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No Cheap Replacement For Hard Disks Before 2020
siddesu writes with disappointing news to anyone who'd like to see solid-state storage dominate in the near-term future. "A new study of storage technology by the former CTO of Seagate predicts that hard disks will remain the cheapest storage technology in the next decade and probably beyond."
So these people can predict the future now?! Really, you never know what is going to happen for sure. Look at current HDD tech, IBM made the GMR breakthrough and BAM! Huge storage capacity in drives. What makes people think that there cannot be another such discovery with solid state or some other yet unknown tech?
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
...10 TB drives will be $10? More likely, 100TB drives will be $100 but you won't be able to get anything smaller. And they'll still crap out after a couple of years.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Once SSD storage gets large enough for a reasonable price (and it seems that this will happen soon), why should I care if I can get 10 times the capacity for the same price?
If you mean 'lowest cost per GB' then you're probably right. If you mean 'lowest cost per IOPS' then you're already wrong. And if we're talking 'lowest cost for something of adequate capacity and a low power consumption for a laptop' then you're also probably wrong too. When flash drives drop below about $1/GB (and it's already close) there will be little advantage in mechanical disks for most users. It doesn't matter if the disk is bigger if you're only using 10% of the capacity, and it's slower than the alternative and uses more power.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Although flash memories have also become popular - with advantages such as lower power consumption, faster read access time, and better mechanical reliability than HDDs
So HDDs will still be tops in terms of capacity, but SSDs win in everything else. They're getting to the price range now that they're a viable replacement for high-end systems that don't need massive storage. I doubt I'll even have a HDD in the next system I build, SSDs provide enough capacity.
The fact a major, respected, industry leader has predicted an upstart new technology will not surpass the incumbent technology is an indication it is almost certainly false.
..don't panic
Of course they will be cheapest, but only cheapest per/GB.
As time goes on, SSD's will be the default in desktops and laptops... mostly because these systems don't need very large drives... especially as we move more and more data to the "cloud".
Sure, per GB, magnetic storage will remain king when it comes to capacity, but they will only be used by those with extreme storage needs.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I for one, just like many others, prefer hard disks over solid-state because of their more predictable lifespan. Solid-state drives tend to slowly lose parts of their usable sections. Even though the good old hard disks tend to break easily, at least I can defragment them without slowly starting to damage the disk. Yep, there are 2 different kinds of solid-state drives which handle this problem differently, but I still don't think the technology is matured enough yet. Perhaps in a few years. As for the mini laptops and such, solid-state seems to be superior though. Many of the first mini laptops used solid-state, but now only very few have them. Why this direction of development?
today, a typical 500 GB hard drive costs about $100
This article must be several years old. In present day, a 1TB hard drive costs about $80.
October 23rd, 2009 By Lisa Zyga
Doh!
... 7200 RPM should be enough for anybody.
Yeah right.
Obviously this dude has his head stuck in the sand.
Cheaper alternatives to hard disks will almost certainly be at hand by 2020. Probably by 2018, and possibly as soon as 2014.
Lack of insight might be the reason why he is the _former_ CTO of Seagate.
I mean, both Intel and OCZ have said that once they get to tri and quad-state MLC flash technology, prices should drop considerably by 2012. I think Seagate just doesn't want to be relegated as a dying tech company.
Most of my non-server machines only use about 40-50gb of disk space, even though the hard drives have gradually grown from 20 to 40 to 120 to 500 to 1500GB over the last few years. Each time I build a system, I tend to throw in whatever drive costs about $100-125 when I order my parts. So based on my past usage model, I'd have no problem switching over to SSD if I can get say...128GB of storage for $100-125. On those occasions where I need a big chunk of permanent storage, I'll just get some sort of external hard disk that will undoubtedly continue to plummet in price.
The guy's absolutely right on this and there's nothing really to argue about.
Duh. New desktop PCs and full scale laptops should have 2 disks in them. An SSD, with the C: drive partition with the OS and Program Files folders. Nearly all software will install itself to the SSD by default that way. Also the swap partition should go here.
"My Documents\Downloads" and the default download directories should go to the mechanical hard disk. The slightly complex part is that users should know to store small files to the SSD and big ones to the hard disk, unless the big files are something that needs to be accessed quickly (like a large pdf document).
OS support would be the best way : a smart OS could 'cache' files to the SSD or automatically remove files from the SSD when it's getting full. The typical user isn't going to properly manage a divide like this.
