Well, because Flash RAM doesn't have any moving parts (as opposed to a hardrive), there is more that can go wrong with it. For example, it would be more likely to break if dropped. But that is just what my friend told me; he knows a LOT more about it than I do. A bigger draw to Flash is its energy efficiency, it would use less battery, need to be charged less, and the battery would last longer before having to be replaced. I guess that is the biggest reason for wanting Flash, because iPods only have so many charge cycles before the battery has to be replaced. I read that the battery in the iPod Classic will probably have to be replaced after about a year and a half if it is used a lot. Is that true? How long do they usually last if you use them several hours every day?
I have a question that I feel will only get answered if I ask it on a recent blog. I was reading an blog posted in 2005 ("Flash Based Laptops, Sooner Than You Think" by James R. Stoup Sep 16, 2005) and I was wondering if any of it is still accurate. In particular, do you still think:
“Flash memory will NOT replace hard drives in computers. Flash memory only has a life of a couple million write cycles. While this is plenty for an MP3 player or digital camera which doesn’t access flash memory constantly, flash ram as a hard drive replacement would die a quick and painful death and your laptop would be a very expensive paperweight in under 6 months. Even if you moved the swap partition into regular RAM, the flash drive would still rack up reads and writes quickly enough that it would hit its failure limit in a little over a year. How would you like to turn on your 1 year old Powerbook only to find that it not only doesn’t boot, but all your data has died a painful and unrecoverable death?
So… don’t expect hard drives to go away anytime soon. Does that mean we’ll never see a lower power solid state replacement for the hard drive? No… it will happen eventually. There are a few promising technologies in development, but it will be years and years before we see them in an Apple computer (or Dell or IBM or....) “?
I am trying to decide if I should wait until Apple switches to flash RAM to get an iPod. Will that ever happen? If so, how soon do you think?
October 2007- How much of this has changed? Phil Steen: do you still think
"Flash memory will NOT replace hard drives in computers. Flash memory only has a life of a couple million write cycles. While this is plenty for an MP3 player or digital camera which doesn’t access flash memory constantly, flash ram as a hard drive replacement would die a quick and painful death and your laptop would be a very expensive paperweight in under 6 months. Even if you moved the swap partition into regular RAM, the flash drive would still rack up reads and writes quickly enough that it would hit its failure limit in a little over a year. How would you like to turn on your 1 year old Powerbook only to find that it not only doesn’t boot, but all your data has died a painful and unrecoverable death?
So… don’t expect hard drives to go away anytime soon. Does that mean we’ll never see a lower power solid state replacement for the hard drive? No… it will happen eventually. There are a few promising technologies in development, but it will be years and years before we see them in an Apple computer (or Dell or IBM or....) "?
I am trying to decide if I should wait until Apple switches to flash RAM to get an iPod. Will that ever happen? If so, how soon do you think?
AAM: Three's a Crowd
AAM: Three's a Crowd
Flash Based Laptops, Sooner Than You Think