NAND flash gets baked, lives longer. An article has been published in the December 2012 edition of IEEE Spectrum that highlights an interesting and potentially useful discovery by ROM manufacturer Macronix. Researchers there have discovered that applying heat to NAND flash cells can drastically extend their life, thus overcoming one of the biggest problems with the solid state storage technology. NAND flash is used everywhere, from smartphones to SSDs to thumb drives, and we've written extensively before on how it works. The technology's biggest failing is that NAND flash only lives so long.
Every time the flash cells are erased, they retain some residual charge; eventually, they get to where it takes so long to make them change their charge level that they stop being useful as a storage medium. As NAND flash grows denser, it gets more delicate; in our discussion on the future of flash, we discuss the decreasing lifetimes of NAND flash and the potential alternatives. Sony Crams 3,700 Blu-Rays' Worth of Storage in a Single Cassette Tape. Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram. A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.
The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0). To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses. Bangalorean shows the way to store more on less - TOI Mobile | The Times of India Mobile Site. CES 2013: Kingston’s HyperX Predator Flash Drives Go to 1TB – Yes, 1TB.
Given the sheer number of products that get unveiled at each CES, it’s of no surprise that some will shine a bit brighter than others, causing people to do a double-take or drop their jaws. This year, the first product to manage both of those for me is Kingston’s DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0, a flash drive that boasts not only a seriously long name, but huge storage. How does 1TB sound? Let’s put this into perspective. About a year ago, I took a look at Kingston’s first-ever HyperX flash drive, weighing in at 64GB. At the time, that was in all regards impressive – though not quite as impressive as the 256GB offering the company also had. It’s not uncommon for technology to move at such a pace where densities can double each year, but I am not sure anyone expected Kingston to be announcing a drive today that quadruples last year’s top-end model.
Despite its massive storage, Kingston was able to retain a modest size with Predator.