ComputerWorld is running a story about the future of laptops. Apparently, both Apple and LG are planning to release laptops using flash memory devices instead of hard drives.
Flash memory is already in heavy usage in a lot of consumer electronics devices, like digital cameras, MP3 players, mobile phones and similar devices but until relatively recently they have had much smaller capacity than hard drives and so haven’t been used for computers.
Dropping prices and increasing capacity are changing the game, however, and while we haven’t seen many high-profile companies releasing flash-based and hybrid flash and hard drive portable computers.
Call me sceptical, but I don’t think this is quite ready to happen yet, and I see one major issue here.
Current generation flash memory is still subject to limitation in the number of read/writes that can be done. After a certain number of times pushing and pulling data through the chip, it simply doesn’t work anymore.
Hard drives die too, but flash memory can tolerate less. While that doesn’t matter in an environment like an MP3 player where you’re not doing a lot of read/write cycles, running an operating system is very intensive on the storage medium, so it would be likely that flash memory-based computers could fail earlier than hard drive equivalents. And I’m not sure people would want their laptops to die too quickly.
You might be surprised that I don’t actually think storage capacity is a problem at the moment. As far as I’m aware, some of the biggest chips are around 32 GB, so that’s reasonable storage space to have in a low-end ultra-portable laptop. Plus, if storage capacity continues increasing at the current rate, this aspect of flash memory will become even more feasible pretty quickly.
If they can sort out the read/write tolerance, I think this is a great idea.
I can see the advantage in terms of portability. But yes - I cant see any practicality because of the read/write issue.
In theory this is an excellent idea, although the read/write cycle’s is a serious issue, last time I checked it was about 100,000. Although it is great that the battery life could seriously be increased, without needing to continue to develop them too much. But it all comes back to the cycles, the drives would probably be dead in a few months for most people, and Virtual Memory would be an absolute no-no.
Although this could work if the OS was built around the limitations of flash memory, so If it booted like a read-only Live Linux disc that would use no (or little) write cycle’s, then you would need lot’s of ram to erradicate the need for Virtual Memory, and store any files that needed to be written for permanent storage in the ram until the computer is shut down, that way the number of cycles required would significantly be reduced, although shut-down time would be increased, and after extended period’s of time with no reboots the system would become slow.
It is certainly an idea for the future, but I personally don’t want to be having to by new flash drives for my computer every few months.