot longer than a conventional drive. There's no moving parts, and other than a power surge ,the lifetime should be well over 5x that of a standard hard drive.

I did scan over the article, but I've studied digital devices. It's something I've learned about. Just regurgitating what I've remembered. ;)