Heads are spinning in response to Samsung’s planned release of a 16 gigabyte flash drive – a string of eight 2GB flash memory cards. Flash memory is solid state data storage, as opposed to the conventional hard drive, which contains spinning mechanical parts. The implication is that the price of memory for computers will soon drop dramatically, as will the amount of energy used to power them. Moreover, you will be able to carry millions upon millions of pages on something the size of a keychain (people will probably start using smaller ones as business cards before too long). There’s definitely something reassuring about the solidity – to rely entirely on a single, rickety hard drive, or a network, to store documents is incredibly risky and unreliable. Plus, these cards are far more tolerant of shocks, bad weather and all around abuse.
Chosun Ilbo describes the remarks of Hwang Chang-gyu, Samsung’s chief executive, who said:
…the development signaled the opening of the “digital paper age.” “In the same way that civilization rapidly progressed after paper was invented 2,000 years ago, flash memory will serve as the ‘digital paper’ to store all kind of information from documents to photos and videos in the future. Mobile storage devices like CDs and hard disks will gradually disappear over the next two or three years, and flash memory will dominate the information age.”
Boy, this article’s got its bytes and bits mixed up. For the record, it’s a 16-gigaBIT chip (about 2GB, the size of the smaller iPod Nano), which can be stitched together in memory cards up to 32 gigaBYTES. As in, half the biggest iPod.
Yes, it’s actually a string of smaller cards. Noted and fixed.
As someone who has washed his flash drive before, let me assure you that chances are good it will even come through the washing machine okay. Just be sure it is fully dry before plugging it in!
On the other hand, my cell phone did NOT come through the wash okay. Pity it didn’t have a nice flash card backup of all my contacts…