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Ultra Fast Disk Drives With No Moving Parts
saccade.com writes "Let's face it, the slowest part
of PC's today is the disk drive. Bit
Micro has come up with a nifty solution - flash memory based
disk drives available in typical
disk
form-factors. These e-disks are electrically compatible
with ATA, SCSI, etc. but run orders of magnitude faster - access
times down to 40 usec and transfer rates over 100 MB/sec. What's
the catch? Cost. Currently going for just under $1K/G, a 30G model
I recently held in my hand was worth much more than my car. However,
as flash memory prices drop, so do the price of these drives.
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way
of the floppy and CRT."
Because I'm pretty sure most of us were aware of high cost flash media disks.
I thought Flash memory suffered from a limited/short life time, that you could read/write to it only so many times, after which you can pretty much say bye-bye to your memory. How are these disks going to work then?
Simpy
SSD (Solid State Disk) has been around for over 30 years. Every so often it is billed as the "spinning-rust"-killer which has yet to be borne out. It's a great idea but so far rotating media has managed to improve enough to make SSD uneconomical.
yeah right - or write to be more exact: flash is not durable as far as number of write cycles are concerned, its not designed for continuous disk activity such as the one which happens with swaps.
It should still say that, since theres nothing new or interesting about a $30,000 bullshit drive that stores less data than hard drives sold with computers more than 5 years ago....
Are we done yet with the whole 'floppies are dead' stories? I regularly use floppies because it's easier to plop in a floppy, copy one file and pop out the floppy than it is to put in a USB drive, wait for your pc to recognize it (don't know about Macs), copy the file then have to correctly disconnect the USB drive
What about those machines which don't have USB drives or who aren't on a network? What then? Floppies will be around much longer than anyone thinks and for good reason.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The slowest part of PC's today is the disk drive.
No, the slowest part of PC's today is the user interface. The rate at which a user enters data (via keyboard/mouse) is a fraction of the rate at which a user thinks. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)
-kgj
-kgj
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way of the floppy and CRT.
You mean it'll still be the default option on most new PCs and in use by ~90% of PC users?
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way of the floppy and CRT
For how many decades now has this been predicted? Holographic memory, battery backed RAM, yada yada yada. Methinks rotating storage will be around for more than the rest of the decade.
Infuriate left and right
The reason hard disks etc are seperate devices is because they have mechanical parts that require motors etc to work. If this is going to be replaced by memory chips then why not just integrate the whole lot on the motherboard as just another plug in memory module? Why make it slower by passing it through SCSI or ATA not to mention the extra cost of including the interface electronics?
$1K/G,
Just SAY IT - a whooping 1,000 $ for 1 crappy GB! No thanks I'll stick with my s-ata, and if that gives me any more issues, I'll get rid of that too, and use IDE
They also have industrial uses. They get used in places where the gyroscopic effect of a normal drive would be undesirable, or the vibration caused is undesirable.
Personally, I don't think the price will come down that much. FLASH devices (the actual chips) are used in a ton of places. In the past there have been shortages of the devices, and IIRC the cell phone manufacurers are the largest buyers of them.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
This "disk drives will be obsolete" assumes that disk drive prices are flat. Drive prices are one of the few things that has (if anything) beaten Moore's Law. Eventually they'll probably flatten out - but not yet. The "death knell of rotating media" has been sounded more times than I can remember. Anyone remember the front-page stories that by late 80's bubble memory would have replaced hard disks? :-)
I thought the problem with flash was a limited number of write cycles (10,000-100,000?). With this thing rated at up to 25,000 IOPS, is would seem that they might not last all that long (4 seconds?). I don't see any indication of some breakthrough in flash memory itself.
Also, what's so different from this and just using a standard CF card? You can get 1GB of CF for under $150. It should be fairly simple to put together a "CF-raid" drive for way less than $1K/GB.
What about those machines which don't have USB drives or who aren't on a network? What then? Floppies will be around much longer than anyone thinks and for good reason.
What about those machines which don't have floppies?
Seriously, I haven't put a floppy into a machine in the last 6 years. They're totally unnecessary nowadays. They're about useless for transporting documents for the simple reason that the majority of useful documents exceed the size of the floppy nowadays.
