Hard-drives driven out?

[Becky]

More and more nowadays, manufacturers of electronic devices are using flash memory to replace hard-drives. Flash memory is less vulnerable to damage than a hard-drive since it stores data on a chip and does not contain any movable parts: one of the major reasons for the change. Not only this, but flash memory tends to perform better, it costs less, it requires less power and has proven very popular. It is no wonder that the latest prototype cheap laptop (costing under $100) uses it.

With all this considered, and with the capacity of flash memory increasing at a fast rate, it seems highly likely that the use of hard-drive technology in PCs will soon reach it's end - to be replaced by flash memory.

Read the full article at C Net

 

[floppybootstomp]

Not yet though.

Any idea how much 300Gb of flash memory would cost right now?

Lots

One day though, maybe sooner than we think.

And when that happens, the days of losing all your data through hard drive crashes should be over.

Which will, of course, be a good thing

 

[tomsega]

This is an interesting thaught. Indeed, it would cost many thousands of pounds for a 300gb Flash drive, and obviously they don't exist on the market...

But still, your hard drive speed makes much more difference than people usually recognise in most applications - specifically games. For example, using a 5000rpm HDD on an Athlon64 3500 instead of a standard 7k HDD will make it feel more like a 2800! This is why I always recommend you spend £100 on an 80gig 10,000rpm drive to go with your regular storage drive, because if you put your operating system and all of your games on THAT drive your system will WIZZ along as if you had a much more powerfull processor.

Just imagen what using flash hard drives could do for performance!!

 

[Ian]

150GB Solid State drives already exist Then again, I suppose anything is at the right price! It has an access time of 100 to 68 usec, which isn't bad at all!!!

However, if I remember correctly, current solid state drives are much slower - but this will no doubt change soon enough.

You can get physical RAM drives that fit into a PCI slot and accept standard Dimms. These are powered 100% of the time to retain the storage and are just as fast as they would normally be (which is ideal). Of couse, the problem being you could have a power cut and lose all your information! I'd love to get one of these to review one day, as I'd stick my main Windows partition on it and watch it fly!

 

[Ian]

Here we go, a bit of info on that card:

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121105,00.asp

and a review:

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050907/index.html

 

[Raje]

Perhaps this is a good thing. It should bring down the prices of current Hardrives, and maybe we can look forward to a more stable and reliable version of the current hardrive, less moving parts, and better construction. Flash prices are bound to go down as technology advances and they obtain a mass market.