1 Access speed, right? SD interfaces, even modern fast ones, aren't anywhere near as fast as a hard drive interface.

On the other hand, you don't need a huge hard drive for your code and your memory swapping. It'd be easy to use a (relatively) small hard drive for your system files and to give programs space to run, and keep your data on the removable stuff.

2 Wait until you see little eSATA keys. A lot of data to let through a washing machine.

3 So, the norm would become something like 20G of HD, 2000G of SD.  I could see it.  And it'd make hard drive failure more or a nuisance than a disaster, at least if all system files are regularly ( preferably automatically ) backed up to SD.

4

We don't know how fast the new standard will be, do we? (It hasn't been published yet.)

Also, no seek time. (In most disk transfers, seeks take longer than data transfer.)

The technology isn't standing still. It may not be the case that flash memory will make HD's obsolete in five years, but ten years from now it's virtually certain. Until now the main reason it hasn't been a challenge is cost and production capacity, but both of those are going to change, in directions unfavorable to the HD industry.

A long time ago Intel worked on bubble memory, with the intention of rendering HD's obsolete. It didn't happen that time, for a number of reasons. This time, however, if I had to bet I wouldn't be betting on the HD companies.

5

Well, I want to see more price dropping of flash memory before I would declare HD to be dead.  And it also is assuming PC makers are working faster to integrate the latest flash memory capacity into the new rigs.

(One of the reasons I absolutely loathe netbooks is because for the same money they spend on a 4-8 gig flash memory drive, you could get a much, much larger standard HD.)

On the another bright side, flash memory is more energy efficient than a standard HD.  At the very least, that will make cooling the rigs slightly easier.

C.T.

6 The new interface spec supports speeds up to 300MB/sec.  I expect it will take a while for cards to actually reach that, though.

7

The price is on a huge downward slope already. I remember paying $120 for a 64 megabyte module (it wasn't SD, an earlier spec) not even ten years ago.

When I got my camera, I bought a 2G SD and it was only $13.

8 When I worked at CowPuters five years ago, a 16mb flashdrive cost $49.  A year ago, I purchased a 2gb flashdrive for $49.  In a week or so, the Duck U. Bookstore will be getting a shipment of 16gb flashdrives.  They'll retail for $49.

Flash memory, unless I'm mistaken, is roughly similar to what's in a flash drive.  I can easily imagine a scenario where they'll be able to compete with a "simple" hard-drive on price and access... and it may not even be very long from now.

9

One of the reasons is that this kind of memory doesn't have as high a quality requirement in processing. They make the flash chips with an extra column, and then test all the memory once complete. If any one column is bad, they turn it off and still have 8. So the yield rate is a lot higher than for things like CPUs and GPUs.

Also, since the vast majority of the die is repetitious, the design cost is vastly lower than for more complicated chips.

10 Until there's a better hardware levelling than they ship now, or flash filesystems come across, I don't see flash catching up. Contemporary flash keys usually just have a small buffer (12 64K blocks or so), which they continuously rotate. Drives do a bit better, but not by much: just enough for a lightly used netbook to survive for a year or two.

What Linux is doing to compensate does not look very promising to me (e.g. UBIFS). I wish there was jffs3 instead (we have jffs2 at present, which works great, but is size-limited and mounts slowly since it uses RAM for all of its map and needs to read all of it).

Windows, AFAIK, is doing zilch.

My biggest hope is that Microsoft continues to drive their feet in filesystems. As the pile of dead netbooks starts growing, hardware manufacturers will have to come up with better levelling hardware. As a matter of fact, they have: new Intel SSDs are excellent. You just cannot price them into a netbook... yet.