Posted by
Hemos
on from the and-it-has-HAL-inside dept.
Nate Fox writes "Finally all the mp3 storage I want: TechWeb has a lil story on 2,300GB solid state drives available within 2 years. " Interesting stuff-but as always, I'll wait to see it in the proverbial flesh.
Yeah, its not nearly enough (seriously)
by
joss
·
· Score: 2
I for one would like to be able to remember everything I see hear or touch. At least with 2.3TB I could remember everything I hear for about 4 years, (add speech recognition to make it searchable).
Imagine how great that would be in arguments: "You said this software would be completed on time" "No, I said it was a complete waste of time - I'll play it back for you"
And it would be really handy with the wife too...
Bring on the implants.. preferably before I go senile.
One thing that stands out in this article - the "data access time" is quoted as 100Mbps. However, data access times aren't measured in megabits/sec.. they are measured in milliseconds, or hopefully for this invention, microseconds (do microseconds come after milliseconds?). 100Mbps could be the data transfer rate. If that's correct, this device is actually really slow - 12.5 MB/s. much slower than both IDE and SCSI's current speeds.
This means it probably wouldn't find its way into servers until its speed problems were corrected.. It'd even be a little slow for PCs..
and about what we'd do with it. Back around 10 years ago when 30 meg hard drives were roomy, nobody could think of what we'd do with PCs that had 20,000 megs of storage like today's PCs do.. I'm sure we'll find ways to use the extra space.
I think that we all know that any company that releases this technology will be charging far more than $50 for 2.3TB of storage. It's not that they have to, but that they can to maximise their profit.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing either.
I predict that 2.3TB will be above $400 in two years IF this technology holds water
Big claims .. I'd be worried for my head
by
SirSlud
·
· Score: 3
You know, I have a feeling this isn't total vapor-nonsense. If I were a scientist who had discovered a storage technology with these kind of metrics (3,600 GB, 100Mbs!!), I'd be awfully worried about blathering these kinds of astronomical numbers unless I was fairly certain I could do it.
Curiously enough, I work at a company that develops medical imaging software. We have a product that is bundled by a large supplier of MRI machines with their machines. The connection being that the scientist in quesiton here also led the team that invented the MRI machine.
-- "Old man yells at systemd"
Re:Big claims .. I'd be worried for my head
by
SirSlud
·
· Score: 2
There no corperations claiming to have cold fusion ready within 2 years. Or were there?
-- "Old man yells at systemd"
Hmmm... $50 is too expensive!
by
Sun+Tzu
·
· Score: 2
I think I'll wait *3* years when these babies are obsolete and pick them up for $10 each!;)
historical perspective sought
by
timothy
·
· Score: 2
As some writers have pointed out, some things that are not widely available and cheap would have seemed like an impossible pipedream just a few years ago... even given that storage space has gotten cheaper, it always seems that the curve has to level out soon.
I wonder if there is a site (or if I can intrigue someone into creating one) that shows a curve representing the falling cost of storage space, as in
"X: Time
Y: Cost of 1 MB of (hard drive or equivalent) storage, in constant dollars (how about 1999 just for current easy-ness)"
Similar charts would be great / neat / mind-blowing for both RAM and 'processing power' (though deciding on the unit to measure might be tricky, since processors are not a strict 'x amount of processing'...
Maybe this should have been an Ask Slashdot question instead, but it's this topic which reminded me of this idea which has been brewing a few years.
Re:historical perspective sought
by
Trepidity
·
· Score: 2
Well, I remember when buying a computer in 1994 that most hard drives were around 50 cents per megabyte. I bought my 8.4 gig last year (march 1998) for US$180, which is around 2 cents per megabyte.
This is why that 2.3 TB drive for $50 looks unreleastic. That'd be around 0.00002 cents per megabyte. In five years we've gone from 50 to 2 cents (25 times less), so I doubt we'll go from 2 to 0.00002 cents (100,000 times less) in a mere two years.
I, too, would like to see a chart with something more accurate than my anecdotal evidence =)
Re:What do you do with 2.3 TB? - Movies
by
MindStalker
·
· Score: 2
No thats a double sided, double (or is it triple?) layered disk that hold that much. I believe the typical 2 hour movie not including all the little extras you get is around 1.5GB (THIS IS A VERY ROUGH ESTIMATE, so don't get on my case about the numbers I don't really have the time now to look them up)
Vaporware == venture capital fraud
by
crow
·
· Score: 2
This sort of thing could easily be a scam to get some venture capital. If it were IBM saying it was five to ten years out, I would believe them.
