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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 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.
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
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.