ZDNet.com reports: "The high rate of failure is surprising, since millions of flash chips get wave-soldered on PCBs every day. Likely problem: the flash translation layer chip isn’t fully compatible with notoriously finicky disk drivers.
The lackluster performance problem is well known to regular Storage Bits readers - search on Solid State Disk if you aren’t. I’m still working on unraveling the issues in detail, but the basic problem is that flash was never intended for frequent small random writes."
It looks like the first generation Solid State Disks (SSD) are having some problems. They're also not delivering any real performance advantages over the traditional mechanical hard drives that we use today.
One thing that is not addressed in this article is that you can only write to a flash memory so many times before it fails. Currently, its generally about 100,000 write cycles per cell on the device. Although most devices don't write to the same cell over and over again, instead they spreads out the writes over many different cells.
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