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Lost in the news this week was the announcement of a Sandisk flash drive of 32GB. This is a better technology than current hard drives. Won't it be great when media servers get this technology?
No or few worries about your music collection going away with a hard drive "crash". Size should be smaller, also!
Follow Ups:
Flash memory chips use EEPROM transistors. These transistors store charge on insulated gates. The charge gets there, and gets removed, by electrons tunneling through a very thin silicon dioxide layer. The electric fields required to force tunneling currents are enormous. The oxide layers can only withstand a relatively small number of cycles before they break down.Particle defects are not a problem. The limitations on charge/discharge lifespan have to do with subtle oxide chemistry and structure effects. Process recipes for growing the oxides are closely-guarded secrets, and minor deviations can lead to reliability problems.
Lucky for us, the transistors these days are more reliable than General Motors paint jobs, but I still would not trust important information to a flash memory.
"Lost in the news this week was the announcement of a Sandisk flash drive of 32GB"Probably because other companies have been making 64GB flash drives since 2006.
Flash drives are getting better but the quality varies considerably from brand to brand. Many are not reliable and die for no particular reason - usually the cheapie bulk packed no-name units - while others have limited write-erase lifespan.
Here is a link to an article on "Reliability Issues" and how they are being overcome. It's worth noting that the military makes great use of flash memory.
http://www.storagesearch.com/siliconsys-art1.html
I am somewhat familiar with SiliconSystems as they are a maker of flash memory... so it is in their best interest to promote the "reliability" of this technology. The article you provided is basically a cut 'n paste from a SiliconSystems article.It is true that flash memory has improved over the years but there's a big difference between what the military uses (pays for) vs what the typical consumer buys.
Regardless, we will start to see flash memory used in PC's, Servers, and even laptops very soon... mostly to quick-boot the operating system.
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