SSD (Solid State Drive)

[xoxoxoBruce]

Whenever I read about, or listen to tw and Mitch ramble on about, the latest is computer stuff, I find it interesting but figure it won't apply to a non-techie user like myself for a few years.

Cory Doctorow (you know, boing boing) wrote about his latest $435 Terebyte(big) SSD. Sounds pretty impressive, and I love the idea of no moving parts.

In October, I bought a one terabyte SSD for a ridiculous $435 -- about a third of what I paid for a 600GB drive a little over a year ago! -- and having run it for two months now, I'm prepared to pronounce it good. I wasn't familiar with the manufacturer, Crucial, but they got very good reviews on Amazon, and at that price I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. My machine -- a Thinkpad X230 running Ubuntu 13.10 -- chugs along with nary a beach-ball, and I can go six to eight hours on a six-cell battery with full brightness, and continuous Wifi and Bluetooth usage. I'm rough on my computer, and it's taken plenty of knocks and bumps without any noticeable impact on the drive.

Sounds like the future to me... at least until they come up with "The Next Big Thing" in a few weeks.

[tw]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Sounds like the future to me... at least until they come up with "The Next Big Thing" in a few weeks.

That was the advantage of bubble memory (1970s). Unfortunately every time that solid state memory achieved a breakthrough, the disk drive industry also increased their storage capacity.

Flash (ie NOR) memory has some serious limitations. For example, data must be read in blocks. And written back in pages. Change one bit means writing to a large block. Unlike disk drives, solid state memory has a limited number of writes. As it gets tinier (to achieve higher data storage), the life expectancy drops to something around 10,000 writes.

A flash memory controller also plans so that too many writes do not occur in one memory area. No problem with phones that are disposed on average every 18 months and do fewer data writes.

Resistive memory keep promising to replace and eliminate the weaknesses of flash. However the promises have not panned out. So it looks like old technology flash memory will be with us for some time for small storage and disk drives for larger storage.

An IEEE article that also references other relevant articles summarized it:
Nanoislands Simplify Structure of Resistive Memory Devices

[mbpark]

I have two in work computers.

There is no way I am going back to spinning disk in a laptop.

This is at least 6x as fast as my old spinning disk.

Mitch