Samsung Wins

The age of the hard drive has ended, to be replaced with flash memory devices provided by Samsung and others. When Apple announced its latest must-have gadget, the In the article, Samsung's semiconductor CEO, Dr. Chang Gyu Hwang, praised the 50nm technology behind the chip. Groupings of a number of these chips in a laptop could be the beginning of their use beyond smaller mobile devices. But flash memory has a couple of factors against it at the moment. It costs a lot compared to hard drives, and flash memory has a finite number of times where data can be written and re-written to it. The technology will continue to advance, and Samsung predicts 128GB memory cards, containing a number of smaller Gb flash chips, will be available in a couple of years. That would make them a viable option in terms of storage size for laptop or desktop use. David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him