I also predict the death of internet porn at the same time.
EULA : By reading the above message, you agree that I now own your soul.
Seriously why waste time and energy thinking about this? It can't be predicted. Imagine in 1947: "There is no forseable way to improve computing speed for 20 years."
Everyone knows that hard drives will continue to get bigger and bigger, and smaller drives will drop off the market and the "entry" price will remain around the same. But if you don't *NEED* such huge drives, then SSDD works just fine. My Netbook can attest to that. Sure- I can't store ALL my music and ALL my video and ALL my pictures, but I don't need to on that type of device. Linux seems to work just fine on SSDD, saves a bit of battery, seems a bit faster overall, and it is impervious to jarring and magnetism, and is smaller and lighter. And that is just 40GB (16 fast, 32 "normal"). I can't imagine that in the next few years that Flash won't continue to get faster, cheaper, and more dense- especially as more and more portable devices create an ever-increasing demand.
"Good luck with that."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_zapper
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
There has always been and will always be a 22% chance that 90% of the time, 45% of the people will only be correct 62% of the time when attempting to predict the future to 100% accuracy. Henceforth and seemingly only a partially untrue tautology.
Nobody with a clue has been arguing that SSD's would be cheaper per gigabyte than ye olde spinning-platter HDDs any time soon.
What we're seeing now, and will see much more of, is the hybrid approach of combining a small-ish (80GB) SSD for the most-accessed OS & Apps, with a monsterously huge and relatively slow (array of) HDDs for bulk data archival and backup.
With HDD I/O still the single biggest bottleneck today, it makes sense to start transitioning to SSDs, but it doesn't have to be all at once. The premium for SSDs -- ~$2.50/GB SSD vs ~$0.10/GB HDD -- isn't that much, but it will probably pay for most to wait another year not just for prices to fall more, but for all SSDs to finally support TRIM, and have efficient firmware that competes with indilinx and intel's. SATA3 will also be welcome as current SSDs have already hit the SATA2 xfer limit.
(Oh, and please don't eat the "ZOMG SSDs have limited write-cycles!" FUD. In the vast majority of normal usage patterns, you'll never ever get close to hitting it, and even you did, the failure mode still allows you to READ your data off if you had no backup, as opposed to a HDD crash.)
Power to the Peaceful
I think that now we hit the TB point getting HDD with more space will be less and less of a concern. How much data does the normal user have and need space for? They will need to start the migration to SSD for speed than storage space. The short term answer for balancing the cost will be a hybrid of the two drives using the HDD for space and the SSD for speed.
they don't record video.
Yet.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152102
Aren't tape drives still the least expensive per byte backup solution? (Or weren't they at least 10-15 years ago, well into the HDD era?) Just because something has the greatest cost per capacity doesn't mean it will still be the primary technology in use if something else is faster plus adequate in capacity for most purposes.
This just means that licensing costs are too high, and we have to wait till the patents run out.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I wonder why there won't be any cheap replacements for hard disk drives until 2020? Could it be the fact Slavegate, the one making the claim, has and is actively trying to hinder the progress of all solid state based storage? Personally, I thing Slavegate is doing this as a measure so they can continue to influence their sheep to buy Slavegate HDDs every year to replace a drive that had experienced a head crash.
"http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/15/1632232"
HDDs are still much better for data storage -- it's a mature technology which is quite reliable and won't be replaced any time soon.
However, SSDs are already replacing HDDs on netbooks, notebooks will follow: lower power consumption, less noise, immunity to bumps and shake make SSDs so attractive in that segment.
SSDs use on desktops is somewhat limited -- they are much better as a system disk because of fast IO times, but most users won't really care about that extra speedup.
Vendors might offer dual-disk configuration though where the OS is on SSD and user data -- on HDD. But that is rather something for power users, not for Joe the Plummers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_Coward
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashdiskcomparo.html
^ this guy disagree's, saying the transition will come as early as 2013-2014 (five years from march 2008) for 2.5" drives.
Holy shit! Anonymous Coward says current generation SSD's might not be able to be used for long-term backup! Clearly this means there is absolutely no use for Solid State Disks whatsoever!
The game is over gentleman. Time to shut down production and throw in the towel.
Thanks for saving our ass. Anybody reading this should know that Anonymous Coward is a smart cookie--he was also responsible for warning about the transition from perfectly sound MFM interface to the bloated, evil IDE interface. Whatever advice he gives regarding these untested, unsound Solid State Disks should be wisely heeded.
