When will PC's use only flash memory instead of hard drives?

Answer 1

It'll be in the very far future starting with laptops; back out the thinking for a while, what is the most tasking use of a PC? Games.

For gaming, multigigs are needed for today's modest games, Higher speed offers better experience; true gamers are after those two criterias always. Hard drives top those compare to flash.

On the other front, office task, web, email; those mundane tasks demand very little compare to even Windows XP's 1 gig standard. Even a 4 gig microdrive would do spades, and I've got such thing as CF-IDE in my Linux laptop. There is not much commercial demand based on this. So there's no incentive for Maxtor/Seagate/etc to start making flash-based disk but miniaturize aluminum disks.

FYI: Largest Flash commercially just hit 8 gigs; Aluminum/Head disk just miniatured into about SD size in a research, that made a side news.

Answer 2

Its going to be a long while, and it probably won't be flash memory. Flash is rather slow compared to a harddrive, although it is getting faster. The biggest disadvantage to flash is the fact that it has a limited number of write cycles. If you used a flash drive as your main storage you would quickly "wear it out", especially if you put a swap file on it.

There are very high speed solid state "disks" out there now without this limitation, but they are nonpersistent, meaning that you must keep power to them or they lose what you store on them. They are also quite expensive when compared to the per gig price of a standard hard drive.

Hard drives are going to be with us for a while I think.

Answer 3

When the cost of the memory will make it viable. Work it out... how much would it cost you to have, say, 300GB of Flash Memory in your system?

On average, a 1GB flash stick, be it a USB drive or microSD (for example) ranges from $10 to $20. So let's say $15 to be safe. 300x15 = $4,500.00. Might as well buy a car!

I'm not saying that a 300GB Flash-based drive will cost $4500, but it's a rough estimate. I certainly don't see it costing anywhere near what a 300GB hard drive costs nowadays.

Answer 4

Probably never. Hard drives are still much cheaper and faster than flash drives. Certainly, this might be an option.

The $100 laptop sports a tiny flash drive as it's main drive, and has no hard drive. see http://laptop.org/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml

Good luck and Happy Computing!

Answer 5

in fact they can already do that. you can use a flash drive as an external hard drive and not use a generic hard drive at all.
But the only problem is flash cards dont have the storage capacity of regular hard drivers. a hard drive can store terabytes of data.. whereas the highest capacity flash drive i have heard of is 1 GB

Answer 6

i don't think of any laptop would be having flash drives. they are utilized so as that the gadget could be made compact. yet there's a large form of area in a computer and so not undemanding Drives can honestly be put in in them.yet frankly, in utilization words, not undemanding drives are plenty greater effective and quicker than flash drives.

Answer 7

Is see them using Flash drives instead of CD roms very soon...but the hard drive is here for the forseeable future.

Answer 8

when software can fit on it without minor things such as space requirements . 2 gigs isn't much but when they get flash to hold 20-50 gigs, hard drives will be on the way out.

Answer 9

Well, it due to the tranfert rate and the versatility of the datas, if i'm not mistaking. I guess a flash memory on a PCI bus would be slower, more risky to use, and also more expensive...

Answer 10

in about 5 years. there are already hybrid drives that are 32 gigabytes flash and 100 gb hard drive

this will explain it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive