Nowadays hard drives are all about how much data you can shove on to them and how fast you can do so. And this soon-to-be announced Phase-Change memory is expected to up the ante quite a bit.
Students from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering are getting ready to show off their new type of SSD that they have nicknamed, “Moneta”. But Moneta isn’t just a regular SSD. Instead it’s a Phase-Change memory (PCM), this new type of memory uses a metal alloy called Chalcogenide and, according to its makers can perform up to 7x faster than any flash-memory based SSD that is currently on the market.
To store data the PCM uses a heat application through an electrical current to switch the alloy between two states – crystalline and amorphous. Reading data entails using a smaller current to determine what state the alloy is in. This new drive reads at 327MB/s and writes at 91MB/s, but we’ll probably have to wait till after its unveiled to see how it fairs up with user testing. I wouldn’t expect this any time soon as it’s likely that this sort of thing wont be available to consumers for some time.
via: UCSD
