As awkward as the name sounds, it reflects the reality that for the last four decades the valley has been as dependent on magnetic disk drives made of iron ferrite and subsequent materials as it has been on computer chips made of silicon.
Seagate Technology seg, the maker of magnetic disk drives, beat earnings by 5 cents.
IBM announced this week that it is using a new way of making magnetic disk drives that will vastly increase the amount of data they can hold.
The major advantages of flash memory such as small physical size, no mechanical components, low power consumption, and high performance have made it likely to replace the magnetic disk drives in more and more systems.
Its major advantages such as small physical size, no mechanical components, low power consumption, and high performance have made it likely to replace the magnetic disk drives in more and more systems.
However, flash memory has four specific features which are different to the magnetic disk drives, and pose challenges to develop practical techniques: (1) Flash memory is erased in blocks, but written in pages.
The other reason the shift is happening now is that these solid-state drives (so called because, unlike magnetic-disk drives, they have no moving parts) are being designed to fit in the same space in laptops currently used by the industry-standard 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch disks used in hard drives.
The Millipede will eventually store up to an incredible 1 terabit of data per square inch, in comparison to the 35 gigabits of today's magnetic-disk drives.
Time-sharing must guard against interference between users' programs, and most systems use virtual memory, in which the memory, or "address space," used by a program may reside in secondary memory (such as on a magnetic hard disk drive) when not in immediate use, to be swapped back to occupy the faster main computer memory on demand.
