Sandisk launches 32Gb flash drive, competes with Samsung and hard disk drives

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 04 January 2007 16:50

Opinion and Analysis

Hard drive manufacturers are also working on putting flash memory into their hard drives to act as a cache. But all makers of flash memory have to worry about the lifecycle of flash memory. Newer flash drives have much longer read/write cycles than before, with reports of flash drives that handle up to 1 million cycles instead of just 100,000.

There’s no word yet on how many cycles the new Sandisk 32gb flash drive can handle, when we find out we’ll let you know, as it is an important issue.

However it must be remembered that hard drives have an MTBF or ‘mean time between failure’ of over 1 million hours these days – some models, anyway – and so aren’t invincible either and will also eventually die.

Hard drive manufacturers are also working hard at increasing the capacity that individual hard disks will hold. Already 2.5-inch hard drives have broken the 200Gb barrier, with companies like Seagate and Hitachi claiming lots of work being done in the hard disk space to dramatically boost storage capacities between now and 2010, less than 3 years away.

Whatever happens in the war between flash and hard drives, flash is here to stay, and presents a credible alternative to hard disk technology. Set to only get better, not only might you next notebook have at least 1Gb of flash loaded into its hard drive, but it might come with no moving-parts hard drive at all.

From a time when 5Mb hard drives were the size of washing machines decades ago to  some modern computers no longer needing a hard drive at all, in the realm of technology, the future certainly is bright!