The hard drive has been a limiting factor in all kinds of things. Why were you taught to "always save your work"? Cause hard drives are slow and it was infeasable to have the application save data in real-time. With an SSD, most applications can probably save your work in real-time. Why does it take so long to boot? Cause the hard drive is slow. With an SSD you can probably afford to quickly dump all of your memory out to "disk" and shut the compute down in hibernate mode--none of this partial-sleep junk.
Why does it take so long to load a program? Slow disk. Why does my computer lag sometimes? Probably slow disk moving around heads on a spinning platter.
Why does it take so long to install things? Partially cause the OS has to set up a shadow copy so you can roll back. Why does my OS not have a shadow copy feature yet? Probably cause the designers thought it would be to slow to implement because of your slow-ass disk. Why does it take so long to search my filesystem or index it? Slow-ass disk.
You think that extra speedup won't be cared about? Seriously? The fact we've delt with such a slow means of long-term storage has held us back for a long time. Remove the silly constraints forced by stupid mechanical devices and suddenly we can do a lot of creative, useful things that were not possible before. Surely even you can see that, right?
Or am I forgetting this is slashdot home of the tech-Luddite and dog gon'nit a command-line and a green screen is good enough for me and should be good enough for anybody!
Oh really? You can buy netbooks with SSD storage for under $200 now; last-gen netbooks are available for around $100. They have SSD. That is damn cheap.
No, we're not talking about 2Tb of storage at that price point. But most people, many geeks included, do not need or use that much storage. Most people have, at most, a gig or two of storage they want to preserve - and that's on the high end. Personally, I've been saving data for close to 15 years now (including quite a few ripped DVDs and CDs, audio and data ISOs), and 150G is still enough for me to create a complete backup.
SSDs of 8 or 16Gb are quite common now, and more than enough storage for most people's needs - including OS and applications. You can get a 16G OCZ SSD for $50 or so. I -think- that's about a third to a fourth less than they cost as little as a year ago.
No, those SSDs aren't cheaper per gig than a HDD, but they are more than enough capacity for most folks. I know several geeks who have gone all-SSD in their desktops and laptops, and only keep rotational media around for backup.
In other news, the promised high-density hard drives - the ones which were supposed to surpass tape density and be cheaper per megabyte - still are not here yet. Surprise!
Hard disks will probably be the storage of choice for people with large data storage needs. However since bandwidth to the home is increasing at a SNAILS pace, most people won't have the need for so much storage and will buy the equivalently priced but faster, lower power, silent and reliable solid state stuff.
Had the situation been different and bandwidth to the home been going through the same improvement rate as HD storage, the result might have been different. But in 1997 I had a comcast connection at 5Mbit down / 2Mbit up speeds for roughly the same price as I now have a 10Mbit down / 5Mbit up. In 1997 I also bought something like a 3Gig hard drive for a comparable price to the 2TB hard drive I bought last week.
Hard disk storage has improved by 600+ fold. Pipes to fill the hard disk have improved by 2 fold.
And don't forget that if you actually USE your bandwidth, many ISPs will hassle you or cut you off.
Liberty.
Am I the only one who thought "Well Duh!" when they read this? Just because something is newer doesn't make it better, and it certainly doesn't make it cheaper either! In fact I'm still using paper tape for most of my data-storage needs. Granted, I need about 7-10 days prior notice before booting my copy of Windows XP from paper tape, but I only reboot about once a year anyway so it's not that big a deal.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Hard drives never beat magnetic tape in dollars per megabyte. I guess that's why we still all use tape drives.
The cake is a pie
Use DVD RW technology with more advanced lasers and more advanced media. I am sure that a fiber optic hard drive that uses rewritable media can be made cheaper than a solid state hard drive. Just use multiple platters like real hard drives and use lasers instead of magnetic read/write heads.
Right now I have USB kits for ATA IDE hard drives to be used as external hard drives for my backups and sometimes I use DVD-R or CD-R disks for backup. I am sure that a multi-platter fiber optic hard drive would at least make a great backup device.
I also use cheap SD cards and USB flash drives for backup of smaller documents. Mostly pictures that need to be developed in JPG format for photo developers.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I'm not that interested in Blu-Ray movies, but I've got 200G on my HD... as in a dozen DVD+R backup disks. I'm buying a Blu-Ray burner for disk archives ASAP and looking forward to TVDs.
