Tag Archives: flash

A little over two months ago, Seagate completed its acquisition of Samsung’s hard drive division, leaving only three major players in the magnetic storage industry. Actually, not quite three, as Toshiba remained as well. The problem was that this veritable “David” wasn’t actually in any position to take on what were the three remaining “Goliaths” of this industry. The reality …

Intel Corporation and Micron Technology have announced that they are expanding their existing joint venture relationship for production and use of NAND flash memory. As part of this expansion, Micron increases its share of the overall NAND Flash output by purchasing the assets of IM Flash Singapore (IMFS) and also the assets of IM Flash Technologies (IMFT) in Manassas, Va. …

Eli Harari,  one of flash memory’s founding fathers, was not reserved when speaking Monday at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The SandDisk co-founder predicts that flash memory will “checkmate” hard drives by 2020.  He goes on to state that DRAM, as we know it, may not be far behind. This is quite the counterpoint to the recent Microsoft Research …

Recent years have seen the consolidation of the memory market to three Tier 1 players, Hynix, Micron and Samsung. This consolidation was the result of enormous CAPEX requirements, coupled with a highly volatile commodity, DRAM. Today’s NAND Flash landscape is broad, compared to DRAM, however possesses the very same traits. Players today include Hynix, Intel, Micron, SanDisk, Samsung and Toshiba. …

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), have announced that SSDs only have about a decade of life left before they become impractical from a functional standpoint. The researchers have stated that as flash memory shrinks, read and write latency, not to mention cumulative bit errors increase. Apparently, one of the team members wrote a paper which asserted that the …

Our release yesterday of our Intel 520 SSD Review (Round One) was probably one of the most anticipated events seen yet in the SSD arena and, if sales can be determined by the extreme numbers of readers who visited the site, Intel will do very well. In that review we made a promise, this being that we would follow up …

Well I guess the secrets out by now.  Intel has this morning officially released it’s new enthusiast level Intel 520 Series SSD and it is none other than ‘SandForce Driven’.  What’s that, you say!? Our report today is a complete analysis of the Intel 520 240GB 6Gbps SSD and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that this is only …

Kingston Technology, a strong NAND-flash memory maker, is reportedly planning to cut prices for all of its NAND-flash products; possibly by as much as 15%.  This would include USB drives, memory modules, and its SSD products according to a Digitimes story. Kingston indicates that the anticipated price adjustments are coordinated with chips suppliers’ moving to more advanced process technologies that …

Everspin Technolgies is reporting record growth for 2011, with MRAM product shipments increasing over 300% from the prior year. The MRAM pioneer continues to shape the market for magnetic memories; gaining further momentum with over 250 design wins in the past year. Everspins patented MRAM technology is based on a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) storage element that is deposited on …

Did you ever wonder where the term ‘flash’ in NAND flash memory originated? The answer it seems is directly tied into Toshiba, a company who’s name is synonymous with NAND flash memory as they have a very long history in flash memory, developing it since the 1980’s. As funny as it may seem, a Toshiba engineer is actually credited with …