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Flash Memory: Hard Drives
built 629 days ago
Flash memory sticks are fairly new but already taking hold fast. There is no such thing as bringing in a "disk" anymore - you simply store everything you need to take with you on an external hard drive - memory stick.
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In either case, flash memory could help your system in a couple of ways. In one scenario, bits of the operating system would be stored in flash memory; those bits could load more quickly from flash memory than they could from a hard drive. The result would be faster bootup times.
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Toshiba has unveiled their new 16GB flash memory chips, the largest available so far. Designed for use in phones and music players, it's yet another step toward hard drive based players such as the Video iPod going bye-bye. more
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Historically, flash memory’s major disadvantage has been price: in 2002, it cost about $260 per gigabyte, compared with $150 per gigabyte for a comparable one-inch "microdrive" hard drive. But prices for both have dropped drastically since then.
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There is ... some concern that the finite number of erase/write cycles of flash memory would render flash memory unable to support an operating system. This seems to be a decreasing issue as warranties on flash-based SSDs are approaching those of current hard drives.[11][12]
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