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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gary Spiers who wrote (7912)	10/31/1999 12:52:00 AM
From: Craig Freeman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Gary, please tell me where we disagree: 1) DRAM requires a supporting P/S while flash does not. 2) DRAM can last several months or "even years" in suspend mode with only minimal battery support. 3) "Even years" isn't good enough for institutions who typically are willing to pay a premium for multi-decade solutions such as "CF". 4) It is not unreasonable that, within a few years, someone will release a form of RAM which requires the bare minimum of power to sustain storage for CENTURIES ... rendering obsolete both flash memory and all currently available alternatives. 5) With just a few exchanges on this thread, we scared the "P.." out of many SNDK longs who were holding their stock thinking that they were "safe and secure over the long pull". SNDK may hit $1,000 next week. But my job, as I see it, is to bring those whose dreams tend to ascend back to Earth. The market is a tough best. A few can beat it for a short time, Fewer still manage to beat it over time. Craig

To: Gary Spiers who wrote (7912)	10/31/1999 9:09:00 AM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

Gary and Craig, The question I posed originally asked why a handheld PC uses volatile memory for RAM, but flash memory for longterm storage. I left on vacation this summer only to find my RAM memory was erased (and along with it all the software I had loaded). It seemed to make sense to make RAM less volatile (that is, use flash memory) or to have an automatic back up of RAM to flash memory to avoid this problem. Based on the replies I have received it is clear to me that flash is too expensive and too slow to be used in place of DRAM in the application I mentioned. I believe that flash memory and DRAM/SDRAM will coexist peacefully for at least a few more years. It would be silly to believe that flash will not be replaced at some time in the future. Ausdauer SanDisk...See the Big Picture