Bye-bye hard drive, hello flash

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Write Cycles and other SSD points.

This has been true, but has been getting better. Hard drives also have such a finite write cycle limitation, which after a while, will result in bad sectors.

Early Flash was limited to about 100K write cycles, which would die after about one year of typical HD like use. Current ones are typically about 500K, which of course, will last quite a bit longer.

The type of flash technology currently used in ATAPI/ATA type flash drives (commonly referred to as Solid State Drives - "SSD") have a 2M write cycle lifetime. Furthermore, besides the boast of that alone lasting about 10 years of "typical" use (I quote that because I don't know what's defined as typical), they also boast wear equalizing algorithms which move data along the bits so that more stagnant data is placed over detected hotspots, preventing (hopefully) any one block from failing prematurely. Your point is still valid though; MTBF is still measured in HDDs by hours (typically around 300K) and Flash by write cycles.

SSDs are currently available to the public, though as mentioned, the cost is typically prohibitive to home consumers for several years yet. Manufacturer sites include:
http://www.superssd.com/default.asp Texas Memory Systems
http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edisk_35_ide.php BitMicro Systems
http://www.memtech.com/newproducts.html MemTech

And Many others. More thorough information about this and other aspects of SSD's, I refer you to this site: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd.html

Newer "NanoTube" technology seems promising to both significantly increase data density and write cycles to the point of realistically replacing rotating HDDs. See http://www.nantero.com/index.html

I hope this sheds some light on this subject.

Posted by: D-cat   Posted on: 01/04/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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