Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

Posted Mar 19, 2008 16:41 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (guest, #15888)
Parent article: Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

> patents that deal with many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer

All of which boil down to electrical (or, possibly, optical) signals over a serial or parallel
bus, right?  Makes about as much sense as patents on file formats I suppose, sigh.

Still, there are a _lot_ of existing ways a storage device can communicate with a computer --
SCSI, USB, PATA, SATA, FireWire/1394, etc.  I don't imagine that any patents covering the SCSI
or ATA command set itself are still in force, and many of Seagate's patents may already fall
under various cross-licensing agreements.

Of course, there are some inherent differences between flash and disk, so sooner or later
we'll see interfaces optimized for the former, and disks will have to start emulating flash
rather than vice-versa.  (Think of the various SCSI commands that make no sense if you don't
have rotating platters, moving heads, and the latency thereof.)

Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

Posted Mar 23, 2008 23:40 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

What I wonder is "why not PCI" (or similar)?  Flash has the potential to go very, very much
faster than hard drives, particularly if you put down a parallel array of flash.  

Put some battery backed RAM a board with a controller and an array of parallel flash devices,
and you have a very, very fast "disk."  The battery backed RAM is there mainly to absorb
bursts of activity as well as sector translation maps for wear leveling.

It should be possible to get very fast speeds out of such a critter.  Maybe not as fast as a
RAM disk--that'd require fitting in a RAM socket and responding at RAM speeds and
latencies--but fast enough.

The only annoying thing is that BIOSes won't see it as a disk since it wouldn't necessarily
offer a disk interface.  I guess you *would* have to emulate some sort of legacy disk
controller interface for that, much like modern GPUs still support all the old VGA modes.