Flash, ah-aaaah, not saviour of the universe
Price plummet prediction pummels Nand prosperity prospects
TOSHIBA has issued a warning that Nand flash prices will drop by more than 50 per cent in 2008.
Despite surging demand it appears oversupply is the main cause and extends earlier price drop predictions by 10 per cent.
Yesterday, Toshiba partner Sandisk reported a fourth-quarter profit of $105.8 million up from a $35.1 million loss in same quarter last year. However, investors warned of an oversupply of Nand hitting the company going forward.
Toshiba and Samsung lead the flash memory market and the latest announcement comes one week after reports that Samsung was offloading excess Nand stock to Kingston Technology in an effort to stabilise prices. Samsung had also blamed falling chip prices for lower profits. µ
Comments
Still waiting
Hoping that some bright spark will pair up a decent 8 or 16GB Flash drive with 128MB of standard Dram as cache. SSDs all suffer from the limited re-write life of Flash memory. a 128MB DRAM cache should be more than sufficient to blunt the number of re-write operation to the Flash to something far more manageable.Re:still waiting
"SSDs all suffer from the limited re-write life of Flash memory." sigh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levellingWear levelling?
I just have investigated suitability of SSD for company purposes. Wear levelling is nice but what in case if you want to rewrite complete disk periodically? Ie. collect tens of gigabytes of data, process, erase, collect another batch of data the next hour etc. If your data roughly fits capacity of SSD (which is likely due to small capacities of SSD these days), no wear levelling will help you, that's the fact. I think big RAM disks would be helpful in this case, but it is not easy to obtain 64 Gig RAM drive for reasonable money these days :-(Re: Wear levelling?
I don't think the limited number of flash-erase is a problem, even if you rewrite the whole flash-disc. For an example, if you have a 64Gb flash-drive with 100Mbyte/s write performance, it takes >10min to write the whole disc. As current flash-memories support >100000 erase/block (and some as many as 1000000), it will take more than 2 years *writing time* before you hit the limit.