The death knell for flash memory..?

Wertz · 19-12-2004 4:03pm #1

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/seagate-st1-5gb.html

A 1-sq inch HDD capable of holding 2.5-5gb of data, utilising a compact flash interface.
I assume this means it will be able to simply fit into current devices which take flash cards and up the storage capactity by a lot whilst staying affordable. Nice to see a company working on something that improves the devices we already have rather than trying to sell us new ones...

Kazujo · 19-12-2004 4:34pm

Micro drives have been out for a while now which could more than a gig if I remember correctly that use the smart card interface, but not all devices can read the full space available on the cards.

AFAIK most devices have an upper limit of readable memory, I know my camera is limited to 128MB admitedly it's abit old but still it will only read upto 128 and it doubles as an MP3 player.

duridian · 19-12-2004 4:46pm

I think it will eventually work out that hard drives as we know it will eventually be replaced by non-mechanical storage methods like this ie. no moving parts like motors, read heads etc. IIRC there are already solid state "hard drives" available that connect like pci cards but the capacity is still smallish at around 4 or 5 gigs.

Kazujo · 19-12-2004 4:51pm

I remember seeing a prototype USB solid state storage device it was either 10-20 Gig bout the same size as an external floppy dirve. Solid state would the best way to go albeit expensive, super fast access times and no more fear of clunk of a dieing hard drive

Wertz · 19-12-2004 5:14pm

Kazujo wrote:

AFAIK most devices have an upper limit of readable memory, I know my camera is limited to 128MB admitedly it's abit old but still it will only read upto 128 and it doubles as an MP3 player.

Ah didn't know that.
The solid state is nice (isn't anything with no moving parts) but it's gonna be big bucks for a few years yet no?
From what I'm grasping from seagate's article, these HDD will be cheap and available relatively soon.

Kazujo · 19-12-2004 5:23pm

They would be very nice as interchangable carts for Mp3 players. I remember seeing a report a few years ago that people wee researching electron hard drives and some sort of cyrstal HDD.

vibe666 · 19-12-2004 7:27pm

hate to burst the bubble, but it's not solid state, it's just a really small hard drive, much like the current microdrives are. although seagate claim much better shock resistance than current microdrives. would still be good though. especially if the power consumption is kept low, which it looks like it will.

p.s. i know not everyone said it was solid state, but someone seemed to think it was.

The death knell for flash memory..?

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