You’ve got a smartphone, a digital camera, an iPod, and you carry around documents on a memory stick.

Surprise! You’re using flash memory.

Flash memory has no moving parts. It’s an electronic storage device that can retain information even when the power is off. Solid-state drives (SSDs) made from flash memory are incredibly fast and highly reliable, when correctly engineered.

A Brief History of Flash

Developed from EEPROMs (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory), flash memory was invented by Dr. Fujio Masuoka while he was working for Toshiba , circa 1980. Masuoka delivered a paper on his invention at the 1984 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco.

However, it wasn’t until 1987 that Masuoka-san designed a type of flash memory suitable for mass storage, known as NAND flash. It was Intel INTC -0.78% that saw the massive potential of the invention and introduced the first commercial flash chip in 1988.

Toshiba, on the other hand, was said to have punished Masuoka for failing to be a team player (he developed flash as an unauthorized side-project, which was a Japanese business cultural no-no).


Flash is Everywhere

Our ability to take photos and erase them, to change ringtones, or to acquire digital music is the direct result of the use of flash storage over the past quarter-century.

For businesses, one of the most attractive uses of flash is to replace hard disks. Flash memory does not have the mechanical limitations of hard drives, so an SSD has better speed, noise, and power consumption. Flash-based SSDs are gaining traction for mobile storage devices; but they’re also used in high-performance desktop computers, servers and enterprise-scale storage systems.

The cost of SSDs is still higher than that of hard disks, but those costs are falling fast.

Flash has a finite number of write/erase cycles. However, this has improved enormously over the past few years, from 100 cycles, to 10,000 to as many as 100,000 cycles. When properly engineered, SSDs are now at least as reliable as traditional spinning hard drives (although cheap flash can still be frustratingly unreliable).

In June 2006, Samsung released the first flash-memory based PCs, the Q1-SSD and Q30-SSD, both of which used 32 GB solid-state devices. An SSD was offered as an option with the first MacBook Air in 2008, and from 2010 onwards, all MacBook Air laptops shipped with an SSD. Starting in late 2011, as part of Intel’s Ultrabook initiative, an increasing number of ultra-thin laptops are being shipped with SSDs as standard.

Flash is Fast

Flash has a much faster access time than hard disks. Think of starting up in seconds, not minutes. Even the slowest current SSD gives you far better real-world performance than does the fastest conventional hard drive—perhaps100 times as fast.

On the desktop, this translates into improved user productivity, and helps you get more work accomplished in a fraction of the time.

Using flash in enterprise storage servers means you can support more users, do more work, and use less power. It’s become an important technology for business transactions. But will flash completely replace hard disks?


Flash is Transforming Tomorrow’s Business

The transformation happening at the consumer level may be moving upstream faster than many predicted. And with advances in software that make flash easier to manage and protect, this transformation is gaining even more support from forward-looking IT professionals.

So, if you’re wondering where data storage technology is heading in your business, look no further than your smartphone, tablet or laptop. As flash technology continues to improve in maturity, cost and reliability, it’s likely to take on an even bigger presence in your company.

The world will be moving a lot faster as a result.

Moved To The Right Section..

General PC Chat & Help