🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <fr-n==q.payner@netcom.com> payner@netcom.com (Rich Payne) writes:

>This? Flash EPROM sounds interesting, but it still seems to me that
>the voltage and power requirements to -write- to it are far above the
>power requirements for a small drive. It would not seem that the present
>FLASH EPROM would be a replacement for current small HD's. But I think
>it still would be usefull. 

Voltage isn't the same as power.  The 4MB card consumes 0.15 watts
active, and 0.04 watts standby.  The main problems with Flash EPROM are
that it takes on the average 2 seconds to erase a 256KB zone.  The
entire zone must be erased.  Once erased, writes take 10us per byte and
reads are 200ns maximum, data transfer at 8MB/s.  The card can be shut
down between accesses so it takes no power, then be instantly powered
back up.  A disk drive will take a few seconds just to spin up.  Disk
drives also have head and rotational latency.  Note that all the figures
I have are for 4MB cards, 20MB cards may differ significantly.

I could certainly see a 20MB Flash card replacing a Kittyhawk or
similar drive in at least some applications.  Simply by size and power
consumption, two or more 20MB cards would fit where only one hard drive
would.  They may end up more complementary that competitive however.
Even a drive as small as the Kittyhawk could probably have a few
megabytes of Flash memory for use as cache.  This could give the low
power and speed of Flash with the low cost of disk.
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<-:(= Anthony Stieber	anthony@csd4.csd.uwm.edu   uwm!uwmcsd4!anthony