Flash Memory: Difference between revisions

To add an injury to the insult, the high voltage needed to erase the flash memory degrades the structure of the semiconductor itself, so it wears out much faster than most other types of [[Mass Storage]], making flash (much like CD/DVD-RW discs) generally unsuitable for use as [[Random Access Memory|RAM]], and as writing data to it is generally slower than reading (if the chip is full and needs erasing first -- ''much'' slower). It usually cannot be used for a swap file, which usually need much to be written on. Finally, because it's a semiconductor chip and requires complex and expensive tools to manufacture, flash memory is closer to the DRAM in cost, at roughly $1 per GB in the 2010s. It thus is still enormously expensive compared to magnetic and optical storage, rather severely limiting its usefulness in [[Real Life]]. Things are getting better, but SSDs still cost about ten times more than good old HDDs of similar capacity. And the USB thumb drives can look very cute.

 

 

* '''Solid State Drives''' are the HDD-sized devices that hold quite a few Flash chips and are roughly similar in capacity to the modern HDDs. They are usually marketed as direct replacements for hard drives for people that prefer their speed and indifference to the rough handling, and are not afraid of their price, small sizes, and the whole "fatigue" thing, so they are typically found in standard laptop HDD sizes, and use the common HDD IDE or SATA interfaces. Slightly easing the "fatigue anxiety", though, modern SSDs have roughly the same mean time between failures as the modern hard drives. On the other hands, they're still much more expensive. Nintendo's Wii has a rather small 512MB SSD instead of its competitors' multigigabyte hard drives. To offset the cost problem, it's common for homebuilt PCs to have a relatively small SSD to hold key programs (including the operating system) and one or more larger HDDs for general storage.