Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

Posted Mar 19, 2008 16:46 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (guest, #2285)
Parent article: Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

I think it would make a lot of sense for flash drive manufacturers to start working with
Microsoft on a new Windows filesystem similar to JFFS2 and enable access to the raw flash in
the drives through some extension to the ATA and SCSI standards.  Linux of course already has
filesystems that handle raw flash.

Surely it would be more efficient to do it that way.

Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

Posted Mar 19, 2008 21:29 UTC (Wed) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link] (1 responses)

Sure, it would be more efficient. It would also fly about as well as a lead balloon in the market. The reason they're making ATA-attached flash drives is exactly because you can immediately sell those to the vast majority of the market that already supports hard drives. The other tolerably widespread interfaces have drawbacks in cost, performance, or ubiquity, or a combination of those.

Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

Posted Mar 19, 2008 22:06 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

Well, in my idea the new commands would not replace the older SATA commands but be in addition
to.

In that way, you could use the direct flash interface by installing a Windows driver during
installation before using the drive, just like you used to have to do for SATA, SCSI or RAID
with Windows XP.

Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

Posted Mar 20, 2008 1:14 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

They are working on a new flash file system ... but you're probably not going to like it too
much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT