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what are the merits and limitations of the different types of flash memory?

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f0dder:
I do know the SATA solid-state drives fail much more than their mechanical counter parts, and they fail without warning. That seems odd to me for a flash failure, but it would make sense in a DRAM design if the battery backup suddenly failed.-superticker (September 06, 2011, 11:44 PM)
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It's definitely not the flash cells that are worn out, those spurious drive deaths happen much too fast for that. For the OCZ drives, it seems to be the firmware that goes into a panic-state after some power-cycle. The Intel bug seems to be along the same lines. But it's really discouraging that these things happen, as solid state drives were supposed to fail gracefully. Oh, btw, only the "enterprisey" SSDs have battery backup.

FWIW, I doubt they "fail much more than their mechanical counterparts" though, the shop I bought my Vertex2 from told me they had around 1% fewer RMAs on SSDs than mechanical disks.

Come to think about it, it makes more sense to use DRAM over flash in a SATA drive design just because flash write speeds are so slow and their write times can be somewhat non-deterministic because of the MM firmware execution involved.-superticker (September 06, 2011, 11:44 PM)
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If flash memory really was that slow, a ram buffer (which all the drives do have) would only allow for high burst speeds - but the decent drives allow for high sustained speeds. My X25-E does something like 150MB/s sustained.

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