There are three kinds of 'new' drives: flash, ram, and ramflash. The best is
ramflash. This is flash backed 1:1 by dram. The flash is written only when the
power goes down. This has huge life and high speed. But it is not affordable. So
what most people do is, use a flash disk and plenty of ram. A second, third etc
removable flash disk (can be usb) can serve as data storage. 

The real market for those new devices is embedded control on PC platoform. The
price reflects this. The larger (=64G) flash disks cost as much as full pentium
system. There are also SCSI interface flash and ramdisks which mostly serve to
keep legacy systems working.

The manufacturers give specs on write life etc. The only problem is price. A 64G
flash disk is really expensive now. A few years ago even 1G was a huge
investment. Unless there will be a breakthrough in technology it will be
impossible for flash to compete with hard disks in price/capacity.

Peter P.



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