NOR and NAND

[rewben2]

I've just been looking into NOR and NAND, and from what I know NOR is faster, tends to be smaller and is more expensive. NAND is used in SSD's.

Some questions about the topic which I couldn't figure out from searching online...

1. Do HDD's use NAND or is NAND only flash memory specific?
2. Why don't they make SSD's use NOR so its faster? Would it be too expensive?

And one question a bit off-topic to NOR and NAND, do ssd's have a cache (64/32mb) much like hard drives do?

 

[ss202sl]

do your own homework!

 

[rewben2]

do your own homework!

I couldn't find online answers , a lot of websites at school are blocked.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Since you can access Tom's hardware here is a link to a news article that you might find interesting:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nand-nor-flash-memory,18528.html

NOR is definitely more expensive than NAND. NAND is ideal for high capacity data storage such as solid state drives. NOR is used for low capacity data storage such as cell phones but even that is changing.

Solid state drives do employ a cache. For example, the new Samsung 840 Pro SATA 3 6Gb/s ssd employs a 512 MB LPDDR2-1066 cache.

Currently there are a few "hybrid drives" that combine both NAND based solid state storage and traditional hard disk drive storage. They are rare.

BTW - Back in 2006 when there were no consumer oriented ssd's, several other terms were used as names for ssd's. One of the terms was "nand hard drive". SSD's are not hard drives and eventually the term solid state drive was adopted.