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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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.