Hitachi reckons solid state overwrite problem licked

This isn't the silver bullet you might think it is, for starters, thumbdrives are too small to fit RAM, and even if they did stick RAM in them, well pulling the thumbdrive would destroy changes there were going to be saved as you'd also need room for a small battery to power the thumbdrive long enough to write the files.

What this really applies to is internal hard drives which have enough room for batteries in the case of power failure.

Despite, this still doesn't fix the real problem, our current NAND can't handle heavy writing.

That's a good idea !IF! they also put on board a capacitor / battery to store enough power to keep the unit powered while it writes the data in DRAM to NAND in the event of a power failure. And what ever power capacitance object they solder on board had better have a life span longer than the rest of the hard drive.

The problems with this are twofold:

1. Reliability. Power loss/computer crashes already have enough potential to corrupt my data. I don't need one more possibility.

2. Storage media manufacturers are trying to stuff too much technology into our storage devices that has the potential to break. Stick with the basics. Transfer cable, power cable, control chip(s), storage medium. Nothing else.

It's time for the SSD manufacturers to stop resting their laurels and get some R&D going that will find them a material we can write to as many times as we want. I don't want a bandaid for the overwrite problem. I want a solution.

Maintaining enough voltage to write back data to the ROM backing store could easily be done with a capacitive device; been done before. Hitachi should go the next step, though, and develop integrated RAM/ROM chips where each bit of RAM has a non-volatile backing flash bit. Monitor the chip power, and when it starts falling, save all the bits in the RAM layer onto the flash layer. Or better yet, develop a high speed non-volatile memory technology, like FRAM. I remember the old core memory boards fondly.

@travis o:
Typically when one writes about "SSDs", they mean the internal hard drive replacements. "Thumbdrives" were not mentioned, and are a different beast than what this article is about.

@Rich Wargo

That would be the way things would happen were it not for engineers. :)

Nice but wasn't one of the reasons for using flash memory the fact that it needs less power than dram?
What happens when you lose power and you have data in dram which is still unwritten to the flash?
In my opinion with current flash technology SSD drives are a bad idea.
What am I saying, they are bad idea alltogether because if you have a power surge and the flash part gets fried you lose data. On the other hand you can recover data from regular drives even when they get half-melted in a house fire.
SSD drives have a long way to go.

So this is some kind of new Hitachi hard drive technology? I don't get it. If only someone could explain it to me using a clever flash animation with cute characters and a catchy tune... hmmm.

i still don't get why they try to use flash storage technology in this way. i remember reading about mram a couple of years ago here on the INQ and haven't really heard much since.

here's a little info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAM
http://www.mram-info.com/

i guess it looks more like politics and big company investments in flash production are slowing production and development of mram more than any technical complications. too bad, because if mram ends up being what it claims to be, it could replace ram and hdd in one shot. it could also make instant power on a reality for nearly any machine.

1) Back up your data and switch to an atomic file system (reiser4, Transactional NTFS, probably others) to keep your data safe.

2) SSD's typically (every case I've heard of) uses a more reliable flash memory than the cheap USB flash and memory cards you stick in your camera, and typically offers a longer lifespan than a mechanical hard drive. This is especially true if you are moving the disk around.

3) The DRAM can easily have a large enough battery/capacitor backup to write any changes if the power is cut, which if you had bothered to read more about the drive you would see is true.

4) With the rapid improvement in flash size and speed, you will probably want to replace the drive long before it breaks (assuming you're using it intelligently and not for extra ram)

5) Mission critical data should be on RAID systems, hopefully with hot spare drives, battery backup, and backup generators whenever possible. Even laptops can have RAID 0 and battery backup, and cheap Desktops can easily be configured so that you're saving your data in some high-end, secure, reliable corporate storage system.

6) These are incredible for mostly read-only, random access data such as your operating system and applications, which are usually quite easy for an experienced user to restore. The DRAM will provide a nice cushion to the amount of writing that is done to the disk, and eliminate the use of flash memory on heavily modified files. If the cache is large enough and your disk writes small enough, it may only have to use the flash whenever you power down the drive.

You may be a server maintainer, workstation user, system administrator, computer repair man, and gaming enthusiast, but you're obviously not a computer engineer or computer scientist. If they added 2-4 GB of DRAM cache (or even as low as 512MB), which is fairly cheap compared to a 40GB SSD, it would serve quite nicely to store my OS and all my applications, without me having to bother myself with what files get updated often. You can stick to your slow, cacheless hard drives. Assuming a good transfer rate, I want one of these drives!

Anybody have any specs?