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."

Comments

Lets try the other way around, eh

[v1]

High capacity drives are going to be expensive due to their very nature of early technology and gradual adoption rate.

I think they have that backwards. Lets try High capacity drives are going to have a gradual adpotion rate due to their very nature of being expensive due to their being early technology

There, that's better.

I'd have one now ("be an early adpopter") if they weren't so bloddy expensive.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[4solarisinfo]

Price isn't the only factor here. Has anyone seen any real reliability or Environmental numbers on any of these drives yet? I know many government/military programs who would be glad to pay for it, if it could prove to increase availability in certain environments.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[bunratty]

The cost for a given capacity will depend on the capacity needed. The smaller the capacity, the more advantage flash will have over hard disks. For now, 250 GB of flash is much more expensive than a 250 GB hard disk. On the other hand, you can get 1 GB of flash for under $10. Are there any hard disks at all available for that price? Also given that flash is faster, smaller, and consumes less power than disks, flash will replace disks in devices that need smaller capacities first. That means the usage of drives will decrease gradually from now until the 2012-2014 time frame you mention.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[BitZtream]

Bulk trasfer speed does not have to be slow. Its not like your hard drive in your PC now reads from one head at a time. It uses multiple heads to achieve higher rates by reading/writing all the platters at one time. The same applies for your RAM. You don't read 32 bits from a single chip in a clock cycle, your stick of ram has several chips on it, they all get strobed at once to return a larger size. Then there is the whole dual channel thing, not only do you do it with each chip on the stick, you do it with 2 sticks on seperate channels so you can now read in twice as much as a single stick.

So with flash memory you don't put in one really big chip to get 250GB, you put in 250 1GB chips working in parallel. Instant 250x increase in throughput using a relatively minor increase in die real estate for the extra controlling circuits. The only reasons USB flash drives are slow now is because A) they are dirt cheap B) no one is using them in a way that REALLY needs to be fast C) its on USB anyway, not like we're talking about a high performance bus in the first place

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[cbreaker]

Well, the USB bus is capable of 480Mbit. USB overhead is quite high for high speed transfers but still, you could achieve 40MB/sec over this interface. It's not that slow.

Current consumer flash-based hard-drive replacements are still slow as shit. Yea, you could do it all crazy with 250 1GB sticks to achieve good performance, but those are already available and they cost HUGE DOLLARS.

I realize that eventually, Flash will catch up and could very likely replace hard drives. I think it sounds wonderful. But it's just not here yet, even with the new disks introducing this year.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[Geoffrey.landis]

No, no.
Hard drives are actually vented. There's no pressurized compartment. They run at the same atmosphere as the rest of the machine. My error; I apparently failed to be sufficiently explicit in what I wrote. When I wrote "in the space environment," what I actually meant to say was "in the space environment, which is a vacuum, a technical word which means that there is no atmosphere..."

Re:I dont see it

[Lars Clausen]

We have already been running tests showing Lucene to be several times as fast on large indexes and realistic queries using SSD than using normal drives. I'm going to have a smallish SSD in my new laptop combined with an external drive for my large data. Faster, more solid, and less battery usage. Doesn't matter if I get 32GB rather than 160GB on board. I agree fully with the OP, SSD will really break through in 2008. Dell already offers it as an option. It's all a matter of usage patterns right now, in the long term I am prety sure hard disks will die.

-Lars

Re:within 5 years, tape manufactuers will have tro

[jaweekes]

I actually see the solid state drives replacing tape (if the cost goes down). They would be smaller then tape, and the life-span would be as good. You could technically have a SSD loader, working like the current tape loaders, and the only thing needed would be a good connector that can take several thousand insertions (like the SD connector). SSD would be more reliable then tape because of the reduced mechanical parts.

SSD's would have all the advantages of tape (portable, easy to load, etc) without the mechanical problems that tape has. Wow, I need to patent this now!

Re:Really?

[mini me]

Find me a DVD-sized USB drive that can be distributed for the same price as a CD/DVD and I'll agree with you. This is an economics issue, not a technological one.