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Nicholas Sherlock wrote:
> steve wrote:
>
>> Flash hard drives will be standard in all PCs within a very few years, I
>> would think.
>
> The price will have to reduce massively. Although prices are falling,
> have you seen the prices for 2gb flash cards recently? AFAICS, with
> billions of discrete elements in each chip, won't there be a high
> failiure rate?
>
> Cheers,
> Nicholas Sherlock

Initially they will be expensive....but say 5 years from now I would
expect them to standard.

Think back to 2000.....and Win98SE was only a year old and WinXP hadn't
been released yet.

Hard drives then were about 20GB for spinning platters.

In article <429438b3$>, steve <>
wrote:

>Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> Where have I heard this before ... anybody remember magnetic bubble
>> memory from the late 1970s? It was slower to access than semiconductor
>> RAM, but more expensive than hard drives. Falling between two stools, it
>> was never very popular.
>
>Agreed.....but that was then and the day of solid state hard drives has
>always been coming.
>
>The sheer reliability of the things, combined with more speed and chips
>are getting cheaper all the time.

So have the hard drives.

>The cost curve had to meet the demand curve at some point......and there
>would be no looking back.

The point is, it has to catch up with hard drives. But they continue to
grow in capacity-per-unit-price at an unrelenting rate.

In article <429439f7$>, steve <>
wrote:

>Nicholas Sherlock wrote:
>> steve wrote:
>>
>>> Flash hard drives will be standard in all PCs within a very few years, I
>>> would think.
>>
>> The price will have to reduce massively. Although prices are falling,
>> have you seen the prices for 2gb flash cards recently? AFAICS, with
>> billions of discrete elements in each chip, won't there be a high
>> failiure rate?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Nicholas Sherlock
>
>Initially they will be expensive....but say 5 years from now I would
>expect them to standard.

But they probably would not be cost-competitive with terabyte hard
drives.

>Think back to 2000.....and Win98SE was only a year old and WinXP hadn't
>been released yet.
>
>Hard drives then were about 20GB for spinning platters.

And now they're 300-400 GB ... and they're still hard drives.

On Wed, 25 May 2005 17:56:03 +1200, Steve <> wrote:

>Like these? just need them to be 10 or 20GB+
>
>http://www.pp.co.nz/HardDiskDrives-SolidState.php
>
I like the MTBF, 1,000,000 hours.

In article <d716im$u6c$>, Nicholas Sherlock <> wrote:
>steve wrote:
>> Flash hard drives will be standard in all PCs within a very few years, I
>> would think.
>
>The price will have to reduce massively. Although prices are falling,
>have you seen the prices for 2gb flash cards recently? AFAICS, with
>billions of discrete elements in each chip, won't there be a high
>failiure rate?

The great joy of integrated circuits is that it's effectively one thing to
fail. While there might be millins of 'transistor equivalents' ... these
don't enter the equation. As it was once explained to me ... we wouldn't
have video recorders if they built them out of discrete transistors



Bruce


-------------------------------------
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
- George Bernard Shaw
Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
- Ambrose Bierce

Caution ===== followups may have been changed to relevant groups
(if there were any)

In article <>, -=rjh=- <> wrote:
>Bruce Sinclair wrote:
>> In article <d716im$u6c$>, Nicholas Sherlock
> <> wrote:
>>>steve wrote:
>>>>Flash hard drives will be standard in all PCs within a very few years, I
>>>>would think.
>>>
>>>The price will have to reduce massively. Although prices are falling,
>>>have you seen the prices for 2gb flash cards recently? AFAICS, with
>>>billions of discrete elements in each chip, won't there be a high
>>>failiure rate?

>> The great joy of integrated circuits is that it's effectively one thing to
>> fail. While there might be millins of 'transistor equivalents' ... these
>> don't enter the equation. As it was once explained to me ... we wouldn't
>> have video recorders if they built them out of discrete transistors

>But, I thought the main poblem with flash memory is that it *does* fail
>after a relatively small number of writes? What is Samsung doing here
>that is different?

Why should it ? I have not heard of a failure of any 'pen drives' ... even
though they get a hard life. Sure, that sort of life is not the kind of
write performance you'd probably get as a 'hard drive'.

