Let me resummarize all of the main advantages and disadvantages of flash. Everything on this list has most probably been mentioned already, but I’m trying to put it all together to get a clearer view. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to traditional mechanical harddrives simply as “harddrives” and to flash-based harddrives at “flashdrives”.
Advantages of flashdrives:
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[*]Less power consumption. Like in “significantly less”. Power consumption is always an issue, but for notebooks, especially subnotebooks, it’s critical. Think about how happy we are since sophisticated technology like Centrino allows us to have around 4 hours on our VAIO TR. And still, that power drains quick. Higher capacity batteries are available, but at the cost of size and weight. Harddrives are one of the power consuming components, so a flashdrive would give us some very precious battery time.
[*]Flashdrives are quiet. Really, they don’t make any sound at all. While there has been great improvement in harddrive accoustics for some time, a flashdrive would completely remove any of these issues.
[*]Weight. Well, I’m not entirely sure how great the savings would be, but I believe that a flashdrive filled with chips weighs potentially less than a harddrive filled with at least one massive metal platter and head mechanics. And once you go “subnotebook”, every ounce counts.
[*]Breakability. This would be the killer argument. Harddrives are, without any doubt, by far the most breakable component in your entire computer. Harddrives consist of metal platters spinning at insane speeds, with very tiny heads floating on an air cushion above that platters. That’s right, there’s no vacuum in a harddrive, the air is needed to keep the heads in a distance from the platters! Just a single microscopic scratch or hole in the platter is enough to render a small part of your harddrive unusual.
But it’s getting even worse: due to the hole, the head may suddenly lose its air cushioning once it gets over that hole and crash again, probably resulting in another hole. In that case, you don’t only have some bad sectors, you’re always getting more.
With all those fragile parts stuck together, you can imagine that a drop or some shaking might damage your harddrive even if it’s not spinning. But if it’s spinning and, even worse, in the process of reading or writing (the heads thus moving over the platters) damaging that whole construction is even easier.
With flashdrives, you have </i>no moving parts</i> at all. A flashdrive should be able to survive a drop even from a considerable height. A flashdrive is less prone to production errors and a flashdrive doesn’t suffer or even care if you’re sending it down a bumpy hill in a car with overaged dampers.
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Disadvantages of Flashdrives:
Reading the above, one could expect wonders which solve every problem with mass media technology. Alas, flash technology isn’t perfect. It has some flaws, some may be considered “serious”:
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[*]Very expensive. Flashdrives currently are by no means anywhere near normal prices for harddrives. Look at an example on how much Flash really costs. We’re talking several tens of thousands and up to hundreds of thousands of dollars here! Sure, this was an example of a really, really fast flashdrive and technology also advances, making fast flashdrives eventually affordable, but at the very moment an affordable flashdrive which can compete with a harddrive is just a dream.
[*]Speed. Now, this isn’t necessarily an issue, either because you don’t always need the great bandwidth which can be achieved with harddrives today or because there actually is fast flashdrive technology, as stated in the example above. However, the affordable technology still is many times slower than an average harddrive and so it still stays an issue most of the time.
[*]Capacity. Almost a non-issue, since you could argue that you just have to pay enough. However, you can also get a speedy flashdrive if you pay enough. And paying enough would mean that your notebook soon becomes more expensive than your average sports car. Current affordable flash technology comes in not too bad storage capacity, up to around 10GB. Considering that even the very small 1,8” subnotebook harddrives come in sizes from 60GB to 100GB and that everything needs a whole lot more storage capacity these days, that’s still just not enough.
[*]Limited write access lifetime. I don’t know, has this already been addressed, really been taken care of? The last thing I heard was that you are still limited to around 100000 write accesses to each individual cell (or 10000, or maybe a million, depending on technology), rendering your flashdrive basically unusable after that point. With the right amount of work, this drastically changes the MTBF (mean time between failures) and is perhaps not acceptable. But maybe the technology already is far enough to either be without any limit or with a limit high enough to be usable.
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So, what do I think? Well, solid state flashdrive clearly are the better technology, in almost every possible aspect. Given the choice between a mechanical harddrive and a solid state flashdrive with roughly the same speed and size, I would take the flashdrive without batting an eyelid.
But I wouldn’t be able to afford it, and that’s the problem. Solid states flashdrives are superior but absolutely unaffordable at the moment, so they aren’t a very realistic option yet.
Eventually, this will change. Flashdrives will be affordable within our lifetime and they will be the mass storage media of choice. But that probably won’t happen in the next 2 years. 2 years to go from 50000$+ technology to 100$ technology just isn’t enough. Maybe in 10 years, I would say 5 at least.
