Pocket Size Computers Coming Soon
Cell phone computing is around the corner! Four Gig storage the size of a thumbnail has arrived. Intel is forging ahead in the quest for miniaturized storage, and the first products featuring these new chips, named ZP-140, will be on the market in January. They are thumbnail size chips and weigh no more than a drop of water! These solid state drives have standard control electronics built in enabling other chips to be added without controllers for a total storage capacity of 16 gigabytes. This is enough to run some operating systems on a tiny chip!
Did you know that flash drives tend to lose their charge and thus wear out with time? I never really thought about it, which makes me want to take another look at the age of my current memory cards. In these new chips, new information can be added and erased at least 100,000 times which is about the top of the standard for the current chips that last anywhere from 10,000 to 100,00 charge cycles.
This new technology is Intel’s answer to Samsung’s chip which is in the Apple Ipod Nano and the IPhone.
Ever wonder where the term “flash” came from? The technology was invented by Dr. Fujio Masuoka in 1984 while working for Toshiba. His colleague, came up with the term because the process of erasing information reminded of him of the flash of a camera. Kind of like “gone in a flash”.
We already know that mobile computers are feasible, so miniature storage devices are the next logical step. Products such as barcode scanners and MP3 players already utilize mini storage devices, and soon we may see these things become a part of all business operations, from symbol scanners to security cameras.
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January 2nd, 2008 at 2:45 pm
It is true that flash wear out. However it’s far less of a problem than you might think. The number of erase cycles - 100.000 is on the low end, many chips can handle a million or more - is per “erase unit”. The size of an erase unit depends on the size of the flash chip and other factors, but it’s typically anywhere from a few K to a few hundred K. Modern flash drives will often have reserve capacity and built in “wear leveling” that ensure that the same erase units are erased as rarely as possible.
Also note that it’s _erases_ not writes that matter, and erase units can be written to multiple times - you can only either set or clear bits once between each erase. This means that with clever utilization it’s first when there are no other free blocks left to write to that the drivers will need to erase anything at all.
All of that combined means that flash will often have a MTBF (mean time between failures) higher than disk drives, and can certainly easily be engineered to be far more reliable if you’re willing to pay the price.
April 17th, 2008 at 4:57 am
we will be face to face wiht 20 gb memory sticks in near future
September 17th, 2008 at 10:35 am
With video and other media storage becoming more and more important (as is video quality) I can also see this size increasing faster and faster. Everything seems to be getting smaller these days, and faster.
September 22nd, 2008 at 1:46 am
Well well it looks like we don’t have to wait too long after all. Jan is not too far off i guess we could wait that long for pocket pcs.
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:37 am
I think it is fantastic that things are becoming smaller and smaller. It makes handling things so much easier.
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