SSD (Solid State Drive)

[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