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Why SSDs Won't Replace Hard Drives
storagedude writes "Flash drive capacities have been expanding dramatically in recent years, but this article says that's about to change, in part because of the limits of current lithography technology. Meanwhile, disk drive densities will continue to grow, which the author says will mean many years before solid state drives replace hard drives — if they ever do. From the article: 'The bottom line is that there are limits to how small things can get with current technology. Flash densities are going to have data density growth problems, just as other storage technologies have had over the last 30 years. This should surprise no one. And the lithography problem for flash doesn't end there. Jeff Layton, Enterprise Technologist for HPC at Dell, notes that as lithography gets smaller, NAND has more and more troubles — the voltages don't decrease, so the probability of causing an accidental data corruption of a neighboring NAND goes up. "So at some point, you just can't reduce the size and hope to not have data corruption," notes Layton.'"
> If you are storing video 32 GBs is a huge amount of storage.
What? No, if you're storing video, 32 GB is piddling small change. One season of a show is somewhere between 4 and 20 GB depending on resolution and compression and how many episodes and how long the episodes are. 24 minutes of 1280x720 video in h264 with its audio in stereo mp3 will run you around 340 MB for animation, more for live action. Four 20-episode seasons of such episodes would then be 27 GB. If you were instead following four shows *at the same time* and they were 1 hour shows, that'd be 8 show-seasons per year, something like 108 GB. (Those figures are for pretty well compressed stuff, mind you - direct blu ray rips are more in the range of 8-20 GB for two hours of video.) And this stuff accumulates fairly easily with a decent internet connection. One 340 MB episode per day, for example, would push you over 120 GB per year.
And of course there is other data. mp3s are a minimum of about 1 MB per minute, unencoded cd quality audio is more like 10 MB/min, and lossless compression averages around 5 MB/min. 32 GB wouldn't be enough to rip my CD collection losslessly. Or if you prefer itunes, $10 worth of music can suck up 300 MB. People definitely manage to fill their 16-32 GB music players with music just between their old physical CDs and they stuff they buy online.
Operating systems these days can be fairly huge; a fresh install of a popular linux distro will start out in the 2-4 GB range, and a crufty old install of XP kept patched up will bump into that range. Vista and 7 start out in the 8+ range. In the case of Windows, that's not counting additional programs.
Games can be rather large too. WoW is over 10 GB. Steam + the Orange Box + Torchlight comes out to over 22 GB. Those games (well, except for Torchlight) are five years old. They're not ultra enthusiast games, they're games that run all right on a fairly low end laptop from a couple years ago.
Even still pictures can add up. If you're copying the pics off a digital camera, those can be a few MB each. (It depends on the resolution, of course). And people I know with digital cameras take a LOT more pictures than they would with a film camera, because they don't have to pay for film anymore. These days just filling the memory in the camera means you've taken multiple GB worth of pictures.
> First of all flash has replaced Hard Drives below a certain size. I doubt that you can find a sub 50 GB hard drive these days. If you do they are pretty rare and the price per gigabyte will be really high.
True; newegg seems to start at 80 GB for laptop drives. However, flash drives are over $2 per GB, and 320 GB magnetic drives are $46. A 32 GB flash drive still costs $85. Flash is still a few factors of 2 away from being competitive in price or capacity. It's still living in the "expensive high speed for enthusiasts" market as far as laptop/desktop drives go.
start ripping your bluray movings, or simply stream dumping them. Now when 4k2k video starts being common think blueray x4, now is a TB drive enough?
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