Flash Memory Made Immortal by Fiery Heat

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

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Macronix will be making an announcement at 2012 International Electron Devices Meeting on December 11th concerning breakthrough technology for Flash memory. Through new technology, Macronix is able to extend the life of Flash memory almost indefinitely.

Taiwanese flash memory non-volatile memory manufacturer Macronix is set to reveal technologies is says will make it possible for flash memory to survive 100 million read/write cycles.
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I wonder what the price premium will be? The prices are falling, but this would be sure to jack them back up.
 
I really don't need my flash memory to last more than 5 years. By then, I'd need to upgrade to larger capacity USB sticks or SSDs. My 4 gb sticks are too small now, except for music in the car and my SSDs are 240 GB and will last at least 6 years. After that, I'd probably want like 1 TB SSDs or something.
 
I don't see how 100 million read/write cycles is immortal or anything close to it.
 
mrnotwo said:
I don't see how 100 million read/write cycles is immortal or anything close to it.
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They also claimed it's possible that it's over a couple billion cycles.

I'm not sure how cheap it would be to make. There's going to be an addition in price for adding the heat plates atop the diodes and NAND is still considerably more expensive than platter-drive storage.

macronix-heat-flash-memory-diagram.jpg


http://www.extremetech.com/computin...-memory-survives-more-than-100-million-cycles

This is a huge step in the right direction to replacing the dumb platter drives, but there's still the underlying price dilemma.
 
Platter storage is not going anywhere anytime soon. Reliability is #1 and they are dead reliable.
 
schizrade said:
Platter storage is not going anywhere anytime soon. Reliability is #1 and they are dead reliable.
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Yes, but this may make flash/solid a stronger contender. If the failure point of a disk is pushed out past a certain point it no longer matters. I'd imagine that a hundred million (or billions) of write cycles on a solid state drive would do just that.

If solid-state can become cost-competitive with this enhanced reliability, then regular mechanical drives are in for a bumpy ride.
 
Platter storage is not going anywhere anytime soon. Reliability is #1 and they are dead reliable.
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Hard drives are not more reliable than SSDs. They are cheaper per GB than SSDs and they do retain their data longer when left without power.
 
So basically, the heat is baking the NAND into clay tablets that can still be rewritten a million times?
I like that, if it can store the information unpowered for dozens of years (I don't care about read/write cycles for archiving usage.)
 
The heat refreshes the number of write cycles available. The IEEE article wasn't clear as to how often this was needed, but made it sound like it's a process done once a day or nearly once a day.

mrnotwo said:
I don't see how 100 million read/write cycles is immortal or anything close to it.
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Nothing is immortal, but using the same wear-leveling algorithms used today the device would be good for 20,000 years, which is more than I usually need.
 
Phoenix333 said:
Fiery heat? I approve of this process!
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This wins the thread! :)

Anywho, I don't see how this is very practical, but I do like the idea of flash memory that has lots more endurance. It's a huge disappointment when you shove your SSD into the slot and start working it and it only lasts long enough to get you a little excited about its performance before it just dies in the middle of it, leaving you kinda just there wondering what you did wrong. Sure, you get used to that eventually if you hang around computer nerds for long enough, but it still ends too fast with a SSD. Hard drives might be slow, but they're big and can go forever as long as you're gentle with them. I'll take a huge hard drive that's slow and keeps on going as long as I want over a SSD that's basically in and out of my box so fast I hardly notice it was even there.
 
I'm skeptical. Without using some sort of exotic process (carbon nanotubes) or have some other drawback, I would be very cautious about thinking it's the magic bullet of SSD drives.

There's always a catch.
 
I'm still fine with the old conventional hard drives. 5TB is coming out soon also.
 
As long as they can make a 256GB SSD that'll last three or four years and is under $150 by the time Christmas hits, I don't care what they do. They can bake the shit out of their drives all they want, I just want SPEEEEEEEEEED.
 
Red Machine D said:
As long as they can make a 256GB SSD that'll last three or four years and is under $150 by the time Christmas hits, I don't care what they do. They can bake the shit out of their drives all they want, I just want SPEEEEEEEEEED.
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I just bought a pair of Intel 240 gig SSDs for $139.99 each ($286.78 after S&H from Newegg). Course it was Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals, so the price is back to $200. I'm sure other SSDs will drop in price for the holidays.
 
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