Geek Alert! Geek Alert! This is the only warning you will receive. This week we’re going to tip-toe on the curb, tightrope above the abyss, and teeter on the brink of serious “geek talk”. Actually, we’re not going to get deep enough into it to satisfy the truly geeky, but we’ll probably get geekier than some of you would like. So, everyone will probably be equally disappointed. And that’s my goal (just kidding, of course).

Computer memory is what we’re talking about. There are three basic kinds in any computer (or similar device like a phone or iPod). There’s Read-Only-Memory (ROM) that tells the computer about itself every time it starts up. Data stored in ROM is “nonvolatile”, meaning that the data is not lost when power is removed. A good example of ROM at work is, yes, the plastic trophy bass that sits on your wall (well, maybe not your wall, but you saw one at Big Al’s) and sings “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. A single ROM chip, cheap to manufacture and about the size of your fingernail, contains the song clips and the instructions to synchronize the motors to the music. Ain’t technology grand?

Then there’s the Hard Drive, which stores the majority of the information on the computer. It’s quite a precision machine, consisting of spinning platters that hold data and tiny arms that swing across the platters, plucking bits of data and feeding it to the system’s processor, then replacing the data after it’s been worked on. However, despite technological advances, hard drives contain many fallible moving parts, use lots of electricity, and are still fragile.

Which brings us to Random-Access-Memory, or RAM. RAM is where data from the hard drive goes before/during/after it’s worked on by the processor. The more RAM you have, the more data your computer can make ready for processing, the faster your computer works. Pretty simple. This kind of RAM is volatile – it needs an electrical signal present to retain its data.

There’s another kind of memory out there, however, which is poised to fundamentally change the face of computing. It’s actually all around you already. In digital cameras, cell phones, “Jump Drives”, and personal digital music players like the iPod.

It’s a marvel of computer evolution. It’s RAM that needs no electrical signal to retain its data. It has no moving parts like a hard drive, so it’s not as fragile, and doesn’t require near as much electrical power to run it (can you say “battery life?”)

Again, you see it around today, and I’ve written about it in this space, sometimes referring to it as “flash RAM”. Until recently, however, this RAM has been very expensive – much more on a price-per-megabyte ratio than a hard drive. Well, all that is changing.

A relatively new kind of flash memory, dubbed “NAND”, has burst onto the scene. NAND is short for “not and”, and has to do with (OK, a second Geek Alert) the mathematical expressions used within the chip architecture to store the zeros and ones that make up the individual bits of data. Whew, that wasn’t so bad.

Anyway, NAND flash memory can store a bunch of data for a relatively low cost. Samsung and Toshiba are at the forefront of NAND production. Apple purchased a “ton” of Toshiba’s NAND production this year for its iPod nano 2GB and 4GB models. Samsung this week announced it has developed a 16GB NAND chip (actually an array of eight 2GB chips), and that 32GB arrays were on the near horizon.

Remember, that’s gigabytes, not megabytes. Hard drives, me thinks your days are numbered.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski