A Magnetic Memory Alternative to Hard Disk 258
Dr Occult writes "Finally, a magnetic memory chip has been manufactured in volume and released by the U.S. company Freescale. Christened MRAM (magnetoresistive random-access memory),this chip will hold information even after power has been switched off. From the BBC news article: 'Unlike flash memory, which also can keep data without power, Mram has faster read and write speeds and does not degrade over time,' and 'MRAM chips could one day be used in PCs to store an operating system, allowing computers to start up faster when switched on.'"
Is bootup time really that big of an issue? (Score:5, Interesting)
What other applications could this have besides boot time?
Re:Price? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is bootup time really that big of an issue? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is bootup time really that big of an issue? (Score:4, Interesting)
What I do want, however, is good rewritable storage with NO MOVING PARTS! It'll make things like under-the-TV HTPC's much, much more feasible - you have a small ~10GB boot drive for the core OS components, and a big ol' hard drive that spends much of it's time spun down. On top of that, you could have almost instant resume from hibernate
Corporate users would also gain colossal benefits; I know that by far the most common failure I see at work is a dead or dying hard drive, which are a pain to replace in OEM machines which tend to be built so that only people with advanvced degrees it WTF Ergonomics and How To Wire Like A Spider On Drugs can open them. Replace that with a solid state unit with no moving parts and the problem is more or less instantly solved. Heck, depending on its overall reliabilty we might even be able to dump things like RAID in the mid to long term.
Does anyone have any non-fluff stuff about wha power consumption, max transfer and the like is? Since it's MRAM I expect that it'll only need to use power when reading or writing to disc, right? Hence I'd expect power usage to be practically zero - another huge boon for corporate users. Colossal possible bandwidth and low latency are the icing on the cake.
Disclaimer: I know little about MRAM other than what I've read in fluff pieces before. Time to visit Wikipedia...
Slow Bubbles (Score:5, Interesting)
Why can't I get a motherboard with 500MB Flash for storing an image of system memory exactly after the OS is loaded and initialized, that is blitted over to RAM and then tweaked (system clock, network counters, etc) in a few milliseconds? All the "loading" from storage to RAM includes minutes of computation like a second "compilation" that's practically identical every time I start the machine. How much computing power is wasted on that redundant exercise every day, around the world? I'd like to reinit only when the startup becomes corrupt, which a "known good" ROM instance could avoid better than the current chaotic process.
A major limitation... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd rather see MRAMs used ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think Freescale has produced this because they don't know how to market it, and are willing to listen and see how what marketplace does with a device having these unique characteristics.
It will, of course, get smaller, cheaper, faster over time. Whether it gets cheaper fast enough to open new markets remains an open question.
Re:NOT a hard drive alternative (Score:5, Interesting)
Assume 15 MB/s write. 40 GB will take about 45 mins. So in 5 years, you will only write each block 175,200 times which is within the 1,000,000 writes spec for flash. And this assumes that you do no reads at all.
Wearout is a myth with modern flash filesystem software.
Re:Slow Bubbles (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually a simple alternative is quite feasible today - after a clean boot, write a "hibernate" image. At boot time, have the selection of the hibernate image as a boot option. 5 second boots!
Not as good as your suggestion, but $cheaper.
Nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
"Alternative to harddisks"
"Make the OS load faster"
This is complete and utter nonsense. It is not a HDD alternative, because it if ar too small. OS loading is dominated by hardware detection and initialisation. A Linux-Kernel, e.g., is less than 2MB in size and is typically loaded in less than a second. This could be brought down further by the BIOS setting UDMA mode.
I guess this product does not have any real application.
Re:NOT a hard drive alternative (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:NOT a hard drive alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:NOT a hard drive alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:NOT a hard drive alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
And I just think you're flat out wrong in your assertion. Maybe on a server data is accessed over and over, but for normal desktop use data-access is sporadic. I don't listen to the same mp3s over and over, and I certainly don't watch the same 5 minutes of a DVD on a loop pattern. I suppose if I was doing intensive video editing, I would want that video stored on high-performance drives. Same with any other very intensive read-write activity.
But for the vast majority of desktop users the repeat data access is going to come from the Warcraft III
-stormin
Re:NOT a hard drive alternative (Score:2, Interesting)
sure a chopped down linux distro may run in ram but no way in hell that vista will, or xp & 2k for that matter
what you will want to do is load your data into ram when you access a file
for a PC (and i mean personal comp. macs, linux, and typewriters included) this makes the most sense
Re:NOT a hard drive alternative (Score:2, Interesting)
"Until recently, the common approach to using Flash memory technology in embedded devices has been to use a pseudo-filesystem on the flash chips to emulate a standard block device and provide wear levelling, and to use a normal file system on top of that emulated block device."
Taken from http://linux-mtd.infradead.org/~dwmw2/jffs2.pdf [infradead.org].