That could raise some interesting engineering/maintenance considerations.
A local capacitor might provide the latent power to support sleep state. Or you could provision flash with enough ECC and reserve capacity (a 16 GB microSD drive fits on my pinkie nail) to survive years. Might even make swapping the storage a regular maintenance item, say 5-year cycle. Figure a high-end duty-cycle of 10 starts/day, 365 days/year -- that's 3650 read/write cycles a year. Even if that's a 100x low estimate, we're talking 365,000 cycles/year (that's assuming 1000 starts/day). As of 2003, AMD were discussing 1,000,000 cycle lifetimes for flash storage: http://www.spansion.com/Support/Application%20Notes/AMD%20DL...
Actually, in five years, controller technology would likely advance enough that, provided your unit production count is high enough, you'd just swap the entire controller for a new component with enhanced capabilities.
A local capacitor might provide the latent power to support sleep state. Or you could provision flash with enough ECC and reserve capacity (a 16 GB microSD drive fits on my pinkie nail) to survive years. Might even make swapping the storage a regular maintenance item, say 5-year cycle. Figure a high-end duty-cycle of 10 starts/day, 365 days/year -- that's 3650 read/write cycles a year. Even if that's a 100x low estimate, we're talking 365,000 cycles/year (that's assuming 1000 starts/day). As of 2003, AMD were discussing 1,000,000 cycle lifetimes for flash storage: http://www.spansion.com/Support/Application%20Notes/AMD%20DL...
Actually, in five years, controller technology would likely advance enough that, provided your unit production count is high enough, you'd just swap the entire controller for a new component with enhanced capabilities.