Disadvantages of solid state media (was Re: Advantages...)

Jochen Kunz wrote: Further to my previous comments about this, a quick survey of recent NAND flash parts does not seem to support your statement at all. It appears that for "modern" parts, even the small-block devices now typically have an erase block size of 16KB or more. The "page size" can be as small as 512 bytes, but you can't erase those independently. Back in 2005 Micron published a technical note on small-block vs. large-block NAND that discusses some of the technical tradeoffs, though it focuses more on write performance than cost: http://www.micron.com/~/media/Documents/Products/Technical%20Note/NAND%20Fl… While the device densities have continued exponential growth in the seven years since that was published, as far as I can tell the engineering tradeoffs are still quite similar. There are NAND flash chips (or System-in-Package devices) that contain both the controller and the NAND flash; these have an external interface that uses 512-byte sectors, but they still have to deal with larger erase blocks internally, just like packaged flash cards and USB flash drives do. Eric