IBM Develops Memory 100x Faster Than Flash
The memory of the future?
IBM today announced that, for the first time, scientists at its research arm have demonstrated that a relatively new memory technology, known as phase-change memory (PCM), can reliably store multiple data bits per cell over extended periods of time.
The benefits of such a memory technology would allow computers and servers to boot instantaneously – much faster than what even the fastest SSD today can do. IBM believes that PCM can write and retrieve data 100 times faster than flash while also not losing data when the power is turned off.
Unlike flash, PCM is also very durable and can endure at least 10 million write cycles, compared to current enterprise-class flash at 30,000 cycles or consumer-class flash at 3,000 cycles. While 3,000 cycles will out live many consumer devices, 30,000 cycles are orders of magnitude too low to be suitable for enterprise applications.
"As organizations and consumers increasingly embrace cloud-computing models and services, whereby most of the data is stored and processed in the cloud, ever more powerful and efficient, yet affordable storage technologies are needed," states Dr. Haris Pozidis, Manager of Memory and Probe Technologies at IBM Research – Zurich. "By demonstrating a multi-bit phase-change memory technology which achieves for the first time reliability levels akin to those required for enterprise applications, we made a big step towards enabling practical memory devices based on multi-bit PCM."
It's big step, for sure, but don't expect flash-based storage to suddenly get replaced by PCM. That SSD RAID configuration that you've been lusting after for your ultimate rig will still be the fastest storage solution for a good while.

I think this advancement is more about how they implemented this technology into an extremely fast and reliable memory rather than the technology itself. Think of it like a hard drive, we've had the technology for years but now we can have gigabytes of space instead of megabytes.
Going to need a new terminator for the next date since it was suppose to have happen already
The people at IBM value the art of procrastination and spend a lot of time and money on procrastination.
The people at IBM are good at playing the long game, and seeing as they pump more into R&D than Intel makes in turnover I would defy you to do as good a job as they do.
Whilst other companies bang out a press release for a tiny incremental upgrade these guys are quietly building the future.
Latency.
Or just keep it the way it is but make it 2TB and allow the system to slowly cache the hard drive to it (many users rarely shutdown their systems so this can allow users to get the speed benefit of a storage like medium that can do over 200GB/s ?
Or take the standard ssd and move each memory chip to it's own channel, then make it larger and sell it for under $ 50
the manufacturing cost of a SSD is far less than that of a standard HDD.
IBM needs to stop being lazy and release a SSD with the new tech and allow users to max out their current bus and allow performance to be boosted when they get a new board with a faster bus.
The tech never reaches its max due to overhead caused by error checking and send receive acknowledgments.
No other memory is as fast as sram used on a processor die so you would actually cause a performance hit to the processor, SSD's may be cheaper to manufacture but they are still a niece product and they recoup the low volume production and R&D through their high prices.
Notice that innovations are now years in the making 10+years due to costs so new ideas like this take close to 20 years to hit the shelf.
dont get me wrong, but i have a thumb drive slow as hell, but make it 100 times faster, and hell, better than the best ssds non raid, and possibly in raid too.
now, i want to know about this ssd are cheaper than hdd to make. can someone show me a link on this? and if its true, can someone show me a way to take my rage out...