Whilst we all think of flash memory as relatively slow compared to the main RAM memory in our computers, it's easy to forget that it's still considerably faster than the top flight hard disks. Over the last year there have been several references to the fact that this has not escaped the notice of the major hard disk manufacturers, who reportedly have announced this week that they will come together under the 'Hybrid Storage Alliance' (HSA). The companies on board for this venture are Seagate Technology, Hitachi, Samsung, Fujitsu and Toshiba (Western Digital are notable by their absence).
At the moment, the major commercial obstacle to making 100% flash drives is the cost of chip manufacture (Sandisk recently announced a flash-only drive which adds $600 to the price of a laptop - see the article by Seán below). Basically the notion behind the Hybrid Storage Alliance is to manufacture a drive with the best of both worlds: essential fast-access data such as database indexes are stored on a flash memory area, with the major 'weight' of information residing on the conventional magnetic platters. Such an approach is also supported by Windows Vista, in which the 'ReadyDrive' facility has the ability to detect and write to these faster drive data storage areas.
However clever this combination of technologies may appear, one can't help thinking that this 'alliance' announcement is a corporate response to Sandisk's bold and original commercial-scale development, and is really only a stopgap measure until the price of flash memory decreases further and provides a real challenge to the 'platter-peddlers' strategy.
