back to article Japanese lab's 'value-aware' SSDs last longer, recognise images faster

Japan's Takeuchi Lab has proposed a “value-aware” solid state drive that it says can recognise images faster than rivals, while also extending drives' working life. Solid state drives degrade as they age, because you can only jolt the semiconductors involved so many times before the very silicon itself becomes damaged and more …

  1. Anomalous Cowshed

    The question everyone is asking is, when are all these fancy non-degrading solid-state memory technologies we keep hearing of going to reach the market? I mean, at the moment, we have a deficient technology (Flash), which we're mass-producing, and in a bid to cut costs and maximise productivity, we're making it more and more defective (MLC...), and spending enormous resources and ingenuity working around the severe flaws.

    1. defiler

      When there's a market that demands reliability

      At the moment, the SSD manufacturers seems to be falling over themselves to satisfy the two main drivers in the marketplace - speed and price. Sacrifice one of those for longevity.

      As soon as the market demands it (ie is prepared to stump up cold, hard cash for it), the manufacturers will rush headlong into that too.

      For now, though, most users seem satisfied that they can get 100x the IOPS out of an SSD than they could on a spinner, and let RAID deal with the drive failures. Hell, it could currently be significantly cheaper to have some bod tour the DC every day swapping out failed SSDs than to try to engineer more longevity into them.

      1. choleric

        Re: When there's a market that demands reliability

        That's not really what happened with ssd is it?

        It took upstarts to drag the big players into the market. They were quite happy milking their spinning rust cash cows for a long while more.

        Where are the upstarts with the new technology. If there are none then we may be waiting a long time for the existing players to roll out new technology.

    2. Cuddles

      "I mean, at the moment, we have a deficient technology (Flash)"

      Define "deficient". Despite beliefs to the contrary being oddly tenacious, SSDs have been as reliable and long-lived, or even more so, than HDDs for a while now (although either might still have an advantage depending on the specific conditions). The idea that SSDs are crappy, short-lived things that can't be trusted with data for more than a few months is at least a decade out of date by now. Sure, it would be nice to have technology that's even more reliable, but that will always be the case and is hardly a sensible reason to call technology that is as good as any we've ever had deficient and defective.

  2. GrapeBunch

    Retro frustration

    <ot>I'm still waiting for a reliable, economical 8 GB (yes, that's right, GB not TB) SSD EIDE hard drive to retrofit into a 1994 Thinkpad 701C ("Butterfly" keyboard) for completely silent retro-computing. The solutions I tried (starting at an Australian-made circuit board that held a CF card of the user's choice) claimed they were like an EIDE hard drive--but were not recognized as such by the 701C. For example, DOS would not boot. I freely admit that it could be "my bad", and I'm not a wizard.</ot>

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