(Anyone else had any of these fail or heard of it ?)

I can see the possibilities for a few more failures than memory sticks that
are physically inside computers (as they have a few extra mechanical bits
that get used occasionally ... and peopel can be a bt rough ) ... but why
would they fail any more often otherwise ? .. and if they are installed as
"hard drives", that connection/disconnection stress is minimised too ...
isn't it ?




Bruce


-------------------------------------
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
- George Bernard Shaw
Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
- Ambrose Bierce

Caution ===== followups may have been changed to relevant groups
(if there were any)

steve wrote:
> thing wrote:
>
>> Would make interesting boot disks.....one flash drive v 2 scsi/sata
>> drives and a HW raid controller....might actually work out
>> cheaper....and faster.
>>
>> Except of course if "someone" developed a read only region for the OS
>> and it was pre-installed with a MS OS.....
>
>
> I'm sure you'd be able to buy ones that didn't...or could be hacked.

Im sure you could, of course most computer users will simply buy a
Windows PC "that cant be hacked", only to find if they want to
swap to Linux or OS/2 (grin) it cant be done on that hardware.

Im sure BG gets wet dreams over that possibility....

regards

Thing

Bruce Sinclair wrote:
> In article <d716im$u6c$>, Nicholas Sherlock <> wrote:
>
>>steve wrote:
>>
>>>Flash hard drives will be standard in all PCs within a very few years, I
>>>would think.
>>
>>The price will have to reduce massively. Although prices are falling,
>>have you seen the prices for 2gb flash cards recently? AFAICS, with
>>billions of discrete elements in each chip, won't there be a high
>>failiure rate?
>
>
> The great joy of integrated circuits is that it's effectively one thing to
> fail. While there might be millins of 'transistor equivalents' ... these
> don't enter the equation. As it was once explained to me ... we wouldn't
> have video recorders if they built them out of discrete transistors
>

But, I thought the main poblem with flash memory is that it *does* fail
after a relatively small number of writes? What is Samsung doing here
that is different?

Lawrence D¹Oliveiro wrote:
> In article <429438b3$>, steve <>
> wrote:
>
>
>>Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Where have I heard this before ... anybody remember magnetic bubble
>>>memory from the late 1970s? It was slower to access than semiconductor
>>>RAM, but more expensive than hard drives. Falling between two stools, it
>>>was never very popular.
>>
>>Agreed.....but that was then and the day of solid state hard drives has
>>always been coming.
>>
>>The sheer reliability of the things, combined with more speed and chips
>>are getting cheaper all the time.
>
>
> So have the hard drives.
>
>
>>The cost curve had to meet the demand curve at some point......and there
>>would be no looking back.
>
>
> The point is, it has to catch up with hard drives. But they continue to
> grow in capacity-per-unit-price at an unrelenting rate.

Depends on what you use the disks for. For a single harddrive box like a
desktop, 1 drive is cheapest and I suspect will be for a while.

If you want something more reliable for booting then you need to go to 2
disks and a hardware raid. 2 disks plus the hw raid is not cheap, it
might be that a flash solution for boot while expensive for one unit
would be more reliable and faster than 3 traditional components.

Also some critical data like journal logs, dba logs etc could be
dedicated to a flash drive, these are usually highly critical and read /
write intensive so performance gains here yield noticable improvements.

In article <>, Mutlley <> wrote:
>GraB <> wrote:
>
>>On Wed, 25 May 2005 17:56:03 +1200, Steve <> wrote:
>>
>>>Like these? just need them to be 10 or 20GB+
>>>
>>>http://www.pp.co.nz/HardDiskDrives-SolidState.php
>>>
>>I like the MTBF, 1,000,000 hours.
>
>Hardly the fastest transfer rate avg 4Meg/sec
>
>I have worked with systems over the past few years that use flash roms
>instead of hard disks and I'm yet to me convince. Disk corruption
>seems to be the main problem compared to their HD equivalents systems

Is that lack of verification of the write, stability of the written data or
... ?



Bruce


-------------------------------------
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
- George Bernard Shaw
Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
- Ambrose Bierce

Caution ===== followups may have been changed to relevant groups
(if there were any)