2006-03-11 #1

32GB Laptop Flash Drive

According to this article, Samsung showed off a 32GB flash laptop drive at CeBIT. Not counting MP3's and photos, all of my software and data would easily fit into much less than that. I could use an external HD to store all of my MP3's and photos and then swap in a new 2GB of music every few weeks. Until the price comes down, I would actually even be fine with a 4GB laptop. It wasn't that long ago that my main machine had only a 1GB HD. Now if someone would only make a laptop with a Kinesis-like keyboard.

On an aside, I wonder if we'll see filesystems specifically designed for flash memory.

Update: I found such a filesystem: TargetFFS-NAND.

From the above link they say:

The wear fatigue results in manufacturers only guaranteeing proper operation for a finite number of program/erase cycles, typically 1 million or more.

Only a million updates isn't very much if you're using it for a database server or development box :-(.