Tech Public Policy stuff
You missed one very important point. Anyone so closely connected to Seagate as a former CTO of Seagate, is very likely to still have connections with that company and that part of the industry. Seagate and other hard drive companies don't want solid state to dominate, as their business is in conventional hard drives. Now we have solid state drives that means the chip manufacturers are now direct competitors with hard drive companies, which means a lot more competitors for hard drive companies.
So any press release has to be considered very suspect at best. Seagate and other hard drive companies would totally loose out if solid state dominates the market so they are never going to admit they are in trouble or that they are in danger of becoming obsolite. No company would admit that.
SSDs have a much longer lifespan, which means that they don't have to become cheaper than traditional drives, they just have to be cheap enough that when factoring in their lifespan, their extra cost is more than justified.
Also, because SSDs don't rely on moving parts, the fact that you can't lose one because your laptop took a bump on a subway or you tripped over your tower is another selling point - not only in terms of lower the odds of needing to replace the drive early (and therefore the cost you're paying per drive), but because if what you're storing on the drive is far more valuable than the device itself, you are very much willing to pay extra to lower the chances of a dead drive. Even if you make daily backups, losing say... a day's worth of freelance work is going to cost you a lot more than the cost of the drive.
With that in mind, I'd say even at double to triple the cost, they're worth it. Right now it's more like 10x, but but getting it down to 3x won't take more than a few years, even if getting it equal IS more of a 2020 thing - although I seriously question that number too. 6 years ago I bought a 1gb flash drive for something like $150. 1 year ago I bought a 16gb one for 30 bucks. If 5 years was enough to drop the cost per gigabyte 80-fold, and it's at a 10x multiplier now, I don't think it's going to be long at all before it gets equal, or damn close... and again, damn close is more than good enough with their much longer lifespan.
Flash won't continue to get faster, cheaper, and more dense- especially as more and more portable devices create an ever-increasing demand.
Indeed, slow Flash is what's holding back Linux on the desktop.
Sounds like somebody neglected to read The Innovator's Dilemma. Flash drives do not need to become cheaper than hard drives, they simply need to represent enough value for a demographic who are willing to pay a premium for them. This is already happening. There are many systems that do not need more storage space, but do require "lower power consumption, faster read access time, and better mechanical reliability". Builders of these kinds of systems will adopt the newer technology, won't care about the storage advantage of hard drives (it has no value for them), and will willingly pay the price premium for the desired features. Anyone care to estimate the cost of a service call on a failed drive? When you factor in the labour (not just the cost to send somebody, but also the cost of having them not available to do something else), the cost of an upset customer (taking up time calling in to complain, having endless meetings about what went wrong, etc), the damage to your reputation (a tough thing to measure, but potentially very expensive), and so forth, the actual price of the drive itself is not a significant part of the equation. Solid state devices have always tended to have a reliability advantage over anything with moving parts, and people will pay a premium for reliability, especially where said reliability will reduce costs overall. Hard drives also consume a lot of power, and in many cases aren't actually doing anything but sitting there spinning, since everything is happening in RAM. There are many PCs and servers out there that barely use their hard drive. It loads the relevant app into RAM, and it's job is done. Still, there it sits, spinning away, generating heat (that needs to be cooled), and eating power to no purpose. As the cost of electricity continues to climb, the long term costs of this may in fact prove the flash drive to be cheaper overall, despite the initial price difference. Ignoring flash altogether, there are a whole host of new storage technologies being explored that will produce neither flash drives nor hard drives. While prognostication is always dangerous, it seems not too much of a stretch to imagine that some of these will become reality in the next decade, rendering both hard drives and flash drives obsolete. Reading that article, I am left with the impression that those researchers give a strong impression of having their heads in the silicon . . . er . . . sand.
the 'Monkeys fly out of one's ass' association predicts that Monkeys flying out of one's ass will be the leading cause of Monkeys flying out of one's ass for the foreseeable future.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Yeah, it won't happen. Neither will non-Windows computers. Or 6 hour batteries. That's science fiction. --written from a 2.2 lb netbook running Ubuntu 9.10 on a 20gb SSD. --who pays people to write that crap?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It isn't, though, unless you really expect to use all of that 1 TB capacity. The average computer user uses maybe 1-200 gigs.
