>>>> Densities are not the issue in HDA replacement. It is Transfer Speed. And Flash Memory is painfully SLOW. Just open up a small 400K photo file on your PC for an example.
This isn't a valid test -- depending on the platform, the bottleneck is apt to be in the interface, not the speed of the memory itself. It is a fact that it may be a while before flash replaces server applications of traditional hard disks; but we are at the very earliest stage of seeing flash-based devices for high-end portable uses; as prices drop and performance improves, flash-based devices will become the mainstay for portable devices (notebook pcs, portable music players, etc.).
A typical ATA 100 drive sports 100 MB/s external transfer rate with a little less than that internal (maybe 90MB/s). But then there is the 4-9ms or so rotational latency to consider which considerably slows down traditional HD performance. (Performance is determined not only by transfer rate but also by access time).
Samsung's Flash-based 1.8" SSD can sustain a 57MB/s read rate without rotational latency, TODAY, and without onboard cache. A year or two down the road, we can obviously expect faster. This is already more than twice the sustained transfer rate of competing electro-mechanical hard drives (these are mostly 4200 RPM drives verus the typical 7200RPM SATA drives in desktop applications). Furthermore, traditional hard drives rely heavily on internal cache to boost transfer rates. In addition, operating systems, with 1GB plus memories to work with, now do a great deal more caching than ever before.
While flash may not be there yet (only a couple of such drives are available now, and they are extremely expensive) they offer the advantages of only consuming 5% of the power and adding reliability. They are obviously the wave of the future for portable devices of all kinds. It is reasonable to expect over the coming several years, as flash gets cheaper and faster, a transition toward SSD will gain a lot of traction.
SNDK stands to profit from these developments. |
