NAND Flash memory is, at the moment, seen as the fastest storage solution on the IT market, but IBM decided it would make short work of that very technology by inventing something that seriously trounces the competition.
Currently, the PC storage solutions market is divided between
hard disk drives and NAND Flash-based
solid state drives, disregarding flash drives, memory cards and the like.
The former have the upper hand in terms of raw capacity, while the latter are much faster, both when reading and when writing.
Turns out, however, that IBM came up with a new storage solution which isn't content with just a reliability of millions of write cycles (NAND Flash has thousands).
No indeed, the company actually managed to build a new PCM (phase change memory) whose writing speed is 100 times faster than flash.
Depending on how fast the new technology starts to be used, USB 3.0 might soon become insufficient.
That said, Intel's
Thunderbolt interface should attain its 50 Gbps potential in several years, which is more or less the same time frame for the data storage “paradigm shift” that IBM promises.
A final asset of the new PCM is that it can store four data bits per cell instead of just one, meaning that the overall capacity should also be superior to NAND. As for the price, it will be accessible enough for everything from servers to mobile phones to use it.
"As organizations and consumers increasingly embrace cloud-computing models and services, whereby most of the data is stored and processed in the cloud, ever more powerful and efficient, yet affordable storage technologies are needed," states Dr. Haris Pozidis, manager of Memory and Probe Technologies at IBM Research – Zurich.
"By demonstrating a multi-bit phase-change memory technology which achieves for the first time reliability levels akin to those required for enterprise applications, we made a big step towards enabling practical memory devices based on multi-bit PCM."
Find us on Google+
No user comments yet.
Be the first to express your opinion!
