Flash memory closing in on hard drives?

[Marc]

Flash memory closing in on hard drives?

ZDNet News: September 12, 2005, 6:09 AM PT

Samsung has devloped a new computer flash technology with so much capacity it could replace mini hard drives in some PCs, the company said Monday.

South Korean-based Samsung said its latest NAND memory device has 16-gigabit density. That's twice the density of the 8-gigabit NAND memory developed last year by Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi and others.

NAND flash memory is widely used in consumer devices like digital cameras, cell phones, USB flash drives and portable music players such as Apple Computer's new iPod Nano.

But Samsung's top brass are touting the new small-size, large-capacity devices as an alternative to mini hard drives, and even the hard drives used in laptops.

"This year, it appears clear that NAND will surpass NOR as the most popular flash memory," a representative with Samsung said. (NOR flash is highly reliable and used to store software code, but it's less dense than NAND.)

Analysts are predicting there will be $1.7 billion in revenues for NAND memory this year, while global NAND flash memory revenues are expected to reach $9.4 billion this year.

Samsung also said that, with multiple 16-gigabit flash memory chips, mobile and portable application designers could make memory cards with densities of up to 32 gigabytes.

That would be enough to store about 8,000 MP3 music files on a mobile device (about 680 hours worth of songs) or 20 movies (measuring 32 hours of high-resolution video footage), the company said.

In addition to the new 16-gigabit NAND flash, Samsung also revealed a new 7.2-megapixel CMOS image sensor for high-end digital pictures and fusion semiconductors for next-generation smartphones and PDAs.

The company also unveiled fusion semiconductors for making subscriber identity module card applications.

Samsung plans to begin mass producing its 16-gigabit NAND flash in the second half of 2006. The 16-gigabit flash chips were made using the 50-nanometer manufucturing process.

 

[Jim Wynne]

That would be enough to store about 8,000 MP3 music files on a mobile device (about 680 hours worth of songs)

I overheard a conversation the other day between two Ipod-carrying coworkers. The discussion came down to how many songs each had stored; one said he had 1500, and the other had 2000. The recording industry must love those things. We now have competitions between people who have too much money and time on their hands to see how many music files they can store and never listen to .

 

[Craig H.]

This might have some fantastic security implications. Wear the flash memory around your neck when the laptop is shut down. They can steal the laptop, but not the data, which often (usually?) can be much more expensive, not to mention sensitive.

 

[JerryStem]

This is great for some applications (my Nikon D70 would love this!) but they won't replace HD's, at least anytime soon.

With the pace of multi-media files ever increasing, flash-based storage can't keep up, let alone catch up. Video alone is a space killer.... I just bought a 250gb HD for backups of my digital photos. Typical studio shoot = ~150 images, each about 2.5mb with low level JPG compression (not even CONSIDERING RAW format) = alot of space.

I think cell phones in particular will really benefit from these things. They're getting better every day, with better cameras (some rivaling low end digital cameras) & video capabilities...

Jerry