The pocket camcorder that sells for less than $200 generates 8 GB of 720p video in less than two hours.
Is it really that difficult to fill a 1 TB hard drive?
Solid state does not keep up with Moore's Law. Magnetics are still passing it by. That won't stop SSD's penetrating markets from the bottom. Seagate really has to assume that they will stall out well before 2020 for SSD to catch up. Personally I would be surprised to see magnetics stall out before solid state.
I wouldn't exactly call PCRAM a breakthrough -- people have been working on it since the 1960s. There are a host of new non-volatile memory technologies that claim to be read for prime time Real Soon Now. Just look at the list of upcoming non-volatile memory technologies in the right column at the wikipedia article. You can't go out and buy most of them yet, but any of them could be winners (besides PCRAM, MRAM is available from Everspin/freescale -- you can buy some on DigiKey if you want).
I wouldn't hold my breath for any of these to replace hard drives, they've been a long time in coming and they're still not really here yet. Hopefully by 2020.
I don't know where they're getting their numbers, but based on data I've been collecting for the past 5 years, theirs are way off. A 14 TB drive for $40 in 2020? My data says by 2020, $40 will buy you 342 TB.
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
The total cost of ownership of a storage device includes the purchase price, the cost of restoring/reinstalling after catastrophic drive failures, and the ongoing cost of electricity.
For a home user, the reinstall cost from a single catastrophic failure is going to outweight both the purchase price and the electricity cost. SSDs have a significantly lower catastrophic failure rate, so they cost less.
For a server, the electricity cost is going to outweigh the purchase price and the reinstall cost. SSDs use less electricity, so they cost less.
http://xkcd.com/756//
Yes of course, if we are speaking of cheapest. That doesn't mean there won't be faster and better available...I mean, right now portable storage is less that USD0.10/Gig - and dropping daily it seems. Anyway, not so simple a proposition as nothing new until 2020.
Are they taking into account speed increases? Maybe customers won't want a 20TB HD that runs 10% faster than today's HD. Maybe they'll want a 1TB solid state drive that runs 500% faster. I'll certainly trade 500GB for a 100% speed boost today.
I have a feeling that there are no big speed breakthroughs left in spinning magnetic media, but there are huge opportunities still waiting in solid state.
I don't believe that. I think there will be a threshold effect driven by consumer demand. When the price threshold is reached that ordinary consumers will dig into their wallets, I think the pressure will be on solid-state drive makers to get the product out there and at the price the market demands. This is the kind of bogus/fud story that mfgrs float every once in awhile when they're feeling a little inadequate or under-prepared.
In a wide range of applications, solid-state already replaced rotating drives.
They may have a higher cost per capacity, but where speed, damage resistance and energy consumption is more important than bulk, SSD beats HDD any day.
My next laptop will have a 16GB flash drive, as opposed to the 160GB the old one has.
Even without the hemorrhaging of losses due to piracy, consoles are far more lucrative to game developers than PCs.
Unlike PC development, console development typically isn't royalty-free or even under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. What should a developer do before it can get a console license?
In general, a console owner buys 10 to 100 times as many games for their device as a PC sees.
Does this still hold even if you exclude PCs with only an Intel GMA from the equation?
I don't belive this prediction is going to be correct. The market will always be impacted unpredictably by breakthrough technologies. Already flash drives are making inroads into the market place, and I'm guessing there are start-ups out there at this very moment which will turn the market on its head in the near future. Remember the famous words of the Chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson, who in 1943 said "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
If you look at 64-80G drives rather than the 1-1.5T sweet spot for HD prices, the SSDs are around 3-5 times the price. USB sticks are cheaper than any hard drive when you get down to 8-16G.
Very soon, SSDs will be cheap enough that your choice is between a 100G SSD and a 1T HD at the same price. Unless you really need the space and using separate system and data drives would be too expensive, your computer will have an SSD. I'm fairly certain this is what we'll start seeing; every computer has an SSD with 64-128G space and those who need it add a 1T+ HD for videos and mp3s.
Beyond a certain point, high resolution is most useful for cropping and zooming in post-production.
