Flash memory as a replacement for hard drives

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An obvious extension of flash memory would be as a replacement for hard disks. Flash memory does not have the mechanical limitations and latencies of hard drives, so the idea of a solid-state drive, or SSD, is attractive when considering speed, noise, power consumption, and reliability.

There remain some aspects of flash-based SSDs that make the idea unattractive. Most important, the cost per gigabyte of flash memory remains significantly higher than that of platter-based hard drives. Although this ratio is decreasing rapidly for flash memory, it is not yet clear that flash memory will catch up to the capacities and affordability offered by platter-based storage. Still, research and development is sufficiently vigorous that it is not clear that it will not happen, either.

There is also 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.^[25][26]

In June, 2006, Samsung Electronics released the first flash-memory based PCs, the Q1-SSD and Q30-SSD, both of which used 32 GB SSDs, and were at least initially available only in South Korea.^[27] Dell Computer introduced a 32GB SSD option on its Latitude D420 and D620 ATG laptops in April 2007—at $549 more than a hard-drive equipped version.^[28]

At the Las Vegas CES 2007 Summit Taiwanese memory company A-DATA showcased SSD hard disk drives based on Flash technology in capacities of 32 GB, 64 GB and 128 GB.^[29] Sandisk announced an OEM 32 GB 1.8" SSD drive at CES 2007.^[30] The XO-1, developed by theOne Laptop Per Child (OLPC) association, uses flash memory rather than a hard drive. As of June 2007, a South Korean company called Mtron claims the fastest SSD with sequential read/write speeds of 100 MB/80 MB per second.^[31]

Rather than entirely replacing the hard drive, hybrid techniques such as hybrid drive and ReadyBoost attempt to combine the advantages of both technologies, using flash as a high-speed cache for files on the disk that are often referenced, but rarely modified, such as application and operating system executable files. Also, Addonics has a PCI adapter for 4 CF cards,^[32] creating a RAID-able array of solid-state storage that is much cheaper than the hardwired-chips PCI card kind.

The ASUS Eee PC uses a flash-based SSD of 2 GB to 20 GB, depending on model. The Apple Inc. Macbook Air has the option to upgrade the standard hard drive to a 128 GB Solid State hard drive. The Lenovo ThinkPad X300 also features a built-in 64 GB Solid State Drive.

Sharkoon has developed a device that uses six SDHC cards in RAID-0 as an SSD alternative; users may use more affordable High-Speed 8GB SDHC cards to get similar or better results than can be obtained from traditional SSDs at a lower cost.