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2008, The Year of Solid State Storage
An anonymous reader writes "At CES, SSD drives were a plenty on the show floor. "Some companies said we could see 250GB SSD units by the end of this year, while others predicted it could take up to a couple of years for them to become mainstream. None of the companies promised mainstream adoption, but they promised a bright future and we are inclined to believe them. High capacity drives are going to be expensive due to their very nature of early technology and gradual adoption rate."
I was talking to a gentleman from (big name hard drive company) about their plans for hybrid and/or solid state drives. Essentially he told me that solid state was still limited by price and sequential reading. So it may be advantageous to put some things on flash like OS files that require a lot of random seeks, but for sequential reading of things like media files, traditional hard drive tech won't die just yet . . .I apologize for being too lazy to back this stuff up with numbers, what can I say, I'm a true slahsdotter.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
That's hardly the situation at all. For massive magnetic data storage, tape is still very valid. You're just not going to find 500GB HDD's with such low failure rates in 10-packs for $1000 like you can get tapes at today. And tape can drop in price much more easily than HDD's will.
I'd give it a good 10-15 years before our massive tape storage units disappear from the datacenters.
Until that time is years, instead of weeks, I don't see myself preferring more expensive, or even equal cost SSD, over rotating media drives.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Well, flash storage certainly is better in the space environment. Conventional hard-disk technology requires a pressurized compartment (the heads stay separted from the disks with a thin film of air). And, of course, any technology with no moving parts is preferable-- mechanical parts have an annoying tendency to freeze up with vacuum thermal cycling.
Spirit and Opportunity are now four years into their 90-day mission on Mars, running on flash storage....
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In (approx) 1992 I went to SID (society for information display) in Florida, and a keynote speaker said, roughly: "I have been coming here for 30 years, and I expect to hear, just like I heard 30 years ago and most years since, that within 10 years flat panels will overtake CRTs and make them redundant. Why has this not happened? Because CRT has continued to get cheaper and better quality, thus removing the opportunity for flat panel, because the goals keep moving" He also pointed out that we would get there (and we have) but that we should never underestimate where old technologies can go. In 1983 I put together a business plan for an outsourced proposal I was working on, and we put in £17K (thats $28k) to cover a 70 megabyte hard drive. Now I see one inch drives in iPods carrying multi gigs. I believe that we will see phased take up, ie where it is needed most (e.g. like the way airlines put in flat panels instead of CRTs to reduce weight), before the HDD manufacturers will curl up and leave the scene. Jerry
One thing that has been tested successfully in various places is to RAID (RAID0) the SSD-disks. It makes them about as twice as fast, and it should be possible to RAID them in bigger arrays too. As there is so little risk of one disk breaking down, there is no excuse to not RAID-0 them.
These disks still have a problem with speed on random write though. It's nothing for read-write databases where NCQ (SATA2) disks are faster.