It would be interesting to see who the people behind this are, and what they've done in the past.
Personally, I think it'll be significantly more expensive than that, but the prices will eventually come down. I think it can be done; this guy has one hell of a reputation that he has to uphold. Consider that he said production costs were $50 a drive. The hard drive companies will likely start by charging thousands for the devices, because people will pay for that much storage.
Re:What do you do with 2.3 TB? - Movies
by
dirty
·
· Score: 2
I think they're about 4gigs for a standard movie. Since most discs are double sided, w/ widescreen on one and fullscreen on the other (cuz companies are too dumb to use the built in widescreen to pan&scan features of dvd) you have about 8gigs per disc.
--
-matt
This is "solid state" the way hard drives are.
by
Christopher+Thomas
·
· Score: 2
Now, the solid state bit is an interesting spin, but think about it: 1. How much faster than 10K RPM can we spin drives?
Actually, according to the article they'll still need actuators to move the read/write head over the material... which is starting to sound suspiciously like an ordinary hard drive (actuators move on one axis and the disk medium spins on the other). Solid state starts looking like a bit of a misnomer here.
AFAICT from the article this is just a device working much like a hard drive with multiple layers per platter that uses a magneto-optical system to do layer selection (much as DVDs can focus on different layers). Where they get their size, cost, and capacity numbers from I'm not sure.
Error correction in 4% overhead possible
by
roystgnr
·
· Score: 2
You just have to pick the right code. With ideal block codes (which exist, for certain block lengths), every two parity symbols gives you the ability to correct one symbol error. So if you've got a medium with a low enough error rate (and aren't hard drives less than 1e-6 error probability?), 4% overhead can be more than enough.
So anyway, it's possible; as to whether that's how much is actually used, your guess is as good as mine.
What do you do with 2.3 TB?
by
Matrix42
·
· Score: 2
Well, if this is true (and I haven't made up my mind yet; the lack of technical details was disturbing), what will we do with the space?
Sure, large web servers and other massive database-driven information repositories will be able to use it, but what about the home user? 15,000 hours of MP3s? Not likely.
I'm not going to make the mistake of saying it will be more than enough for anything; I'm sure in 10 years 2.3TB will be pitifully small, but I would like to know. In retrospect, it's easy to see how we can use more than 640KB RAM, but what retrospectively obvious things are we going to do to fill these drives?
Speculations, anyone?
Re:What do you do with 2.3 TB?
by
jms
·
· Score: 2
This would store approximately 3888 hours of UNCOMPRESSED true CD-quality music.
Stick a little microprocessor on it (it wouldn't need much of one!), add a DAC and ADC, and suddenly you have a portable audio recorder/player with some amazing muscle!
Re:What do you do with 2.3 TB?
by
schon
·
· Score: 2
Hmm.. I don't know what I would do with all that storage, but I can imagine the average 'doze user could use it to install Office 2001...
... and have almost 100MB of space left over to store a document:o)
(sorry, gratuitous MS-bashing... you could see it coming, couldn't you?:o)
I was thinking about this, and I wonder if any of the following might be true:
a) It's volitle b) It has to be kept at 4 kelvin c) It's volitle and has to be kept at 4 kelvin
I always thought it might be funny to have a computer that ran on cryogens. Imagine coming in the morining and doing a liquid helium transfer before getting to work.
Or perhaps a 5000 Watt dishwasher sized helium compressor sitting next to your credit card sized hard drive.
Addressing 2.3TB with current OS'es
by
sugarman
·
· Score: 2
Just a quick question regarding this topic, but how are todays' OS'es set up to handle 2.3 TB of memory on a single drive?
I seem to recall something in the BEos bible regarding the addressing of this much memory, but, truth be told my eys start getting glossy when there's lots of '0's.
I'm assuming that Win9X will suck hard at this, but I'm not sure. Would Linux and the BSD's be able to manage this? Are there any other issues for dealing with drives this large?
