Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] ultra cheap notebooks with solid-state "disks"

["Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 6/8/07, McNutt, Justin M. <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> I wonder how they plan to deal with the fact that you can only get so
> many writes to flash before it starts to fail (far fewer than on
> winchester technology).  Also, read/write times to flash aren't that
> great.

The write numbers are now pretty high, and most of these devices now
do "write balancing" in hardware. You are of course correct that i/o
won't be screaming on this thing.

> Perhaps it isn't a flash disk at all.  One could build a solid-state
> storage device using ordinary RAM chips and a battery.  It would still
> be fairly cheap and fast as lightning.

Think that would draw too much power to enjoy truly wonderful battery
life, but I could be wrong. Also, it would become a big disaster if
you lost all your juice; ordinary RAM *is* volatile, after all. :-)

jking

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