And USB drives are much cooler than you seem to make them out to be. Plug the thing into the USB connector in the front, it mounts, you copy, you unplug the thing. Yes, you might have to wait a second or two for it to recognize and mount the thing, but that's better than waiting for at least 90 seconds to copy 1.4 meg to the slow-as-hell floppy.
Floppies once had limited usefulness as being the only easy way to bootstrap the system. Boot from the floppy, format the hard drive, install the OS. Now that every mobo can do CD booting, I no longer need boot floppies, as I can have boot CD's instead.
It took me a couple seconds to decipher it. If he'd used $1000/G or $1K/Gig it would've been more understandable.
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may be capable of holding terabytes, or even petabytes, on a single platter. And it will be orders of magnitude cheaper than solid state storage as we know it. I doubt that hard drives will go the way of the dodo anytime soon.
Just as a comparison, look at how many backup solutions still use tape media (and use it very effectively and cheaply, I might add).
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Sure, hard drives are slow, but that's not my main problem with them. They *are* a bottleneck, but since most applications get the hard disk access "out of the way" at the very beginning and load everything they need into RAM, I could deal with slow hard drive technology for the rest of the forseeable future, if only...
... they were reliable. Hard drives are the only PC components that have ever died on me. Actually, that's not quite true - I had a CD-rom die once, and a few fans here and there; what do all these have in common? Mechanical parts. And when it comes down to it, what do most users value most in their computers? The files on their hard drives. Spinning death traps is what they are. Spinning, clicking, grinding death traps.
I don't know much about flash memory technology or the reliability associated with it. I don't give a hoot how fast it is. If it's solid state (no moving parts) and can guarantee me it won't one day decide to utterly destroy itself, I'm sold.
With all the talk of write cycle lifetimes, no-one has commented on the actual write times. Seek for flash might be super quick, but write times are dire. Orders of magnitude slower than a hard drive, or a CDR. You might as well use a load leveling FS on an array of CDRW's and take the occasional erase performance hit. It'd be faster.......
Yup, lets jam that new fangled star shaped peg into our good old trusty square hole over here...
Why the hell would we stuff this onto the IDE interface? This would be a great opportunity to drop that interface entirely.
No Comment.
When the LCD was released, I'm sure the screens were "1000 $ for one crappy INCH!". No-one is suggesting that normal people on normal salaries go and replace all their hard disks with flash right this moment, but who are we to predict the situation in 5 or 10 years? It's quite possible by then that hard disks will have hit some kind of technology limit making them more expensive for the multi-terabyte capacity we'll have by then, and flash has reduced in price to the point where it's equally as cheap or cheaper. I'm sure you won't be "going back to IDE" then.
If you're going to use those annoying "GiB"/"MiB" units at least use them correctly, will you? If the harddisk was marketed as 200GB, it likely is 200GB according to your use of the units, not 200GiB.
Just buy your flash memory products mail order from a neighbouring EU country without this surcharge (they're not allowed to tax you on this sort of import from another EU country). And make your political representative realise that this tax will cost local businesses more and more money as the capacity increases -your figures give a tax of 51 DKR = 7 Euro for a fairly standard 1Gb card so I guess that should cover shipping - a bulk order for a few friends would make even more sense.
On newer CF cards they have an internal microprocessor that constantly remaps the logical addresses of the drive to different physical addresses [...] So even though the OS thinks it's writing the FAT to that same spot on the drive, the drive is really moving that spot around to maximize the life of the drive.
Wow. So forget trying to shred files on those. (Yes, mods, I realize it would still work at the filesystem level--that won't stop someone who cracks the case open and reads straight off the chips.)
And what about the memory where the logical-to-physical map is stored? Even if you rewrite the same sector to 10,000 different places, you'll have to rewrite the same map entry 10,000 times. Or is that part of the memory designed to withstand rewriting better?
72 or 80 columns. But you can only write to them so many times. Even the erasable ones tend to get too worn out by the rubber eraser.
Erasable punch cards?
Given the IQ level of many slashdotters, I can't tell whether this is supposed to be humor or not.
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