T HE PC hard drive could soon be an endangered species. As the price of Flash memo ry crashes, it is being used in areas traditionally occupied by magnetic storage systems. USB Flash keys are fast becoming the portable storage medium of choice, and a growing number of digital music players (such as Apple’s iPod nano) use Flash memory rather than miniature hard drives. But could it really replace a computer hard drive?
Some are trying. In Korea, Samsung has launched two computer products that use solid state drives (SSDs) in place of the conventional magnetic version. Samsung says there are many benefits to putting an SSD inside a computer, claiming an SSD can read data at 57MB/s and write at 32MB/s, significantly faster than a hard drive’s typical 24MB/s, thus offering faster access to applications and slicker multi-tasking.
The boot-up time for Windows XP is said to be 25 to 50 per cent faster and an SSD is up to 60 per cent lighter than a 1.8in hard drive. It’s also more robust. Samsung claims that the SSD can withstand deceleration forces (that is, being dropped) better than standard hard drives and use far less power. And finally, the lack of moving parts means an SSD-enabled PC can operate in complete silence.
With benefits like these, you’d think that PC manufacturers would be racing to replace magnetic disk drives with solid-state versions. But they’re not. John Rydning, manager for hard disk drives and components at research company IDC, says: “To borrow a quote from Mark Twain, the death of hard disk drives has been greatly exagger ated. The biggest challenge for Flash drives is cost.†But the price gap is narrowing. Last year, one gigabyte of Flash was 33 times more expensive than a small hard drive used in portable devices.
This year, the price gap is projected to be around 19:1. It’s an impressive reduction.
But besides cost, there are other obstacles for Flash memory replacing hard drives. Flash memory is typically guaranteed for around 1m read/write cycles, which sounds a lot, but in the context of the working life of a PC (which is continually writing, erasing or rewriting data) is not. So designers have to use techniques known as wear-levelling to shift data around the Flash memory block to reduce the risk of data error. But while manufacturers claim they can design around that problem, a majority of them predict that hard disk drives will continue to be the main storage medium for uses requiring more than 20GB for at least over the next few years.
“Set-top boxes, media centre PCs, home servers and other large storage devices will continue to use hard disk drives,†says Joe Unsworth, an analyst at tech research firm Gartner. “But because of the advantages Flash offers portable PC users, we’ll see lots of notebooks with Flash.†But even then, he has a warning: “Companies selling these products are going to have to have a good marketing campaign to help people understand just what the benefts are.â€
