Vision - September/October 2007 - (Page 34) tech Speak defining the digital world ] • [ by murray slovick “Flash memory has become the storage media of choice in consumer electronics.” Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images P Top Dog in Portable Storage Sniffing for Bigger Things ropelled by its use in such more, with no moving high-growth product cat- parts, flash is not subject egories as cell phones, PDAs, to the electro-mechanidigital cameras and digital cal delays of conventional audio players, flash memory HDDs so your computer has become the storage media of choice in can access data much more consumer electronics. Whether applied in quickly. embedded form or as a portable media to Of course flash is not transfer data between computers and other without flaws. A number digital products via memory cards of big challenges remain, none of and USB flash drives, the market which will be solved completely in for NAND flash is expected to surthe near future. Price tops the list pass $13 billion this year, only two as flash costs considerably more per decades after its invention. gigabyte (GB) than conventional As rewritable and non-volatile, hard drive memory. A mechanical meaning the stored data does not drive can be acquired for around 25 vanish when the power is turned off, Murray Slovick cents per GB of memory whereas flash memory only requires battery the price of flash memory is still juice to read, write or erase information. years away from approaching the dollarApart from this unique ability—non-vola- per-GB barrier. tile data retention—flash provides other Second, flash memory degradation advantages in notebook PCs since solid can occur after only 100,000 erase/write state drives (SSDs) are noise free, generate cycles. While this may seem like a really little heat and weigh much less than tra- large number, when used with a PC’s ditional notebook hard drives. Samsung operating system very robust life spans estimates that its SSDs consume a third of are needed, often beyond what flash can the laptop power (.5W) compared to simi- provide. Finally, SSDs have a significant larly-sized hard disk drives (HDDs). What’s capacity shortfall when compared to the near- terabyte storage capabilities of HDDs. In the world of CE if a technology can’t adapt to the needs of the user, it has little chance of success. So it should not be surprising that there is considerable market and development activity in SSDs. Earlier this year, for example, Fujitsu Computer Systems introduced the first pen-enabled notebooks with custom-ordered SSDs. The 2.2-lb. LifeBook P1610 and 3.2-lb. B6210 notebooks can be fitted with a 16-GB ($700) or 32-GB ($1,300) SSD made by Samsung. The notebooks are targeted at healthcare, aviation and field service applications that require a light and compact but highly durable mobile computer. Intel recently threw its hat into the SSD arena with products ranging from 1 GB to 8 GB. With fast read speeds of 28 megabytes (MB)/second and write speeds of 20 MB/ second these flash memory drives enable faster boot times, offer rapid data access and are a low-power storage alternative for economical PCs, routers and servers. Power Up Using non-volatile memory to store startup files when the power is off significantly shortens, if not eliminates, the maddeningly long wait times for a PC to boot up. For this express purpose, a number of PC www.ce.org 34 September/October 2007 http://www.ce.org
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.