Comments on: Pocket Size Computers Coming Soon

By: Karen

Karen — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:37:54 +0000

I think it is fantastic that things are becoming smaller and smaller. It makes handling things so much easier. Karen's last blog post..Happy Birthday Lynn

By: PS3

PS3 — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 05:46:20 +0000

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.

By: Pocket Rocket

Pocket Rocket — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:35:39 +0000

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.

By: teknoloji

teknoloji — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:57:52 +0000

we will be face to face wiht 20 gb memory sticks in near future

By: Vidar Hokstad

Vidar Hokstad — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:45:59 +0000

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.