"beyond a certain point, high resolution is most useful for something really really useful, therefore is completely useless"
A quad-720p (2560x1440px) camcorder is useful, but it's a niche that will probably be relegated to high-end equipment because most Internet streaming video is still 480p, or 720p at maximum. As I understand it, most end users don't do digital zooms in post-production, even when shooting in HDTV for an SDTV end product. I did one of my YouTube videos with some long continuous zooms that I composed using AviSynth and a Python program that I wrote. But from the "who was the cameraman?" questions I was asked, and the reaction to my answer ("it was on a tripod, and I zoomed in during editing"), the kind of zoom in post that you see in "Caught On Tape" reality shows and TV news isn't commonplace among amateur videographers. (Yet.)
who offers 1080p video for streaming ?
Who offers 1080p video for lawful download?
streaming is - for several reasons - very unreliable
Then how do cable TV companies stream video on demand to end users' set-top boxes? Look at Disney's Keychest proposal: eventually major label video will be available through what could be described as video on demand on steroids.
Nope! Roast beef costs more than bologna, yet people chose to buy it every day. SSD drives don't need to be cheaper because they are better - silent, far less prone to shock damage, and ohhh so much faster.
Except neither the study, nor the GP, is talk about "better". Both are talking about cheaper.
And if you have the right technology you can have both cheaper and "better":
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/hybrid_storage_pool_top_speeds
Current digital cinema theather versions of films take around 200 gigs and their resolution is only 2048x1080
What makes them better than Blu-ray Disc, which is 1920x1080 on a 50 GB medium?
It all depends if there becomes reasonable 2k home projectors available.
There are already 2K TVs; they're just called "1080p". Google found me plenty of results for 1080p projector.
that flash memory was so expensive it was only viable for applications where you only needed a little bit of storage, like storing your contacts list in a cellphone. Then it got to the point where it took over as the standard storage media for digital cameras and mp3 players, remember the microdrive? it's gone now, and hard drive based mp3 players are the exception not the rule these days. Now flash is beginning to move into the consumer pc space. This was first seen in cheap netbooks with 4-16gb ssds, but increasingly they are popping up as a high end option as well. It's pretty clear that rotating media is on the way out. I don't doubt that it will maintain it's cost/gigabyte advantage but it will likely be relegated to a role as low speed, infrequently accessed storage while ssds take over as the primary drive in laptops first and then desktops. It's possible a tipping point could be reached both as the performance delta between rotating and solid state media increases and as software companies beginning writing programs to take advantage of ssds until eventually the performance of rotating media is so abysmal they are no longer used and software companied forget about them entirely. It's important to note too that while rotating media has a cost/gigabyte advantage it cannot go below a certain price floor due to the inherent and unchanging costs involved in manufacturing a precision mechanical device. For example the cheapest you can get a new 2.5" hdd these days is about 50 bucks, however even if a manufacturer were to make, say an 8 mb hdd it probably still wouldn't be much cheaper than that just due to the costs in making a magnetic disk, precision enclosure, bearings, etc. However ssds can easily go below this price. What this means is that ssds could potentially take over the low end of the pc market by offering cheap low capacity drives that hdd manufacturers are simply incapable of matching in price. To better illustrate this lets look at the 64 Gb ssd, which is retailing for as little $150. As a quick back of the envelope calculation let's say that the cost/gigabyte of flash memory drops by half every 18 months, and working from that number lets say the cost of our ssd drops by 40% every 18 months. In 3 years then a 64 Gb ssd will be selling for around $50, the same price as the cheapest hdd available. In 3 years of course that low end hdd could very well be 500 gigabytes. But there are plenty of users who would likely take the ssd for its performance advantage, and once the cost goes below $50 it will suddenly be the cheapest option available. Keep in mind too that a 64 Gb ssd is perfectly capable of running Windows 7 with plenty of programs installed and some usable storage left over as well. It's perfectly viable for a lot of users and would provide much better performance than any other option.
Who cares what hard drive technology will look like beyond 2012?
I tend to agree, as I was looking at blueray dvds for backups, and saw that a 50gb dvd would cost me about 5$ to buy, what is the use, might as well just keep buying cheap hdd. The price of the new technology has to come way down before all this is affordable replacement, and blueray has been in the works (trying to come down in price) for about 6 years now....and it's still not here.
Oh, I'm sorry, is 256MB good enough for a gaming console
It's enough for the DSi, and twice that is enough for a Wii. Wii has the equivalent of a 512 MB xD-Picture card on its mainboard.
mobile phone
It is for phones on the pay-as-you-go networks (e.g. TracFone, Virgin, Net10) that don't have an MP3 player in them.
10,000 floppies might be cheaper, but not better. By next dive is a SSD.
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus