The age of the hard drive has ended, to be replaced with flash memory devices provided by Samsung and others.
When Apple announced its latest must-have gadget, the iPod Nano, much speculation had already been made about the device. It had been reported previously that Apple will buy up as much as 40 percent of Samsung’s NAND flash memory output for the rest of the year.
Flash memory is a solid state method of storing data, in the case of the iPod Nano that would be music or photos. Digital phones and cameras make use of flash memory. While Samsung and other manufacturers can and do make tiny hard drives, that market may be coming to a close.
Techworld.com notes how Samsung has unveiled a 16Gb NAND flash chip. In the article, Samsung’s semiconductor CEO, Dr. Chang Gyu Hwang, praised the 50nm technology behind the chip.
Groupings of a number of these chips in a laptop could be the beginning of their use beyond smaller mobile devices. But flash memory has a couple of factors against it at the moment. It costs a lot compared to hard drives, and flash memory has a finite number of times where data can be written and re-written to it.
The technology will continue to advance, and Samsung predicts 128GB memory cards, containing a number of smaller Gb flash chips, will be available in a couple of years. That would make them a viable option in terms of storage size for laptop or desktop use.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
