Increasing the Life of USB Drives

Stephen Lawson reports on efforts by SanDisk to increase the reliability and lifespan of flash memory used in USB drives and security devices such as cameras and sound monitors. The new drives are rated to work at temperatures as low as -40 C, compared with consumer devices that stop working below -25 C. The new drives will be able to accept as many as 128TB of information writes, far more than consumer grade drives.

The new capacity comes at the cost of slower writes and a current limit on total drive memory capacity of 64GB.

-DD