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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."
HDD is the new tape drive and SSD is the new HDD?
There are only two advantages SSD has over spinning media at this time: Access speed and Durability. Storage space is still not up to par, and cost is definitely a weak point. However, technology progresses and we're hitting the limits of the current hard disk technology. SSD technology is definitely the future of most personal storage.
But it won't replace it in all areas. There are still "obsolete" technologies in widespread use due to technical superiority over perceived convenience. No one is going to say digital cameras are lousy, but compared to film, they are simply outmatched. Where is Velvia for digital? Where is Kodachrome? These films have no equal in the digital world except as poorly implemented filters in Photoshop.
Spinning media is going to be with us for a while, and I expect, like film, that eventually prices will go back up and this technology will be a specialty market targeted at high-end users and professionals.
Where did you find reports from the field? All I've seen are lab studies and guesses.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Interesting. Hard drives replace tape backup. SSDs replace hard drives.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I wonder how long it will be before SSDs lose the traditional 3.5" form factor. There's no reason why you couldn't say, drop the guts into a PCI form factor. That cast aluminum enclosure is probably $3-5 of a product that probably costs $45 to make. With less heat and mass requirements it's likely we'll start seeing naked chips on a breadboard to save 8-9% of the manufacturing cost.
moox. for a new generation.
I'd prefer that software solution to a hardware solution since the OS knows so much more about which files it would make sense to cache and which aren't worth it. Also, you could overrule the prediction algorithms easily to cache the music you want to listen to or the database you are working on. I actually use /dev/shm (a Linux tmpfs in RAM) often to store quickly changing files.
:)
* I know iron oxides aren't used anymore, but I still like the mental image
Here, too.
My basic "swap cycle" for hard drives was
1) Buy them
2) Use as data storage 2-3 Years
3) Use as OS drive 2-3 Years
4) Use for swap space 2-3 Years
5) Throw them out
I have gone through maybe 25-30 drives for various boxes at home so far, and exactly ONE has failed me so far, while it was already on "swap space" duty. Usually the ones I throw out are about 8-10 years old, just because they are now even to small to be useful as swap space.
Seriously. Google is (believed to be) the largest single user of consumer hard drives. When they start replacing hard drives with SSDs, I will consider HDDs to be done. I wonder what price differential the power savings (don't forget the power for cooling) will cover?
linquendum tondere
Back in middle school me and my buddy wanted to try out linux but didn't want to wait to format* the drive so we stuck the magnet out of the base of a magnet-mount shop lamp (10 lb "capacity", about 5" in diameter). To our surprise, not only did we corrupt the drive data, but the computer wouldn't recognize the drive, either.
*I am aware now that there's more involved to formatting a drive
moox. for a new generation.
Oh, I was just talking about something that mounted in the PCI slot and was held in with a single screw like an old school sound card. There'd be no pin connectors interfacing directly with the motherboard; it'd still have a SATA jack to wire it to the motherboard.
Hell, there's no reason why they couldn't just integrate a 20 or 40gb SSD right into the motherboard. Talk about a microcomputer! Lenovo has some pretty tiny nettops nowadays, I imagine the physical dimensions of the hard drive more or less doubles the thickness of the unit. With a different form factor they could probably reduce the size of the packaging even further.
moox. for a new generation.
Of course the scary thing is now that we have 64 bit processors it could be possible to just map the flash right to the address space. I could see a netbook with a flash drive right on the motherboard.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Which keeps longer if you stick it on the shelf and forget about it?
If you're thinking about backup, you should be concerned about long periods of time. 20 years at the bare minimum. Reports are that DVDs don't last that long. Disks freeze up and need expensive repair to recover the data. How do SSDs stack up here. (Don't judge by current capacity, we're in the very early days yet.)
P.S.: *I* don't know. If you do, I'd like to hear your answer.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I could see a netbook with a flash drive right on the motherboard.
It' s called eMMC and you can find it e.g in n900.