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SSD Price Drops Signaling End of Spinning Media?
gjt writes "When Intel and OCZ recently announced new 'affordable' Solid State Disk drives — offering a meager 32-40GB — we initially yawned. But, then we took a closer look at the press releases and the in-progress research and development in SSD technology and opened our eyes. While the new drives aren't affordable on a cost per gigabyte basis for everyone, it does set a precedent — and most importantly a barometer price of $100. And it really does start the death clock for hard drive technology."
I think HDD will continue to stay enough ahead of SSD in raw capacity that it will stay relevant for a long time. When SSD is affordable at 200 GB then HDD will already be affordable at 2 TB, etc.
Better known as 318230.
In 5 years, people will still be maintaining COBOL systems.
Price is only the first hurdle for SSDs. There's also the issue of reliability, and reports from the field suggest that SSD reliability is highly variable, and in no case as good over the long term as hard drives. That will probably change in time, but they're not there yet.
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Helicopters signal the end of automobiles, just as soon as their poor $$/mile traveled ratio reaches parity, but you can buy helicopters from Air Hog right now!
Solar panels signal the end of nuclear power AND the oil industry, just as soon as their poor $$/watt ratio reaches parity! But you can get a solar powered calculator RIGHT NOW!
Can I be a tech pundit yet?
SSDs offer speed. Spinning Disk HDDs offer cheap space. Hybrid disks offer a nice compromise until SSDs overtake spinning disks in storage/price.
I mean really, who needs an expensive big SSD for your porn collection? Unless you have 12 monitors running porn simulcasting...SSD speeds are really only needed for heavily accessed files. HDDs offer cheap storage for those not-so-often used files. The solution is relatively inexpensive, and here today
The article seems to assume that a typcial laptop user needs a 120Gig harddisk. I don't think that's true. I can most certainly live with a 20Gig to 40Gig harddisk in a laptop. As a matter of fact, my current laptop (3 year old AMD Turion with "120Gig" HD) has two parts: about 16Gig fro WinXP MCE and the remaining 100Gig for Ubuntu. The 16Gig has all the productivity apps I need + 1 game (Portal), which still leaves me 2Gig free for data. If I didn't have the game, I'd have ~8Gig free for data. For typcial data like word processing documents and the like that is more than enough. It is perfectly usable for day to day tasks. (The Ubuntu part is my playground, but it could live just as wel on a 16Gig partition)
If you enter digital pictures into the landscape, it does change a bit. Still, that's still a lot of pictures. Besides, you don't want all your pictures on the move. They're much safer at home on server and/or NAS.
Music you say? We're talking about "needing"... You don't "need" music on your laptop, unless that's your profession, but that doesn't make you a typcial user.
While I don't think I'm going to shell out 100€ for a 32Gig SDD, because I'm a cheap bastard and what I have works, I could most certainly live with a 32Gig disk in my laptop.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
We know how to remove the fans. We have 18W 2GHz CPUs. As you roll these back in clock rate, power consumption drops. It takes n^2 power to run a CPU at a clockrate of 2 if it runs on n^1 power at a clockrate of 1; whereas if you have 2 cores, it takes 2n. When we drop power consumption by replacing spinning disks with 12V SSDs (not 3.3V fed, 12V at a third the amperage, less heat) and get low-power CPUs in there, the total dissipation will go away.
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Pity the lesson of Y2K went unheeded - where every COBOL programmer was paid whatever they asked to fix their code, but after should have all been taken out to a field and shot in the head.
Why shoot the programmers? Why not shoot the managers too ignorant to modernize their code base?
To get back on topic, I see spinning drives as the new backup or large file storage medium. You boot off your SSD and keep most of your files there, but anything you want a backup copy of or anything large enough to not need fast access, like movies, pictures, and music get stored on the HDD.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I've never seen a consumer hard drive last even 3 years
Maybe you're doing something wrong in that case, because all but one of the five consumer drives in my Windows PC are over three years old and it's still working about as well as a Windows PC ever does.
And personally I've never bought a drive which failed in less than three years (for that matter I've only ever bought one drive which failed before I swapped it out because it had become too small).
I received a 128 Gb Kingston SSDnow as a gift from a friend, to put in my laptop. The laptop had a 320 Gb hard drive, so I've had to not lug 2 years of photos around, but it's well worth it because this this is damned fast. Things that had 10 second times now are sub-second. The thing boots Windows 7 in less than 10 seconds.
Capacity is nice, but once you get past 40Gb or so, you only need it to store images and things in bulk. It's like having the speed of a SAN in a laptop. SSD is an order of magnitude faster as far as the user experience goes, and if you can get one for less than $200, it's well worth doing, IMHO.
Once the end users see this in action, the price/Gb won't matter to them, because responsiveness is the name of the game.
Pundits have been tolling the death knell of rotating storage for ... decades?
But somehow, the rotating storage business manages to innovate its way back to relevance -- Winchester technology, thin film heads, headerless architectures, increased spindle speeds, bigger caches, perpendicular recording, 4k sectors, continuing advances in encoding and ECC, continuing advances in media -- the advances keep coming.
And whatever happened to bubble memory, anyway? Wasn't that supposed to save the day and obsolete rotating storage once and for all? Isn't that what Intel promised us?
The initial assumption here is that there was a design flaw in their code. It wasn't a design flaw; the code was simply never designed to be running for this long. In some cases of very old code, it wasn't practical to use a 4 digit date when the code was written. In some cases the programmers warned well in advance that it would need to be fixed but that costs money and business don't willy nilly spend money unless they have to spend money.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Actually, back in the day, all we booted from was SSD (a few kB of ROM) because spinning media (floppy's and 'hard' drives) were freakin' expensive, not to mention gigantic and slow. This made stuff like instant-boot very normal to have back in the day. In the mean time we decayed to using ever faster spinning media until the hardware couldn't go any faster (15k drives since 1997) and the capacity couldn't increase (perpendicular recording a couple of years ago) and we waited minutes for our OS'es to boot. Now we're back at SSD's which don't really scale very well for large amounts of data (smaller chips means more expensive and more potential errors) until somebody finds a better format for storing large amounts of data cheaply (probably in the realm of 3D optical storage) which will slow us down again a bit.
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You are an idiot.
At the time most of that code was written, 32K (words) was a large computer. You SQUEEZED the bits into words tightly. TIGHTLY. People recommended tricks like XORING two pointers together to save space, at the cost of additional computation. And mainframe computer time was in the neighborhood of $700/hour. And that was before several rounds of 12% inflation. At that time a paperback book cost between $0.50 and $0.75, to help you calibrate what that meant.
Also turnaround for many programmers was once per day via courier.
At that time two digit years were the appropriate choice. Four digit years didn't become reasonable, by and large, until the 1980's or even later. (Remember when we moved from mainframes to CP/M computers, our disk storage was trimmed to around 70KB. And our RAM was limited at 64KB. It wasn't until personal computers got hard disks that this limit was lifted. (Networked hard disks came later for most people.)
So for anything written after 1990, you might well have a point, but that's not the code you're dissing. Idiot.
The other respondent who said you should have blamed the managers was more reasonable. Unfortunately current management theory claims that managers don't need to know anything about what they're managing. So the individual managers, themselves, probably aren't to blame. I'd put the blame on the general managers, who should know better than to accept that theory. (Though at their level it becomes true. But a part of their job is to know how the job requirements change as the degree of separation form the actual work increases, and they generally fall down on that. Badly.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.