This looks like a nice technology. But it would probably be too small to be used as a drive and ReadyBoost is marginally useful at best.

I'm not sure where you think you think you can purchase a device that will never wear out and lose all your data today: if you're relying on your hard disk for that, you're quite possibly in for a very unpleasant surprise. And with good wear-leveling algorithms flash is equally robust for any sane workload (even 24/7 writes at multiple MB/second).

At the same time, using flash to hold even today's already over-weight OSs just to save a bit of boot-up time seems fairly wasteful, given that flash is closer to RAM in price/MB than to disk storage: if OSs took the time to stream themselves out to contiguous space on disk immediately after booting and then loaded this back on reboot (checking to ensure that the hardware configuration hadn't changed), that would probably help boot times about as much as flash will.

Now flash as disk cache, and especially as write-back disk cache - that's more exciting. Takes all the pain out of using a medium-sized transaction log, for one thing, making log-protected file systems and databases considerably faster without sacrificing an ounce of reliability/availability. And it lets data updates accumulate for a while before having to spin up the disk on a laptop (not to mention allowing them to be consolidated in a write-anywhere file system or at least destaged to disk in optimal order). Using it as additional read cache is less clearly a win, since RAM (though perhaps more expensive) does a better job of this while allowing other uses as well.

But until the retail price of flash falls well under $1/GB it will remain a luxury for use as general secondary storage, even on laptops (where the saved power just isn't very significant given how much processors and displays use).

With "Wear Leveling" a flash drive will last probably over 10 years, under pretty heavy use, that's 5 years longer than most mechanical HD warranty, and about as long as a mechanical drive lasts when Im being lucky.

As for size - yeah its small, but 32GB is plenty for a copy of XP and a copy of most my frequently used apps. The rest can live on a second mechanical drive. Hell I can fit any linux distro I want on one of those drives no problem and get insanely fast boot times and application execution.

Personally I cant wait. bout time we sped up our slowest component.

It's great that we're someday going to end up with semi-permanent storage (almost) as fast as volatile memory, but I'm still waiting for them to figure out how to make it so I can write to this storage medium as many times as I want. 
You'd be smoking crack if you think I'm going to install an OS like Windows (any flavor) on flash memory that has a limited write life. Find me an OS that doesn't constantly write and rewrite (and rewrite some more) its own files and (maybe) we'll talk, but I wouldn't even count on it then. 
I should choose to replace my storage medium because of technological advances. I shouldn't be forced to replace it because it wore out and lost all my data (EVER.) Leave that to power supplies.

It took some time to get from 6 mb/s to 40 mb/s & incorporate so many windows & linx compatibilities. Years, All those years "You Can Flash O/S", was Theme, did it ever work for that?

RediWhip is thing that gave Flash taste & taught quality when boot up was too much with so much XP Driver Problems. Then someone got speeds up to O/S loadup FOR flash,TOO, Next particularly intresting hope is intialzation of o/s from disc to Flash (Don't Snicker, I Don't Know How To.) & NOW uses, internal to mainboard became in sight.

Hurray for FLASH, its like little portable computer on Stick. It will have just oddles of More uses & Lets' be quick about it, as well. Built in or Stick in: Super Fast Flash, World Awaitis your Usefulness.Its another big step, especially when Ultimate strains data load thru harddrive interface, its like breath of Fresh performance gaining Sweet Air of Life.

To Light In Tunnel, Boys.

Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.


Yum... been looking at Volesoft for ages now, and it has started to use this type of contextual advertisting....

dump it please!

You know what I don't understand? Why the COASt module disappeared. 
Yeah, I know, the more "advanced" processors integrated L2 cache directory onto the die, but even the old K6-III, when placed inside a system with L2 cache on board could use the (board's) L2 cache as L3 cache. 
Why can't we add any L3 cache to our motherboards anymore today? A COASt module was a great way to upgrade your older system. Imagine buying an Athlon 64 today and plugging in 64 MB L3 cache next year. 
AMD has extremely fast HyperTransport connections and the HTX slot... why aren't they creating something like a COASt standard for this slot? It would be THE way to one-up Intel now that their processors are not up to snuff.

Seriously, what gives?