2012 December 02 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for December 2nd, 2012

Oops! FLASH Memory Unleashed From Bit-rot

Published by Robert Pogson December 2nd, 2012 in technology. 1 Comment

“Macronix is set to reveal technologies is says will make it possible for flash memory to survive 100 million read/write cycles”

see Flash memory made immortal by fiery heat • The Register.

SSDs have been struggling against two problems in their competition with magnetic hard drives:

cost, and
bit-rot resulting from wear during writes.

The first problems is almost solved in that SSDs are now less than $1/gB and the second may have been solved by Macronix who figured out how to anneal the storage with periodic flashes of heat. This means in a year or two, SSDs will be very competitive. Hard drives still win on storage capacity but SSDs make great buffers/caches. RAM is cheaper than borscht too.

The SSDs will soon be state of the art and facilitating the move to smaller and cheaper personal computers by taking up less space and mass and taking the load off the processor to give the illusion of speed…

- Robert Pogson

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.