flash memory hard drives

[Utterman]

I was wondering how flash memory technology that is used as a hard drive would preform on a pc?


I'm not exactly sure on the access times, but I would think it would be faster than current hard drives wth moving parts.

[added] I was thinking that laptops could also have a use for this since it would use less energy than hard drives would [/added]

What do you thing about this idea?



Utterman

 

[Warin]

Considering the price of flash memory, I dont think you will see solid state hard drives for PC's anytime soon. It just isnt cost effective compared to conventional hard drive technology.

Performance wise, it should be really good, as access and seek times would be on the order of nanoseconds, not milliseconds.

Now, what -WOULD- be cool would be to have the core OS files and drivers in a flash memory card. Almost instant on systems! Fast booting would be worth the expense of a couple hundred megs of flash ram and the interfacing required.

 

[Sohcan]

Current flash RAM tech isn't suited for hard drives...they have a limited lifetime determined by the number of writes they can perform before they die. This isn't an issue for digital cameras and such, since a typical user would probably only write to the flash RAM at most a few thousand times in its lifetime. Though I don't think any comprehensive studies of flash RAMs' lifetime has been performed, it would probably be unsafe for hard drive use, considering the vastly larger number of reads and writes it would have to perform.

 

[crypticlogin]

What happened to Quantum's solid-state disk drive division after the HDD division selloff to Maxtor? Last I read, they had these networkable drives on the range of a couple of gigs...