You clearly have never seen what the setup is like to use.
You should go to the movie industry and tell them they dont have to spend 30 million a film when you can do similar things with the video recorder on your mobile phone and a PC. It's about the same thing.
So I did some googling and found some information contrary to what you say which makes me think you are a Bullsh1tter.
"The lower energy dense manganese-based lithium-ion, also known as spinel, maintains the internal resistance through its life but loses capacity due to chemical decompositions. Spinel is primarily used for power tools. "
" NiMHs, however. It's old tech, inferior in about a dozen different ways to the modern automotive li-ions."
Inferior except in one critical way. NiMH batteries dont lose 20% of their capacity a year just by exisiting. So while you can design a NiMH based car that will last 20 years, you cant design a Li-ion on that doesnt need a new $10,000 battery every 5 years.
I have been studying a variation on this for a while and the answer is yes. Hard drvie growth has slowed down, or more specifically, hard drive price improvement has slowed down.
You can see on the 1st chart on my page that the last 5 years have been a marked decrease over the previous decade: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.html
Interestingly, in just the last 4 months it has speeded up dramatically. Using my standard data sources there has been an 80% price improvement in the last 4 months. Thats about the same as the last 2 years worth of growth. I think this is due to the emergence of serious solid state drives. Right now drive manufacturuers only have 4 other drive manufacturing competitors to worry about, but they will be facing some tough competition if any old electronics company in Asia can mount some chips on a board and become competition. The only solution is to maximise their competitive advantage, which for hard disks is cheap space and lots of it.
Scroll down to the flash section. SLC is the good stuff used in the big fast SSD's you get from people like Apple. MLC is the slower, less long lasting, stuff commonly used in thumb drives. $2.08 for a Gigabyte in MLC $6.70 for a Gigabyte of SLC
If you want to know the long term price improvement rate for flash, you can join that site for $1000 a year or if you want the cheap version, I've been tracking retail flash (MLC) prices for 9 years at my site here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.html
The data comes from reading the advertisements from a popular and long running computer magazine. I recorded the lowest price of each different sized disk advertised in the magazine in the same months issue every year. The disk with the best bang for buck is the data point used in the charts.
Spot on. Making a hard disk for a competitive price is hard. Thats why there are only a handful of hard disk manufacturers. Making a circuit board with some chips on it can be done by hundreds of companies all over the world. I cant think of any reason to buy a Seagate SSD over any one of the other hundreds of competitors, especially when they all have the same electronics inside.
Separately, it's nice to know that analysts agree with research I've done that it's only 4 years before SSD surpasses HD, at least in 2.5 inch drives. I've been comparing the relative price improvement of hard disk prices to flash and its pretty easy to estimate a crossover point.
I've studied the price improvement trends for flash memory and, unfortunately, it isnt quite the 4 fold yearly improvement you are suggesting. For the last 5 years it averages something about 2.6 fold. Supprisisngly it doesnt make much difference to your numbers over a relatively short period like 3 1/2 years: today $100 for about 26 Gig (using your starting point of $30 for 8 GB) 1 year from now - 68 Gig 2 years from now - 175 Gig 3 year - 450 Gig 4 years - 1.2 Tera
I have also studied hard drives in the same way and they will "only" be about a $50 for a Terabyte in 4 years if trends of the last 5 years continue.
I agree with your sentiment about what you want in a laptop.
I think your predictions are a little off though. By 2015, if trends of the last 5 years continue, flash drives will have displaced 3.5 inch drives for storage per dollar meaning laptops will not have to make any sacrifices in the area of available storage. I think you got the drive size about right. I looked at Windows software bloat and MS has never used more than 10% of the "sweet spot" hard drive at the time of release. I wrote about it here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/softwarebloat.html
The grand parent is pretty much spot on. I have been charting the annual price improvement of flash memory and hard disks. I have data for flash going back 9 years and for hard drives, 16 years. About 5 years ago, hard drives stopped improving at their traditional 100% a year rate and dropped back to about 40% a year. Flash on the other hand has averaged about 150% improvement a year for the 9 year period and over the last five years its gone up to 165%. Flash actually seems to be speeding up where disk seems to have hit a slump. If you look at where prices for disk and flash are now and do simple extrapolation you get pretty much what the grand parent said: 1 inch drives - not competitive, ceased production. 1.8 inch drives, 12 months and they are gone. Seagate gets about 20 to 25% of it's revenue from these babies. 2.5 inch drives - 4 years. In 4 years laptops will represent 66% of the market and none of them will come with hard disks. 3.5 inch drives - 6 years. Its all over baby.
A typical machine does indeed have very close to this amount of RAM. Moores law seems to fit almost perfectly even after 27 years. The guy was a genius.
You can take solice in the fact that you saved some money over a flash based iPod of the same capacity. 160 gig of 1.8 inch disk is still a bit cheaper than 160 of flash storage. But not for long. I've been studying the price improvement of hard disks and flash for a few years now. If both of them keep improving at the same rate they have for the last 5 years then 1.8 inch drives wont be viable in 12 months from now. The flash will be cheaper.
Yes, the price improvement of flash is awesome. I've been studying this and if the price improvement rate of flash stays about the same as it has for the last 5 years (and hard disk does the same) it will only be 4 years before every laptop has a flash drive.
In Australia it was illegal until last year. Considering that the iTunes store didnt open there until 2005 leaving almost no way to use them legally , and around 200,000 had been sold by then, a large number of the population were basically criminals.
What does the expression bottom of the price curve mean. In hard drives, is it the disk with the most megabytes per dollar?
Perhaps it means the largest disk available at the time?
Just to give an idea, you can expect about only about 3000 visits over 4 hours from a link in a comment this far down in a story. Unless your photos are crazily large or your ISP has really mean quotas your site wont be "slasdoted" so just go ahead and post the link. People that enjoy this story will also enjoy your photos. Go ahead and share it around.
Wil, does it annoy you that you that Zonk posted a review of your book right when it cant be purchased?
I mean 80,000 visitors who are exactly the kind of people who would enjoy your book are getting wasted by poor timing.
I am in agreement.
Extrapolating any exponential trend is pretty foolhardy but at least it gives you an idea of what to expect.
You are right about the fact that when flash gets within a certain price range of disk it's other advantages win out over price. Flash has already overtaken 1 inch drives in the market and is getting close to displacing 1.8 inch drives. A few years and 2.5 inch disks will be history. A this point I expect the server space to adopt flash due to its high transaction per second advantage and almost total price insensitivity in this market. The bulk storage market will take a while longer , hence the 11 year prediction for 3.5 inch drives. I think it may take less time as volumes reduce and so the technology loses economies of scale.
Yes I agree. My reserach shows that, in relation to price, the annual improvement over three years for flash comes in at 109% whereas for hard disks over the same period the figure is only 35%
This means, if the two trends continue over time, it will actually become hard to justify buying a hard disk instead of flash, especially the smaller ones the cost a lot more per gig.
Australia doesnt have a retail culture of rebates. It never has had one. The price used is the lowest advertised price found in a reputable computer magazine. This means the prices are good representation of what people payed for the drive at the time. It's Apples to Apples.
I studied this with hard disks and my data showed that the "sweet spot" hard disk (the drive with the best bang for buck) has actually steadily decreaased over time. You can see the chart at the bottom of this page: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.html look in the Annual Sweet Spot Price Trends section.
Basically, my data disagrees with you. The average drive is getting cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Try convincing the average person that they clearly don't care about aircraft safety because their MP3 player doesnt play Ogg Vorbis.
You can't because it's a non sequitur.
Funniest post I have read in a while.
You clearly have never seen what the setup is like to use.
You should go to the movie industry and tell them they dont have to spend 30 million a film when you can do similar things with the video recorder on your mobile phone and a PC. It's about the same thing.
"Keep in mind, also, that the towers have directional antennas mounted on them, wheras bluetooth pairs must both be omnidirectional"
it's not radiation from the towers that we are worried about. It's radiation from the phone that is the problem and it's antenna is omnidirectional.
Yeah, I though Li-ions were all the same.
So I did some googling and found some information contrary to what you say which makes me think you are a Bullsh1tter.
"The lower energy dense manganese-based lithium-ion, also known as spinel, maintains the internal resistance through its life but loses capacity due to chemical decompositions. Spinel is primarily used for power tools. "
" NiMHs, however. It's old tech, inferior in about a dozen different ways to the modern automotive li-ions."
Inferior except in one critical way. NiMH batteries dont lose 20% of their capacity a year just by exisiting. So while you can design a NiMH based car that will last 20 years, you cant design a Li-ion on that doesnt need a new $10,000 battery every 5 years.
I have been studying a variation on this for a while and the answer is yes.
Hard drvie growth has slowed down, or more specifically, hard drive price improvement has slowed down.
You can see on the 1st chart on my page that the last 5 years have been a marked decrease over the previous decade:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.html
Interestingly, in just the last 4 months it has speeded up dramatically. Using my standard data sources there has been an 80% price improvement in the last 4 months. Thats about the same as the last 2 years worth of growth. I think this is due to the emergence of serious solid state drives. Right now drive manufacturuers only have 4 other drive manufacturing competitors to worry about, but they will be facing some tough competition if any old electronics company in Asia can mount some chips on a board and become competition. The only solution is to maximise their competitive advantage, which for hard disks is cheap space and lots of it.
My reverse cycle air condition heats very efficiently thank you.
Anyone can check the spot price for flash anytime by looking at this site:
http://www.dramexchange.com/
Scroll down to the flash section.
SLC is the good stuff used in the big fast SSD's you get from people like Apple.
MLC is the slower, less long lasting, stuff commonly used in thumb drives.
$2.08 for a Gigabyte in MLC
$6.70 for a Gigabyte of SLC
If you want to know the long term price improvement rate for flash, you can join that site for $1000 a year or if you want the cheap version, I've been tracking retail flash (MLC) prices for 9 years at my site here:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.html
The data comes from reading the advertisements from a popular and long running computer magazine. I recorded the lowest price of each different sized disk advertised in the magazine in the same months issue every year. The disk with the best bang for buck is the data point used in the charts.
Spot on. Making a hard disk for a competitive price is hard. Thats why there are only a handful of hard disk manufacturers. Making a circuit board with some chips on it can be done by hundreds of companies all over the world. I cant think of any reason to buy a Seagate SSD over any one of the other hundreds of competitors, especially when they all have the same electronics inside.
Separately, it's nice to know that analysts agree with research I've done that it's only 4 years before SSD surpasses HD, at least in 2.5 inch drives. I've been comparing the relative price improvement of hard disk prices to flash and its pretty easy to estimate a crossover point.
You can have a look at my data (charts) and conclusions here. http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashdiskcomparo.html
I've studied the price improvement trends for flash memory and, unfortunately, it isnt quite the 4 fold yearly improvement you are suggesting. For the last 5 years it averages something about 2.6 fold.
Supprisisngly it doesnt make much difference to your numbers over a relatively short period like 3 1/2 years:
today $100 for about 26 Gig (using your starting point of $30 for 8 GB)
1 year from now - 68 Gig
2 years from now - 175 Gig
3 year - 450 Gig
4 years - 1.2 Tera
I have also studied hard drives in the same way and they will "only" be about a $50 for a Terabyte in 4 years if trends of the last 5 years continue.
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.html
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.html
"(right now it has been dropping linearly with density, vs. HDD's which have tended to drop price/GB exponentially)."
Well thats not right.
Flash prices/GB have been dropping dropping dramatically faster than disk for the last five years.
I've sudied it.
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashdiskcomparo.html
I agree with your sentiment about what you want in a laptop.
I think your predictions are a little off though.
By 2015, if trends of the last 5 years continue, flash drives will have displaced 3.5 inch drives for storage per dollar meaning laptops will not have to make any sacrifices in the area of available storage. I think you got the drive size about right.
I looked at Windows software bloat and MS has never used more than 10% of the "sweet spot" hard drive at the time of release. I wrote about it here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/softwarebloat.html
The grand parent is pretty much spot on.
I have been charting the annual price improvement of flash memory and hard disks. I have data for flash going back 9 years and for hard drives, 16 years.
About 5 years ago, hard drives stopped improving at their traditional 100% a year rate and dropped back to about 40% a year. Flash on the other hand has averaged about 150% improvement a year for the 9 year period and over the last five years its gone up to 165%.
Flash actually seems to be speeding up where disk seems to have hit a slump.
If you look at where prices for disk and flash are now and do simple extrapolation you get pretty much what the grand parent said:
1 inch drives - not competitive, ceased production.
1.8 inch drives, 12 months and they are gone. Seagate gets about 20 to 25% of it's revenue from these babies.
2.5 inch drives - 4 years. In 4 years laptops will represent 66% of the market and none of them will come with hard disks.
3.5 inch drives - 6 years. Its all over baby.
Here is my data and charts:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.html
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.html
and the two compared:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashdiskcomparo.html
Flash doesn't seem to have followed Moores law in its price improvement for the last 9 years. I doubt this is about to change in the next few years.
Huh?
18 doublings:
0 - 4k
1 - 8k
2 - 16k
3 - 32k
4 - 64k
5 - 128k
6 - 256k
7 - 512k
8 - 1024k - 1MB
9 - 2MB
10 - 4MB
11 - 8MB
12 - 16MB
13 - 32MB
14 - 64MB
15 - 128MB
16 - 256MB
17 - 512MB
18 - 1GB
A typical machine does indeed have very close to this amount of RAM.
Moores law seems to fit almost perfectly even after 27 years. The guy was a genius.
You can take solice in the fact that you saved some money over a flash based iPod of the same capacity. 160 gig of 1.8 inch disk is still a bit cheaper than 160 of flash storage. But not for long.
I've been studying the price improvement of hard disks and flash for a few years now. If both of them keep improving at the same rate they have for the last 5 years then 1.8 inch drives wont be viable in 12 months from now. The flash will be cheaper.
Graphs and data for this prediction here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashdiskcomparo.html
In a way, you have bought a peice of computing history, the last of the disk based MP3 players.
Yes, the price improvement of flash is awesome.
I've been studying this and if the price improvement rate of flash stays about the same as it has for the last 5 years (and hard disk does the same) it will only be 4 years before every laptop has a flash drive.
Charts and data here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashdiskcomparo.html
In Australia it was illegal until last year. Considering that the iTunes store didnt open there until 2005 leaving almost no way to use them legally , and around 200,000 had been sold by then, a large number of the population were basically criminals.
What does the expression bottom of the price curve mean. In hard drives, is it the disk with the most megabytes per dollar? Perhaps it means the largest disk available at the time?
Just to give an idea, you can expect about only about 3000 visits over 4 hours from a link in a comment this far down in a story. Unless your photos are crazily large or your ISP has really mean quotas your site wont be "slasdoted" so just go ahead and post the link. People that enjoy this story will also enjoy your photos. Go ahead and share it around.
Wil,
does it annoy you that you that Zonk posted a review of your book right when it cant be purchased?
I mean 80,000 visitors who are exactly the kind of people who would enjoy your book are getting wasted by poor timing.
I am in agreement. Extrapolating any exponential trend is pretty foolhardy but at least it gives you an idea of what to expect. You are right about the fact that when flash gets within a certain price range of disk it's other advantages win out over price. Flash has already overtaken 1 inch drives in the market and is getting close to displacing 1.8 inch drives. A few years and 2.5 inch disks will be history. A this point I expect the server space to adopt flash due to its high transaction per second advantage and almost total price insensitivity in this market. The bulk storage market will take a while longer , hence the 11 year prediction for 3.5 inch drives. I think it may take less time as volumes reduce and so the technology loses economies of scale.
Yes I agree. My reserach shows that, in relation to price, the annual improvement over three years for flash comes in at 109% whereas for hard disks over the same period the figure is only 35%
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.html
This means, if the two trends continue over time, it will actually become hard to justify buying a hard disk instead of flash, especially the smaller ones the cost a lot more per gig.
Australia doesnt have a retail culture of rebates. It never has had one. The price used is the lowest advertised price found in a reputable computer magazine. This means the prices are good representation of what people payed for the drive at the time. It's Apples to Apples.
I studied this with hard disks and my data showed that the "sweet spot" hard disk (the drive with the best bang for buck) has actually steadily decreaased over time.
You can see the chart at the bottom of this page:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.html
look in the Annual Sweet Spot Price Trends section.
Basically, my data disagrees with you. The average drive is getting cheaper.