NAND hard drives are fast, high-capacity solid-state flash memory drives with advantages over other types of flash memory and traditional hard drives. They are cheaper, smaller, erase faster, have a longer lifetime and consume less power. However, they are still expensive and traditional hard drives are currently cheaper. NAND hard drives are expected to become the drive of choice in laptops by 2009.
NAND (Not And) hard drives are very fast, high-capacity solid-state flash memory drives. Expected to become the drive of choice in laptops, NAND hard drives have many significant advantages over other types of flash memory. NAND?? refers to the architecture of the chip, differentiating it from NOR (Not Or) flash memory. NOR flash memory is commonly used in cell phones, PDAs, and other devices where small programs are run in place rather than written to RAM. NOR flash memory is a good choice for applications that are low on memory and do most of their work on immutable code, such as boot directions or operating systems.
For data modification, however, NAND hard drives are superior to NOR flash memory. NAND is cheaper and the chips are smaller, allowing more memory to be packed into the same size space. These hard drives also erase faster than NOR flash memory. This allows NAND to write faster, because flash memory has to erase blocks of memory before writing to them. Additionally, NAND offers a longer lifetime of multiple erase cycles. These factors combine to make this type of flash memory a logical choice for high-capacity storage and handling changing data.
NAND hard drives also have significant advantages over traditional hard drives. Solid-state means the drives have no moving parts that can break. They’re also much faster than traditional drives, and like USB flash drives, they’re completely silent. As if these favorable attributes weren’t enough, NAND drives consume very little power. This is especially important for laptop users.
However, as of spring 2006, traditional hard drives are so cheap that it is difficult for new technologies to compete in the commercial market. Costs for a large NAND drive are still prohibitive. Industry experts predict affordable solid-state laptops with NAND hard drives by 2009. Exact timing depends on manufacturing costs, which continue to decline. Plus, with all the benefits these drives have, consumers will likely be willing to dig into their wallets.
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