Everyone is gaga over the idea of fast solid-state drives, but until we move to some new memory technology other than flash, SSDs are a dead end. I say this only because during a recent trip to Europe I took about six photos on a 16GB CompactFlash card andboom!it was dead. This makes the third CompactFlash drive that blew up on me over the past few years. I've had two early 1GB drives go out, and now this 16GB card. One is simply too many.

Then there is the technology I've harped on over the past five or six years: . When the idea for the HHD was hatched, it was intended to solve all sorts of problems. Half spinning platter and half flash memory, an HHD would increase throughput and make the hard disk more powerful than ever somehow. I actually sat through a day of presentations outlining how this device would revolutionize the mass-storage industry. It was all ready to go and, as one guy put it, make Vista so hot that people would flock to it. You see, . How soon they forget.

So Vista comes out, but the drives do not. Then I wait. And wait. I start asking around. All of a sudden these things are delayed. Nobody actually says why. Samsung may have announced one. The CEO of Seagate tells me that they will probably end up only in high-end servers. He can't say why.

Over time they simply fail to hit the market except as oddities here and there. This was complicated by some scheme of Intel's to use memory on the motherboard to accomplish the same speed boost. That plan seemed to crap out too.

Then a couple of years ago, we begin to see the solid-state drive. Various drives hit the market; some show up in netbooks and some in laptops. Their prices are about ten times the price of a mechanical hard drive, in terms of cost per gigabyte. But then rumors of a 30 percent failure rate begin to surface. These rumors are denied by the industry, but people maintain a persistent belief that SSDs fail at least twice as often as conventional hard disks. This seems to be the case.

Needless to say, there's some issue with the technology. And I'm certain that this failure rate has something to do with the non-start of the HHD. Flash memory appears to be a stopgap technology hanging around until a better nonvolatile memory technology appears. There are plenty of suitors, sure, but nothing commercial.

Flash memory suffers from all sorts of problems, the least of which is a finite read/write cycle that requires a special allocation architecture to keep the data bits moving from one part of the memory chip to another so that one area doesn't get "worn out."

And often when you buy a CompactFlash or SD card, you might find you get a data-recovery disk with your memory module. When one of these things blows up, it won't work ever again, but the data is still there on the drive, and you can coax it off with the right software. I never lost the photos I had stored on that toasted CompactFlash card, I just couldn't use it in the camera anymore (or anywhere else for that matter). It was fried.

There are a number of hot memory technologies lurking in labs around the world, and unless flash can prove itself more reliable, storage technology will turn toward something entirely differentif something new actually makes it out of research and into development. Until then, people, always take an extra memory card with you when you travel! You won't regret it. This happens to every shutterbug every so often. And as for the solid-state-drive revolution, well, good luck with that one.