Monday, December 1, 2008

Fast Persistent Data Storage Idea

There are several types of data storage technologies out there. The hard drive is cheap but slow seek speeds kills it when random access occurs, and a physical impact can literally kill it. Flash memory is faster then a hard drive and can withstand physical impacts but it has a limited lifetime do to the number of writes it can take. Random access memory like ddr3 is even faster then the flash memory and does not have lifetime issues, but is volatile meaning it looses its data when it loses power.

A while ago I thought of an idea on how to have the speed of ram but have it persist like flash. Its rather simple really, just combine on a single chip or board a equal amount of ram and flash and a capacitor to power the ram long enough to write the rams contents to the flash.

So this is how it would work:

When powering up the device (ram, flash, capacitor, and controller) would copy the contents of the flash over to the ram and charge the capacitors.

Until the capacitors are fully charged access to the drive would be denied.

When the device is accessed all reading and writing is done to the ram.

When the device looses power it copies the Rams data over to the flash. (Could add logic to only copy what has changed.)

This increases costs quite a bit but it gets rid of all the weaknesses of known storage technologies. It will be shock resistant, fast, long lasting, and its data persistent.

1 comment:

DanStory said...

I ran across this just a little bit ago, and reminded me of this post. It's close to your idea.