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Large flash based hard drives?

D

DevilMan

Gawd
Joined
Jan 15, 2001
Messages
542
Not sure if this has been asked or if it might even be a reality.

When are hard drives going to be replaced with flash based hard drives? As flash usb drives get bigger you would think a fairly large (20 gig or more) flash based hard drives would be on the horizon.
The size would be greatly reduced, heat reduced, speeds should be fast, and no moving parts.

Any thoughts?
 
Don't hold me to this, but I think that the main problem with this idea is the transfer rate. I know of no flash-based cards that are capable of transferring at current HDD speeds. While this is bound to increase in the future, it's a fairly slow (compartively) medium at the moment. Here is linakge to back that up. Notice the max transfer rate of 10MB/s. Smokin'. It would work... just slow as molasses on cold morning.

I also heard somewhere that flash drives aren't meant to be written/erased to as much as a hard drive is. I have no supporting info for that aside from what I heard somewhere.

There are drives out there that are composed entirely of RAM. Not flash drives, but say 32GB of RAM crammed into a converter that connects to a IDE controller. HUGE transfer rates, fantastic seek times, but needs to be battery backed ALL the time or data is lost. Also, expensive.

There is also the cost per gig factor. If you assume a linear price scale (and it most cetainly isn't) and assume (generously) that a 1GB drive is about $75, then you are looking at $6000 for a 80GB drive. Little on the high side. Even the big boys who deal with this type of storage on a regular basis (think, MP3 players) use HDD's because of the cost factor.

Not to say all is bad. It's a great idea... solid state drives are a ways off, though.

Cheers.
 
yeah...flash drives have an "average lifetime" expectancy of something around either 10 thousand or 100 thousand read/write cycles..which is nothing if you use it for everyday computer use. My friends flash module for his camera had this in the manual. I know if you visit some of those mini-itx sites (mini-itx.com I think is one) they actually have a flash to ide converter which isn't too expensive.
 
hmmm... what about that ancient static ram? any old-timers here (i.e. remember when computers were the size of large file cabinets) who can say anything about the viability of using that?
 
There are non-volatile flash drives available up to 128 GB right now, with read/write speeds at 40 MB/s sustained, with 20 us access times, 5 million write/erase cycles (unlimited reads), and MTBF ratings of 700,000 hours. They just aren't in the price range acceptable to consumers.

For more information,

http://www.m-sys.com/Content/Products/FFDFamily.asp
 
Static Ram is nice, but it is very expensive and consumes lots more power than DRAM. DRAM is cheap because it only uses one transistor per cell (right?) and SRAM uses 6. One reason SRAM is primarily used in cache...
 
but (theoretically) wouldn't it be better for a solid state hdd? since it holds data till it's "refreshed" while dram does not?
 
Don't shoot the messenger...

It's not for the living room, it's for industrial, mobile, and aerospace applications mostly. Think fighter planes and mobile reconaissance vehicles.
 
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