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I'm very much looking forward to the day when spinning metal platters are
retired forever and storage is based on flash/solid-state media.

- Access times in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds

- Quiet

- No mechanical failures

- robust physically

- low power usage

Just a few more years to go.

http://news.com.com/Bye-bye+hard+dri...ht&tag=nl.e433

"steve" <> wrote in message
news:...
> I'm very much looking forward to the day when spinning metal platters are
> retired forever and storage is based on flash/solid-state media.
>
> - Access times in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds
>
> - Quiet
>
> - No mechanical failures
>
> - robust physically
>
> - low power usage
>
> Just a few more years to go.
>
> http://news.com.com/Bye-bye+hard+dri...ht&tag=nl.e433

It would be like the invention of the petrol engine - all the old
technologies would just disappear.

You'd see huge companies such as Seagate, WD , Maxtor etc simply disappear.

At that very moment, steve turned to nz.comp and said
> - Access times in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds
> - Quiet
> - No mechanical failures
> - robust physically
> - low power usage

- Reduced throughput.
(and therefore boot will usually be slower)
- Always smaller size for the same money as a hard drive.




--
aaronl at consultant dot com
For every expert, there is an equal and
opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke

Aaron Lawrence wrote:

> At that very moment, steve turned to nz.comp and said
>> - Access times in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds
>> - Quiet
>> - No mechanical failures
>> - robust physically
>> - low power usage
>
> - Reduced throughput.

Why? There is no reason for this to be true.

A spinning platter's access time is 9ms on average.

Accessing a chip 1 million times faster is unlikely to see throughput
decline.

> (and therefore boot will usually be slower)
> - Always smaller size for the same money as a hard drive.

There will be a crossover point...and that's what I'm talking about.

In article <Jy_uf.12485$>,
says...
>
> "steve" <> wrote in message
> news:...
> > I'm very much looking forward to the day when spinning metal platters are
> > retired forever and storage is based on flash/solid-state media.
> >
> > - Access times in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds
> >
> > - Quiet
> >
> > - No mechanical failures
> >
> > - robust physically
> >
> > - low power usage
> >
> > Just a few more years to go.
> >
> > http://news.com.com/Bye-bye+hard+dri...ht&tag=nl.e433
>
> It would be like the invention of the petrol engine - all the old
> technologies would just disappear.
>
> You'd see huge companies such as Seagate, WD , Maxtor etc simply disappear.

Not likely, they would evolve. Quantum used to make big expensive solid
state HDDs

Aaron Lawrence wrote:

> - Always smaller size for the same money as a hard drive.

But there seems to be a constant minimum price for disks based on
manufacturing costs - they are complex, precise and mechanical.

So disks don't really get cheaper, they just get dramatically bigger as
densities increase.

Meanwhile flash drives have small but quickly growing capacities.
Economies of scale for flash memory have kicked in with the growth of
USB keys and digital cameras etc, and flash memory units can now be made
cheaply. The minimum cost is much much lower than that for a HD.

There will come a cross over point soon where the size of cheap flash
drives is big enough for non demanding computer storage needs (eg less
than 40GB). When that happens, the better price per GB of the cheapest
HD won't matter because the HD is so much bigger than what the low end
of the market needs.

eg at that point (in say 3-5yrs) a 40GB flash disk might be a cheaper
unit than the minimum sized HD (say 200GB then) even if the disk still
has a better cost per GB.

I think flash disks in laptops would be great for durability, battery
life, heat etc etc. Does the average laptop user really need 60GB+ of
storage?

Of course users wanting lots of space will still want HDs for quite a
while yet.

--
Cheers
Anton

T'was the Thu, 5 Jan 2006 14:23:39 +1300 when I remembered
"news.xtra.co.nz" <> saying something like this:

>You'd see huge companies such as Seagate, WD , Maxtor etc simply disappear.

I'd say they'd migrate to flash technologies themselves over going
"Well that was a good run boys, I'm off to Pukekohe in New Zealand to
retire".
--
Cheers,

Waylon Kenning.

