Comments on: Flash drives ready to jump in capacity

SanDisk has developed technology that will yield solid-state drives with twice the capacity of today's flash drives.

[PortVista-19095313035016904102]

How long does SSD last though?

[fredtheviking]

According to Wikiopedia, A frash drive would last about 10 years, before the user notice degradation of drive from general use. If you consider that most poeple upgrade thier laptop every 4 to 5 years. This is fine for most users... Granted if you are doing intensive of I/O, it a trade off. On one hand, you have faster I/O, but at the expense of a shorter life for the flash drive.

[morianos]

I've used flash based linux boxes in the past as low cost routers. The failure rate of the Flash drives was such that we had to reconsider our options. Too much I/O on the flash, though this was 3 or 4 years ago, maybe this has changed...

[Stephen Russell]

These memory parts do not stand up to repeated change. If this were just a boot drive where it was set once and changed slightly then this could be a good thing. But for use as a HD I don't see the part holding up as todays slower ones do.

[thenet411]

I agree with all the previous posters in that thrashing is still a serious problem for these flash devices yet the article mentions nothing about this serious limitation. In fact, it reads more like an advertisement or a self-serving press release than an informational news item. Hmmmmm...

[iBuzz]

I thought that the "repeated write" problem was solved. Basically, the drives implement a virtualization layer on top which redirect writes to different locations on the drive. So, even though your software thinks its writing to the same location, the drive is smart enough to map it to a different physical location each time so that memory is written to an even manner.

Now... what I want to know is, will software (such as Windows) need to be re-written to get the speed advantage of flash-based drives? A lot of system software has been written with the assumption of reading from a spinning disc. That is, programmers have optimized their code to wait for the hard drive's disc to spin around to the correct location before trying to read from it. But with the case of flash drives, there is no disc, and the code will be waiting for nothing. Since the code is waiting, you wouldn't see any increase in performance. Hopefully, these are just driver issues. Anyone know?

[RJT69]

Wouldn't static electricity damage these more than a traditional harddrive? Especially since, there are a number of TabletPCs without an AC electrical grounding wire.

[www.hdgreetings.com]

The drives are highly reliable for any application as long as they were designed for that application.

For example if you take a memory card from a camera and use an adapter to make it a laptop harddrive (like some people are really doing), you are asking for trouble.

If you want to use flash for a mission critical database (like some people are also doing), just buy drives designed for that and they are faster than anything with moving parts can ever be. These mission critical drives are just very expensive.

In the middle of course is desktop usage however the logic is the same - flash storage can be designed MANY different ways and works great if used as advertised.