Solid State Storage
Posted by
Steven J. Schuchart Jr.
September 08, 2006
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After years of the status quo in solid state storage, recent advancements may bring about replacements for conventional hard drives in about five years. One solid state technology, flash memory, has two big weaknesses: It wears out after a relatively small number of writes, and it's slow compared with other types of memory. Future generations of solid state technologies, such as MRAM (magnetoresistive RAM) and phase-change memory, don't have these limitations.
Freescale's commercial MRAM chip is the first of its kind on the market and operates at 4 Mbps. MRAM combines an unlimited write potential and high speed with flash RAM's nonvolatile nature.
Solid state drives may seem like a new phenomenon in storage, but these devices have been around for 25 years. The original market for solid state drives was in military and industrial applications, where the environment was too harsh for standard magnetic hard disks.
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