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Disk Drives Face Challenge From Chips
WSJdpatton writes "Researchers are reporting significant progress in perfecting a different way to store data in semiconductors, which could replace one widely used type of memory chip and possibly become a credible competitor to disk drives. The researchers, in a paper being delivered at a technical conference in San Francisco, say they used a novel combination of materials to create prototype phase-change components that are more than 500 times as fast as flash chips, while requiring less than half of the electrical power to record data."
What is the storage density, and will it still be feasible when this finally comes to market in 10 years?
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
Today the bottleneck of the whole system lies in the hard drive. This is the only mechanical part (fans excluded) of a computer. It's about time to find a solution for large storage that doesn't depends on an arm swinging and moving back and forward through a fragmented file system....
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Hard Disk Drives now are about $0.50 a Gigabyte. Flash is now about $25.00 a Gigabyte. 3 1/2" Floppy disks about $250.00 per Gigabyte. So it is natural for the Flash Memory cards to replace the floppies as they did. Better speed and better cost/Gigabyte. But right now Hard Drive technology is really cheap. If this new design can match prices/gigabyte of a hard drive then the Disk Drives will need a real challenge. Otherwise This new technology may only be a threat to Flash, or used with drives in hybrid mode for faster disk access. But not until then.
Price is a major driving force in memory.
CPU Registers are the fastest but most expensive (very small amount is used)
Cache is the next fastest and the second most expensive. (4 Megs or so)
Then comes normal RAM Memory Still slower then Cache and cheaper normally systems now have about a Gig or 2 of that.
If price wasn't a case Computers wouldn't have much RAM but all Cache, or huge amount of registers. But in real life price is the final decision.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't think the hard drive will disappear completely, but as the costs come down, the companies cannot make money producing the smaller capacity drives. We will see 1Tb hard drives readily available someday, sure thing. But different people have different needs. Hard drives are beginning to augment backup strategies because they have become so cheap and high in capacity.
A solid state drive has a higher G-shock tolerance, is quieter and requires less power than a hard drive. These features are why the technology is attractive to the people who need it. And not everyone needs a hard drive that is 400gb in size. Network appliances may only need a small 1gb boot drive, and these kind of devices will need this new phase-change memory, or whatever will work for the task beyond flash.
It would be cool to have something like this that is your main memory AND your storage space in one. We could call it Run-In-Place. We could then have a instant-on computers. Just imagine Windows XP or Linux booting up in under 3 seconds!
Bearded Dragon
So run out, children, and buy your SD 2.0 standard devices while they're not yet obsolete. That way you can buy your camera again and again for no good reason.
Help stamp out iliturcy.