-- --sugarman--
Re:Addressing 2.3TB with current OS'es
by
Trepidity
·
· Score: 2
BeOS can handle this, NT can handle this, and I assume the commercial UNIXes can.
Windows9x may or may not be able to handle it. The FAT32 maximum is somewhere above 2 TB, but I'm not sure how far above.
Linux will indeed "suck hard at this," due to ext2fs's maximum of 1 TB.
Those who cannot remember the past...
by
the_tsi
·
· Score: 3
4-5 years ago, when 1GB drives first started dropping under $1000, I would have laughed out loud at anyone who told me that you'd be able to buy a 4GB drive for under $100 by the end of the century, nor that new PCs would be shipping with 23+ gigs as standard. I have very little doubt that in 2 years, we'll see multi-terabyte drives shipping for consumer-friendly prices. Now, the solid state bit is an interesting spin, but think about it: 1. How much faster than 10K RPM can we spin drives? Not particularly that much before we have overheating and wear-and-tear issues to deal with. 2. Sure, we can have penny-sized CD that holds umpteen zigabytes of data, but when dealing with magnetic disks, we're going to run into physical issues soon with data density. 3. Power. 10K drives need more current than 7200 or 5400rpm ones, and to go faster we'll need to suck even more. In today's world of green PCs, faster conventional hard drives aren't gonna do it. I think this article is completely legit. Granted, I'm all with CT on the "believe it when I see it" issue, but I don't think it's completely off-the-wall. -Chris
Re:Those who cannot remember the past...
by
Trepidity
·
· Score: 2
I'm still skeptical. The historical numbers you posted are exactly why. Apparently you forgot to do the math on those numbers =)
5 years ago 1 GB drives were just starting to come down in price, and I got an 810 MB hard drive for around $300. Now the best you can get for $300 is around 30 gigs. That's an increase of around 40 times the storage capacity/dollar over 5 years.
On the other hand, if a 2.3 TB drive were to ship for $50 in two years, that'd be an increase of around 500 times the storage capacity/dollar over two years.
I don't think that's going to happen. Perhaps in two years we'll see 300 gig hard drives, or possibly 500 gig hard drives at decent prices, but i doubt we'll see 2300+ gig hard drives for under $5000, let alone $50.
After checking over my math, I'm even more skeptical. The 2.3 TB drive for $50 would represent a 600,000 times increase in capacity per dollar over two years, compared to the 40 or so we've seen in the last 5 years.
Not that I believe in this technology, but one big consumer application would be digital VCRs. You could record a thousand hours of DVD-quality video with one of those. So you could record every episode of your favorite TV shows. Or get HBO for a few months and build up a library of movies.
Of course, this is still a long way from being able to record every channel all the time. With only 100 channels, you would run out of storage within a day. You could, though, pick your favorite channels, set up a profile of stuff you know you don't want to watch (e.g., golf), and have it record everything that doesn't fit the profile. You would then have a week or so after something was recorded to decide to watch or save it before it is recorded over by newer stuff.
Well, not really, but my employer, EMC, has been selling multi-terabyte storage systems for years. If you've got the money, we'll set up a 10TB system for you.
Generally, EMC storage systems are partitioned into separate volumes, which show up as separate devices when viewed by a host computer.
Still, the point is that people are dealing with storage systems larger than what we're talking about here.
fsck has always been a pain. There are several solutions, though.
Much of the time used by fsck is for reading all the inodes. If you reduce the number of inodes, you speed up fsck. I did this with my MP3 partition. Unfortunately, ext2 won't let me have one inode per 1024K. Since with such large storage systems most people will be storing very large (by today's standards) files (excluding news/mail archives with one file per message), it makes sense to alter the file system to reserve fewer inodes. Using dynamic inode allocation makes a lot of sense here. You can also save some time by using larger block groups and larger block sizes, but the advantages there will be relatively insignificant.
Another solution is to use a different type of file system--one that protects itself from corruption or uses some sort of journaling to reduce the need for a full-blown fsck.
That's why we need JFS (was Re:hmmmmmmmmmm)
by
davie
·
· Score: 2
The trend towards huge storage is one of the reasons why folks want a JFS for Linux. I had to fsck a couple 10GB IDE disks a few weeks ago and it was coffee break time. I can't imagine what TB-scale fsck times would be like. I have my fingers crossed that XFS makes it into Linux 2.6 (next year?).