You won't see flash based drives replacing conventional drives any time, let
alone any time soon. Flash memory has an inherent characteristic that makes
it unsuitable for general read/write use: limited number of write cycles.
You're more likely to see MRAM (Google it) or similar technology as a hard
disk replacement.

(MRAM is faster and denser than DRAM and is non-volatile.)

--
Don Hills (dmhills at attglobaldotnet) Wellington, New Zealand
"New interface closely resembles Presentation Manager,
preparing you for the wonders of OS/2!"
-- Advertisement on the box for Microsoft Windows 2.11 for 286

Don Hills wrote:
> You won't see flash based drives replacing conventional drives any time, let
> alone any time soon. Flash memory has an inherent characteristic that makes
> it unsuitable for general read/write use: limited number of write cycles.

Which also seem to be growing. Apparently some newer stuff can take 1M
cycles. And there are dynamic remapping schemes that offset that a bit.

> You're more likely to see MRAM (Google it) or similar technology as a hard
> disk replacement.
>
> (MRAM is faster and denser than DRAM and is non-volatile.)

Possibly, but I don't see where the economies of scale will come from in
the near future. MRAM will have to displace Flash in consumer
electronics or DRAM in computers before that will happen. Flash has the
current economics advantage (due to all the consumer device demand) that
tends to trump technical advantages.

Flash is not perfect, but good enough seems to beat near perfect all the
time when economics is on its side.

Flash currently seems to have far greater capacities than MRAM - ie
gigabits vs megabits and quickly rising. Also Flash is now cheaper than
DRAM and MRAM is unlikely to be cheaper than DRAM until more MRAM is
produced than DRAM.

I suppose the question is will the Flash vs HD crossover happen before
the possible MRAM (or similar) vs Flash one? My guess is that Flash will
take over low end HDs (maybe 3-5 yrs) before whatever replaces Flash is
ready for the larger capacities (maybe 5-8 yrs).


Although it is interesting wondering about a future MRAM equipped
computer (for both working memory and storage). Where would the working
memory live? In a virtual memory file in the filesystem maybe? Or
more likely the filesystem would live in a ramdisk. It would presumably
also need a 64bit OS for addressing it all

--
Cheers
Anton

In article <V6ivf.12790$>,
"AD." <> wrote:

(a differing opinion)

Well, we'll just have to wait and see who will be right. Probably neither of
us, something will come out of left field that no-one thought of.

>Although it is interesting wondering about a future MRAM equipped
>computer (for both working memory and storage). Where would the working
>memory live? In a virtual memory file in the filesystem maybe? Or
>more likely the filesystem would live in a ramdisk. It would presumably
>also need a 64bit OS for addressing it all

IBM introduced a working system using that architecture 30 years ago and is
still using it today. It's currently known as the AS/400(*). It has no
concept of a filesystem as you know it. Everything (programs and data) is in
memory at all times, memory mapped in a 64-bit address space. Since the
machine doesn't have that much RAM, it uses a VMM (Virtual Memory Manager)
to swap out LRU (Least Recently Used) pages to make room for pages that are
currently being accessed. The swap medium is currently hard disks, and the
disk formatting includes a 64-bit field at the beginning of each sector
which contains the 64-bit memory address of the first byte of data in the
sector.

It's fully object oriented, program and data objects are encapsulated and
can only be accessed by the defined methods. The security model is enforced
by hardware so there's no way to trick it into doing something above your
privilege level. A pretty boring machine by computer enthusiasts standards,
but beloved by businesses who want a reliable business system that requires
a minimum of skilled administration.

(*) You may never have heard of the AS/400, but if the AS/400 division of
IBM were to be split off from the rest of IBM it would be the second largest
computer company in the world behind the rest of IBM.)

--
Don Hills (dmhills at attglobaldotnet) Wellington, New Zealand
"New interface closely resembles Presentation Manager,
preparing you for the wonders of OS/2!"
-- Advertisement on the box for Microsoft Windows 2.11 for 286