flash memory as Haddrive?

chrisalviola

chrisalviola

New Member
I heard this friend of mine said that the same chips used in flash memory or flash drives would be used in this new hard drives. there would be no movable parts on this new tech harddrive which makes it tough and it would be cheap too. Is this posible?
 
Flash drives will only last for a finite number of write cycles, which is why I wouldn't use them for this purpose. There are many linux distros and applications designed to run of flash drives, but most of these apps are designed to avoid caching files to the drive, to maximise lifespan.
 
yea, gigabyte sells a pci card that you plug system memory into and it acts as a hard drive. you'd never get the amount of performance that the memory is capable of (because pci bus theoretically can only transfer 133mbps), but its a hell of a lot better than a hard drive, though much smaller in size. i mean even IDE hard drives can overload the pci bus on its burst speed, which doesn't last long anyways but it does in fact happen... with flash memory the speeds would be much faster than the pci bus requiring a pci-express bus rather than the standard pci bus.

i do believe there was a 400gb hard drive i saw somewhere which was sata2 compatible... and completely flash memory. im not sure if it was real or not, but seeing as though its rare it would be very expensive.

there was talk awhile back about a "hybrid" hard drive with both flash memory and regular hard drive platters... with like 1gb of flash memory because vista is going to be so memory intensive... like 400-600mb on a fresh reformat.

i haven't seen the hybrid on the market yet though.
 
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fade2green514 said:
yea, gigabyte sells a pci card that you plug system memory into and it acts as a hard drive. you'd never get the amount of performance that the memory is capable of (because pci bus theoretically can only transfer 133mbps), but its a hell of a lot better than a hard drive, though much smaller in size. i mean even IDE hard drives can overload the pci bus on its burst speed, which doesn't last long anyways but it does in fact happen... with flash memory the speeds would be much faster than the pci bus requiring a pci-express bus rather than the standard pci bus.

i do believe there was a 400gb hard drive i saw somewhere which was sata2 compatible... and completely flash memory. im not sure if it was real or not, but seeing as though its rare it would be very expensive.

there was talk awhile back about a "hybrid" hard drive with both flash memory and regular hard drive platters... with like 1gb of flash memory because vista is going to be so memory intensive... like 400-600mb on a fresh reformat.

i haven't seen the hybrid on the market yet though.
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It plugs into the PCI bus, but it uses the SATA on your motherboard. You can install either 4-8 sticks of RAM, and use it as one large hard drive. The PCI controler then sends the data to a SATA port on your motherboard, so its not using the PCI bus to transfer the data.
 
ceewi1 said:
Flash drives will only last for a finite number of write cycles, which is why I wouldn't use them for this purpose. There are many linux distros and applications designed to run of flash drives, but most of these apps are designed to avoid caching files to the drive, to maximise lifespan.
Click to expand...

what you mean by finite number of cycles?

but isnt it faster to access files with its chips?
 
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I heard this friend of mine said that the same chips used in flash memory or flash drives would be used in this new hard drives. there would be no movable parts on this new tech harddrive which makes it tough and it would be cheap too. Is this posible?
Click to expand...
Unless you're referring to old-school solidstate (expensive), they'd be too slow to be useful

yea, gigabyte sells a pci card that you plug system memory into and it acts as a hard drive. you'd never get the amount of performance that the memory is capable of (because pci bus theoretically can only transfer 133mbps), but its a hell of a lot better than a hard drive, though much smaller in size. i mean even IDE hard drives can overload the pci bus on its burst speed, which doesn't last long anyways but it does in fact happen... with flash memory the speeds would be much faster than the pci bus requiring a pci-express bus rather than the standard pci bus.

i do believe there was a 400gb hard drive i saw somewhere which was sata2 compatible... and completely flash memory. im not sure if it was real or not, but seeing as though its rare it would be very expensive.

there was talk awhile back about a "hybrid" hard drive with both flash memory and regular hard drive platters... with like 1gb of flash memory because vista is going to be so memory intensive... like 400-600mb on a fresh reformat.

i haven't seen the hybrid on the market yet though.
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Click to expand...
1. There is a PCIExpress one so bus bandwidth isn an issue
2. Both the PCI and PCIE versions are not flash memory. They both use RAM which not NVRAM (which is why they have batteries or some form of power on board)

what you mean by finite number of cycles?
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After, say, a billion writes, you cant write anymore
 
Today's 150x flash memory is equivalent in performance to a hard drive from 15 years ago. Cool to implement but very poor performance.
 
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