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Seagate to Offer Solid State Drives in 2008
Lucas123 writes "Seagate will introduce drives based on flash memory in various storage capacities across its range of products including desktop and notebook PCs, according to Sumner Lemon at IDG News Service. The drives are expected to consume less power (longer battery life), offer faster data transfer rates and be more rugged than spinning disk, which has moving parts that can be damaged from an impact."
Do the math. When rewrites were a problem, how big were the chips? How big are the chips now? How many more writes are possible now? The amount of data that becomes a problem is astronomical at this point...the 'rewrite problem' will kick in long after a spinning disk has found a reason to die.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Nobody mentioned the noise! SSD's are silent.
I can't wait for ssd's. Every hard drive I've owned has been noisy and they drive me nuts.
As for durability... hrmm... maybe in its current state, flash doesn't last that long. But, the potential has got to be better than a constantly-spinning platter of disks. I've never had a RAM stick, or flash card die on me, but I've lost many hard drives.
Also, I think there may be greater potential for memory density. Spinning platters inevitably have wasted space, forming a cylinder in a rectangular prism.
I'd be interested to see the effect of SSD's on prices of normal hard drives. Normal HDD prices have been plummetting rapidly over the last couple of years - I wonder if the lure of flash will push them down further.
I think with capacity being so important, price/MB will be a big determining factor in getting flash into enterprise storage. I think the desktop, and (obviously) laptop markets will lap it up first.