Slashdot Mirror
I for one would like to be able to remember everything I see hear or touch.
At least with 2.3TB I could remember everything I hear for about 4 years,
(add speech recognition to make it searchable).
Imagine how great that would be in arguments:
"You said this software would be completed on time"
"No, I said it was a complete waste of time - I'll play it back for you"
And it would be really handy with the wife too...
Bring on the implants.. preferably before I go senile.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
This means it probably wouldn't find its way into servers until its speed problems were corrected.. It'd even be a little slow for PCs..
and about what we'd do with it. Back around 10 years ago when 30 meg hard drives were roomy, nobody could think of what we'd do with PCs that had 20,000 megs of storage like today's PCs do.. I'm sure we'll find ways to use the extra space.
I think that we all know that any company that releases this technology will be charging far more than $50 for 2.3TB of storage. It's not that they have to, but that they can to maximise their profit.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing either.
I predict that 2.3TB will be above $400 in two years IF this technology holds water
IMHO of course.:)
J:)
Oh well, no point in steering now.
You know, I have a feeling this isn't total vapor-nonsense. If I were a scientist who had discovered a storage technology with these kind of metrics (3,600 GB, 100Mbs!!), I'd be awfully worried about blathering these kinds of astronomical numbers unless I was fairly certain I could do it.
Curiously enough, I work at a company that develops medical imaging software. We have a product that is bundled by a large supplier of MRI machines with their machines. The connection being that the scientist in quesiton here also led the team that invented the MRI machine.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I think I'll wait *3* years when these babies are obsolete and pick them up for $10 each! ;)
Geeky modern art T-shirts
As some writers have pointed out, some things that are not widely available and cheap would have seemed like an impossible pipedream just a few years ago ... even given that storage space has gotten cheaper, it always seems that the curve has to level out soon.
...
I wonder if there is a site (or if I can intrigue someone into creating one) that shows a curve representing the falling cost of storage space, as in
"X: Time
Y: Cost of 1 MB of (hard drive or equivalent) storage, in constant dollars (how about 1999 just for current easy-ness)"
Similar charts would be great / neat / mind-blowing for both RAM and 'processing power' (though deciding on the unit to measure might be tricky, since processors are not a strict 'x amount of processing'
Maybe this should have been an Ask Slashdot question instead, but it's this topic which reminded me of this idea which has been brewing a few years.
Just a thought,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
No thats a double sided, double (or is it triple?) layered disk that hold that much. I believe the typical 2 hour movie not including all the little extras you get is around 1.5GB (THIS IS A VERY ROUGH ESTIMATE, so don't get on my case about the numbers I don't really have the time now to look them up)
This sort of thing could easily be a scam to get some venture capital. If it were IBM saying it was five to ten years out, I would believe them.
It would be interesting to see who the people behind this are, and what they've done in the past.
Disclaimer: I have no evidence, only suspicions.
If they can do this for $50, I'll buy five.
If they can do this for $200, I'll still buy one.
Personally, I think it'll be significantly more expensive than that, but the prices will eventually come down. I think it can be done; this guy has one hell of a reputation that he has to uphold. Consider that he said production costs were $50 a drive. The hard drive companies will likely start by charging thousands for the devices, because people will pay for that much storage.
I think they're about 4gigs for a standard movie. Since most discs are double sided, w/ widescreen on one and fullscreen on the other (cuz companies are too dumb to use the built in widescreen to pan&scan features of dvd) you have about 8gigs per disc.
-matt
Actually, according to the article they'll still need actuators to move the read/write head over the material... which is starting to sound suspiciously like an ordinary hard drive (actuators move on one axis and the disk medium spins on the other). Solid state starts looking like a bit of a misnomer here.
AFAICT from the article this is just a device working much like a hard drive with multiple layers per platter that uses a magneto-optical system to do layer selection (much as DVDs can focus on different layers). Where they get their size, cost, and capacity numbers from I'm not sure.
You just have to pick the right code. With ideal block codes (which exist, for certain block lengths), every two parity symbols gives you the ability to correct one symbol error. So if you've got a medium with a low enough error rate (and aren't hard drives less than 1e-6 error probability?), 4% overhead can be more than enough.
