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Flash driving ahead!

Flash—it’s everywhere nowadays from solid state drives in cutting-edge notebooks to the slimmest MP3 players and USB keys. Renuka Vembu reflects on the past, reviews the present and analyzes the future of flash drives.

It is a perfect example of technology leaping ahead in terms of R&D and innovation. It is also a case of products becoming obsolete with every passing day, and new ones emerging. Yet, it is also a witness to the fact that in the booming market flooded with abundant products, there is still room for every player, in this case, every device, to stay and play its destined role. Compact but costlier, long-lasting and durable, power saver and high performer but with security constraints and loss of speed with passage of time—while flash drives are the comparatively new entrants, the good old hard disk drives still have their own niche. As flash drives have been increasingly adopted in notebooks, writable or rewritable CDs continue to dominate the desktop segment.

In flash drives, information can be written, erased and rewritten about one million times, though this may affect the speed in the long run. These plug and play flash drives also consume approximately five times less energy than traditional hard disk drives.

Devita Saraf, Executive Director, Zenith Computers, said, “The traditional means of transferring only data and that too from one PC to the other, has typically changed now. A flash drive enables quick transfer of massive volumes of information, is compact to carry, and has no maintenance obligations. Though these are at a risk of getting lost as they are minute tools, they come in handy if handled with care. Also, a comparison of flash drives to hard disk drives cannot be drawn as they are distinct technologies and both will continue to exist in their respective areas.”

Flash vs. hard disk

On the issue of implementing flash drives as a replacement for hard disks, Sandeep Topli, National Sales Manager, Imation, India explained, "NAND flash devices are solid-state memories with no moving parts, relying instead on storing small amounts of electrical charge in semiconductor transistor structures. Hard drives, on the other hand, rely on a mechanical system consisting of a spinning platter that retains information in magnetic storage elements. Hard drives are ideal for such applications as personal computers and video recorders, which need lots of storage at a low cost. NAND-based drives are unlikely to gain significant design traction in these applications anytime soon, although NAND companies have announced 32 GB NAND-based drives."

Topli pointed out that these large NAND drives are fairly expensive relative to hard-drive solutions and will therefore likely be used in niche or high-end applications. That said, in some applications, the technologies complement one another. Laptops could use a combined NAND/hard-drive storage element, with the NAND flash acting as a type of cache that allows the hard drive to power down more frequently to save power and increase reliability. The NAND element could also store the standby operating system so the device could come out of standby mode faster.

The functional efficiency of flash drives are generally said to be about 100 times faster than the speed of the hard disk drives. Usually, the 2.5 inch flash drive is used in laptops while the standard size suitable for PCs is 3.5 inch. Also, due to the absence of any moving parts, the wear and tear is less in this case when compared to hard disk drives. Even the minimal corrosion issue has been countered as there are devices which assist in tracking data and relocating them from high-usage areas to areas that have been sparsely utilized.

Flash: pros and cons

Nitin Malhotra, Country Manager, Kingston Technology, India said, “The reliability of flash drives should be measured more in terms of its robustness for mobile applications and its ability to withstand repeated shocks.” The advantages of using flash to transport information:

Portability: Unlike hard drives, with flash drives data can be moved, backed up or even shared more easily amongst different users. People can travel to a remote office without a laptop.

Convenience: Users of a shared computer can store their own files on a USB flash drive.

Support technicians can use a flash drive to carry several gigabytes of diagnostic tools, recovery tools, drivers, or critical system updates programs. They can also copy files to personal computers and servers that do not have floppy disks or CD drives.

No device comes without its share of criticism and limitation. Malhotra admitted that there are drawbacks with flash as well, “It is not easy for enterprises to manage the use of flash drives. Nowadays, data security has become a major concern in the corporate sector. A corporation’s biggest worry about data leakage is not that some employees will copy the data to the drive and sell it to a competitor. The bigger risk is the size of the device. Because these devices are so small and portable, they are easy targets for thieves, and also easier for users to lose or misplace.” Consequently, an employee can carry confidential information only with a flash drive. At the same time, it is easy for anyone to get access to information stored in a flash drive.

To deal with this risk, companies, apart from password protection, also offer encryption. They also offer USB flash drives with a write-protect mechanism. A better solution is to purchase devices that include built-in security features. “Several USB flash drive manufacturers offer drives with these features, and the additional cost is minimal when you compare it to the extra layer of security provided by these features. Some flash drives feature Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) symmetric encryption. This is one of the newest government and corporate grade encryption standards, and its complexity is more than sufficient to protect your data,” concluded Malhotra.  

renuka.vembu@expressindia.com