Flash Memory – The Little Champ !

What’s common between a Pen Drive, SD, Mini SD and Micro SD Cards? All of them hold large amount of data in a tiny space. The advent of flash memory has made it possible to shrink the size of memory chips and has found its place in cell phones, Cameras, PDA’s and other portable devices.

Flash is a non volatile memory meaning the data is retained even when there is no power supply. It’s a particular type of EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) that is erased and programmed in large blocks. EEPROMs are realized as arrays of floating gate transistors (MOSFETs to be more precise) and hence occupy lesser space. But there’s one characteristic of Flash that makes it unique and advatageous over the typical EEPROM – the electrical interface of a Flash differs from that of the  typical EEPROM. While Flash is read / erased in large blocks, EEPROMs are read/erased bytewise as it has dedicated circuits for each byte. And this characteristic of Flash makes it more affordable.

Solid State Drives (SSD), which use Flash memory, consume only one tenth of the power as that used by Magnetic hard drives. With no moving parts, they are more reliable, rugged and compact. Apple’s MacBook Air, the thinnest laptop in the world, is the first gadget to sacrifice hard disk and optical disk drives in favour of the Solid State Drives. A MacBook Air with 64 GB Solid State Drive costs around $3000 whereas the one with 80 GB Hard Disk Drive costs $1799. Apparently one would have to pay more for a Solid State Drive but it’s worth the benefits it offers. Unlike a Hard Disk even if your laptop is dropped often, the drive won’t crash.

Samsung has unveiled a Hybrid Drive which has a buffer of 128/256 MB cache consisting of Flash memory. By using this large buffer for data storage, the platters of the hard drive are at rest almost all of the time, instead of constantly spinning, as they are in the current hard drives. The data to be stored is temporarily written into the cache, and once the cache is full the data is written into the disk resulting in decreased power consumption and lesser write times.

In future, as prices continue to fall, the Solid State Drives are likely to replace conventional Magnetic Drives. The future of FLASH looks BRIGHT!

Power Off ! India Off ?

This is the story of one of the biggest IPO… Yes the Reliance Power which was hyped too much just before its debut on BSE. The Rs 11,700-crore IPO, the country’s biggest ever so far, had set a few records as far as bids, number of applications and opening day gains were concerned. The IPO was oversubscribed 70 times ! Thousands of retail investors from across the country and elsewhere subscribed to the Reliance Power IPO hoping to book quick profits. Over 2 lakh DeMAT accounts were opened in a single day, and even a layman who had no idea about the stock market was desperate to get his hands on this stock.

 But their dreams and hopes shattered soon after the listing happened on Monday 11th Feb 2008. While the issue price was Rs. 450, it opened at Rs. 530 but declined soon after closing at Rs.372 leaving lakhs of people in a state of disbelief.

I am not a regular investor in the stock market. There is always uncertainity in the market and that is what excites me the most. Things that are monotonous and predictable becmoe boring in the long run. But too much excitement sometimes results in shocks .

The biggest losers in the market are the people who expect big short term gains. The same thing happend in the case of Reliance Power IPO. People who took short term loans (paying interests as high as 20 %), people who withdrew cash from small cap, mid cap stocks to invest in the IPO were doomed.

 So lessons learnt ? Always expect gains in the long run. This will hold good with reliance power IPO as well. May be in a span of 3 to 4 years, the IPO returns could be very good.

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