So anyway, it's possible; as to whether that's how much is actually used, your guess is as good as mine.
Sure, large web servers and other massive database-driven information repositories will be able to use it, but what about the home user? 15,000 hours of MP3s? Not likely.
I'm not going to make the mistake of saying it will be more than enough for anything; I'm sure in 10 years 2.3TB will be pitifully small, but I would like to know. In retrospect, it's easy to see how we can use more than 640KB RAM, but what retrospectively obvious things are we going to do to fill these drives?
Speculations, anyone?
I was thinking about this, and I wonder if any of the following might be true:
a) It's volitle
b) It has to be kept at 4 kelvin
c) It's volitle and has to be kept at 4 kelvin
I always thought it might be funny to have a computer that ran on cryogens. Imagine coming in the morining and doing a liquid helium transfer before getting to work.
Or perhaps a 5000 Watt dishwasher sized helium compressor sitting next to your credit card sized hard drive.
Just a quick question regarding this topic, but how are todays' OS'es set up to handle 2.3 TB of memory on a single drive?
I seem to recall something in the BEos bible regarding the addressing of this much memory, but, truth be told my eys start getting glossy when there's lots of '0's.
I'm assuming that Win9X will suck hard at this, but I'm not sure. Would Linux and the BSD's be able to manage this? Are there any other issues for dealing with drives this large?
--sugarman--
4-5 years ago, when 1GB drives first started dropping under $1000, I would have laughed out loud at anyone who told me that you'd be able to buy a 4GB drive for under $100 by the end of the century, nor that new PCs would be shipping with 23+ gigs as standard. I have very little doubt that in 2 years, we'll see multi-terabyte drives shipping for consumer-friendly prices. Now, the solid state bit is an interesting spin, but think about it: 1. How much faster than 10K RPM can we spin drives? Not particularly that much before we have overheating and wear-and-tear issues to deal with. 2. Sure, we can have penny-sized CD that holds umpteen zigabytes of data, but when dealing with magnetic disks, we're going to run into physical issues soon with data density. 3. Power. 10K drives need more current than 7200 or 5400rpm ones, and to go faster we'll need to suck even more. In today's world of green PCs, faster conventional hard drives aren't gonna do it. I think this article is completely legit. Granted, I'm all with CT on the "believe it when I see it" issue, but I don't think it's completely off-the-wall. -Chris
After checking over my math, I'm even more skeptical. The 2.3 TB drive for $50 would represent a 600,000 times increase in capacity per dollar over two years, compared to the 40 or so we've seen in the last 5 years.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Not that I believe in this technology, but one big consumer application would be digital VCRs. You could record a thousand hours of DVD-quality video with one of those. So you could record every episode of your favorite TV shows. Or get HBO for a few months and build up a library of movies.
Of course, this is still a long way from being able to record every channel all the time. With only 100 channels, you would run out of storage within a day. You could, though, pick your favorite channels, set up a profile of stuff you know you don't want to watch (e.g., golf), and have it record everything that doesn't fit the profile. You would then have a week or so after something was recorded to decide to watch or save it before it is recorded over by newer stuff.
Well, not really, but my employer, EMC, has been selling multi-terabyte storage systems for years. If you've got the money, we'll set up a 10TB system for you.
Generally, EMC storage systems are partitioned into separate volumes, which show up as separate devices when viewed by a host computer.
Still, the point is that people are dealing with storage systems larger than what we're talking about here.
fsck has always been a pain. There are several solutions, though.
Much of the time used by fsck is for reading all the inodes. If you reduce the number of inodes, you speed up fsck. I did this with my MP3 partition. Unfortunately, ext2 won't let me have one inode per 1024K. Since with such large storage systems most people will be storing very large (by today's standards) files (excluding news/mail archives with one file per message), it makes sense to alter the file system to reserve fewer inodes. Using dynamic inode allocation makes a lot of sense here. You can also save some time by using larger block groups and larger block sizes, but the advantages there will be relatively insignificant.
The trend towards huge storage is one of the reasons why folks want a JFS for Linux. I had to fsck a couple 10GB IDE disks a few weeks ago and it was coffee break time. I can't imagine what TB-scale fsck times would be like. I have my fingers crossed that XFS makes it into Linux 2.6 (next year?).
slashdot broke my sig