Flash price drop spurring innovation
A massive decline in the price of NAND flash memory, the chips that store photos
in digital cameras and music in iPods, is prompting innovation among companies
trying to increase sales.
A few of the items users are likely to see more widespread in gadgets this
year include greatly expanded storage capacity in SD (secure digital) cards,
USB (universal serial bus) flash sticks and internal storage, as well as new,
lower-cost SSDs (solid-state discs) in notebook computers.
The price of mainstream 4G bit SLC (single-level cell) NAND flash memory chips
has fallen 73 percent since mid-August to US$4.96 late Thursday, according to
DRAMeXchange Technology, which runs an online
clearinghouse for the chips. The chips hit a high of $18.50 on Aug. 14.
The price of 4G bit MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash chips have taken a slightly
worse dive, 75 percent down to $2.23 on Thursday, compared to its summer high
of $8.85 per chip.
The difference between SLC and MLC is cost and life span. SLC normally costs
about three times more than MLC, and has a lifetime of 100,000 write cycles.
MLC has a lifetime of only 10,000 write cycles.
Toshiba and Samsung
have both developed new 128G byte SSDs based in MLC NAND to expand their use
in notebook PCs. The new SSDs are less expensive, giving notebook PC designers
more choices in storage.
"At 128G bytes, you're giving consumers the kind of storage space they
expect in a notebook," said Jim Elliott, director of flash marketing at
Samsung, in an interview.
To work around the lifespan issue, Toshiba and Samsung use controller chips
to spread writes across the drive to avoid wearing out any one portion too quickly.
The new MLC-based drives are an important step forward for SSDs in the battle
against hard disk drives (HDD). At 128G bytes, an SSD stands are far better
chance of replacing an HDD in laptop computers because it removes some of the
high-capacity advantage HDDs hold.
SSDs have several advantages over HDDs; they're lighter, more rugged, consume
less power, make no noise and enable a computer to start up and load software
faster than HDDs. But SSDs are a lot more expensive than HDDs, which is why
they're mainly used in the business laptop market, where users are willing to
pay more for performance and reliability.
Elliott believes SSDs for PCs will account for 27 percent of NAND consumption
by 2011, particularly in business laptops and mobile devices.
SanDisk has taken a slightly
different route in SSDs than Toshiba and Samsung. The company made a 72G byte
SSD in a thinner form factor aimed at mobile devices. The drive
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