Buffalo Silicon Flash Drive – It’s the World’s Largest

One year ago, almost to the day, IOCell introduced the self proclaimed “World’s largest capacity flash drive” at the CeBIT 2006 show. Today, you can find 16GB flash drives from Transcend, US Modular and Pretec, so why is the Buffalo 16GB announcement of interest? Well, it uses Silicon HDD Technology.

Silicon hard drives are different then normal hard drives in that no magnetic discs are present, rather the data is stored in silicon memory. How the silicon (HDD) hard drive works is by heating up the silicon via a microscopic probe, this probe maneuvers around the silicon area by an actuator and instantly heats the silicon to 600 degrees Celsius. So if an area is heated that is a zero, if the area is cool and crystallized it’s a one; thus binary code.

Sounds complicated but put into perspective a CD uses 500 nanometers of red laser to read and write, and thus holds about 800MBs of data. Compare that to a microscopic probe at about 20 nanometers (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter) and you can store a Terabit of data in about one-square-inch.

Now, we begin to understand the importance of Buffalo’s announcement. This is the first drive using Silicon technology to achieve 16GBs. If you think this is crazy technology then you might be interested in the 50 Terabyte flash drive made of protein.

Source: MobileMag