Memory Startup Gets Vote of Confidence from IBM
A shift from disk drives to chips to store computer data has been going on for several years. SandForce, a Silicon Valley startup that has been aiding that evolution, has been put to the test by International Business Machines (IBM) and seems to have passed.
SandForce was founded to help address a limitation with the underlying chip technology, flash memory. Such chips, a mainstay of products like iPods and digital cameras, have big advantages over disk drives. Most obviously, there are no spinning disks or other moving parts to break down, a major cause of computer crashes. Data can also be retrieved much more quickly from flash memory than from disk drives.