Courtesy of OSWeekly.com

Continued...

It’s been announced that Intel plans to incorporate NAND flash memory into its forthcoming Santa Rosa notebook platform, and the benefits of this approach for the operating system are obvious once you consider what this flash memory is capable of doing. The design of it contains no moving parts, and unlike some types of memory, it can hold data even without a power supply. The lack of moving parts gives it an advantage over a traditional hard drive in the sense that wear and tear will eventually cause a hard drive to break down after a period of time, as is the case with everything else mechanical.

In a demonstration from Intel, a PC loaded with just 256MB of NAND flash memory booted in about half the time of a PC that didn’t contain the flash memory. For such a small amount of memory, that’s pretty impressive. By utilizing this memory, a computer system can access stored information in a quicker way, and as a result, power is saved from not having to access the hard drive. Not only will this result in near instant boot times, but Intel is also projecting a 2x speed increase in load times for applications and a 2x time reduction in waking a machine up from a state of hibernation.

The concept of using NAND flash memory is nothing new to Apple because they’ve already been using it in the iPod Nano with fantastic results. The lack of a hard drive has allowed for longer battery life, a smaller size, and quicker operation. Although Intel used 256MB of flash memory for their demonstration, we know that much larger capacities are available, and we see this by just looking at the 8GB iPod Nano that was recently released by Apple. Flash memory volumes are constantly expanding, and it’s not ridiculous to envision a time when an entire operating system could run from flash memory. In fact, the eventual elimination of the traditional hard drive from many systems could be a possibility if things keep going the way they’re going.

Since Apple has already used and approved of flash memory in some of its hardware, it only makes sense they would want to integrate it to some extent into their Mac hardware. Emphasis keeps being placed on the benefits of using this memory in mobile computers, and while the battery life improvements alone justify this, I’d also like to hear about plans for incorporating this technology into desktop systems as well. After all, desktop OS users have the need for even more speed, too.