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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."
Well, the breakthrough is PCRAM, which is almost as fast as DRAM but non-volatile and rewritable per byte, unlike Flash, which needs (relatively large) cells to be deleted. Samsung are already producing 64MB PCRAM modules, but you can expect the capacities to increase quickly.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"more predictable lifespan"? I take it someone hasn't had a drive head crash... SSDs have wear-leveling and usually on sectors that go bad it is still readable, you just can't write to it. HDDs are more prone to cataclysmic failure compared to SSDs, a SSD usually won't break unless you manage to physically break the circuit board, compared to the fragile platters of the HDD, etc. SSDs fail nicely, HDDs do not.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Who the HELL runs at 10% of the capacity?
Most of the non-geeks I know have under 10GB of data. They have cheap digital cameras that produce images in the 1-2MB range, so they don't take up much space, and they don't record video. Most of these people are in the 20-30 age bracket. And most of the 'Internet generation' don't bother storing stuff from the 'net. Why bother, when you can just download it again if you want it?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Good thing we haven't been working with solid state storage in digital cameras for 10+ years then. Or the RAID controller technology which could make them kick-ass fast. Sorry, but SSDs aren't revolutionary in that sense, they're taking two rather mainstream technologies combined with the same process improvement you see in CPU/GPU/RAM and coming to whoop ass in all performance oriented markets. I have an SSD as my primary disk and I'd say it's the biggest revolution since dual cores. Almost no matter what I do, the machine remains very responsive under heavy IO load completely unlike hard disks.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That said, I would imagine it would be structure in a way that *everything* gets written to the spinning disk so you can take said disk and plug it into another device.
Why would I want my data on a flimsy, fragile mechanical device when I could keep it on a smaller, quieter, cooler, and far more robust electronic device?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
There's a lot of stuff out there that will never be re-released in a
"better format" because it wasn't created in one to begin with. There's
50 years of TV and plenty of mediocre movies that don't benefit from
Blu-Ray.
The original Star Trek is a great example of this. Sure they had Film
masters but then they started monkeying around with the original material
and kind of ruined the whole point of the entire enterprise.
Some of us already have MP3 collections that are more than 10 years old.
The idea of decade old MKV collections should seem so odd.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.