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A Flash in the pod

18 months ago this post made some predictions on flash memory both increasing in size and decreasing in price.

It's time to revisit the concept of the ultimate devise of magnetic drives.

In Business Week's break down of the iTouch that lays out the differences between it's stable mate the iPhone and what is unique to the iTouch the use of Flash memory is raised.

The observation is that the iTouch is the future vision of the classic iPod and along with losing the click wheel in favour of touch screen functions the magnetic drive will replaced by ever bigger (and cheaper) flash memory storage.

The original evolution that was predicted saw the use of multiple flash memory cards to create one large logical drive. In the time that has passed large steps have been taken in Solid State Drives that seems they being used in laptops today.

While the capacity of SD cards hasn't changed much since the original post capacity has increased in flash memory technology with USB pen drives now possible up to 16Gb. If capacity hasn't increased significantly size has certainly decreased. Intel has showed it's latest SSD developments. 400 times smaller than a traditional 1.8 inch HDD and 75 times lighter the 2Gb and 4Gb devices are designed for mobile systems. They are currently extendable up to 16Gb.

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