It is not a small application that will drive the migration to electronic storage media, but rather large disk intensive applications that make many small disk requests (such as a large database). The advantage of electronic media will be the reduced access time that allows more I/O operations per second (IOPS). Currently, a fast SCSI RAID array, with an access time of 5ms, can push about 120 IOPS.
What will drive the move to solid state storage is not the cost per megabyte, but the relative cost per transaction.
Twelve years ago I patented three technologies (hardware, drivers and file system) that have an access time of about 6us and theoretically put IOPS up to well over 100,000 on today's pentium class machines. Tomorrow's machines will be even faster as it is machine front-side bus speeds that determine throughput using my device. (For example, a 64-bit, 400Mhz motherboard provides the potential for reaching over 512,000 IOPS.)
Only recently, the cost of memory has come down enough to make the move to solid state storage viable based upon that proposition.
Funding is a big problem these days, but I expect to be in business building these machines within a few years.
BTW: I call the device a DataPort.
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It is not a small application that will drive the migration to electronic storage media, but rather large disk intensive applications that make many small disk requests (such as a large database). The advantage of electronic media will be the reduced access time that allows more I/O operations per second (IOPS). Currently, a fast SCSI RAID array, with an access time of 5ms, can push about 120 IOPS. What will drive the move to solid state storage is not the cost per megabyte, but the relative cost per transaction. Twelve years ago I patented three technologies (hardware, drivers and file system) that have an access time of about 6us and theoretically put IOPS up to well over 100,000 on today's pentium class machines. Tomorrow's machines will be even faster as it is machine front-side bus speeds that determine throughput using my device. (For example, a 64-bit, 400Mhz motherboard provides the potential for reaching over 512,000 IOPS.) Only recently, the cost of memory has come down enough to make the move to solid state storage viable based upon that proposition. Funding is a big problem these days, but I expect to be in business building these machines within a few years. BTW: I call the device a DataPort.