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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. 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.)

I wasn't being hung up on the access method or technology available today.

I'll settle for any solid state memory that is cheap, fast, capacious and
MUCH faster than spinning platters.

news.xtra.co.nz wrote:

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

I think Maxtor is disappearing anyway as Seagate just bought them.

(Don Hills) wrote in
news::

>
> You won't see flash based drives replacing conventional drives any
> time, let alone any time soon.

You are a bold one!

Personally, I would never dare to state that something will never happen -
I don't see that you could ever know the future for certain.

I can't see that the number of write cycles would be that limiting -
especially as the limits increase. There are ways to reduce the amount of
writes anyway, like working more within the normal RAM and writing to flash
RAM less.

We already have OSs that will load completely into RAM and run from there,
how much easier will that be when a standard machine has 4GB RAM, or even
64GB RAM?



--
Mark Heyes (New Zealand)
See my pics at www.gigatech.co.nz (last updated 5-September-05)
"The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a
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Maskerade

At that very moment, steve turned to nz.comp and said
> > - 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.

I'm talking about the bandwidth for transferring data (ie. MB/s). Flash
is generally some distance behind hard drives, which isn't what you'd
expect but it's true...

--
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
>> > - 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.
>
> I'm talking about the bandwidth for transferring data (ie. MB/s). Flash
> is generally some distance behind hard drives, which isn't what you'd
> expect but it's true...

Yep.....today.

I was talking about when it's cheap, fast and ready for primetime.

It might not be "flash".....but it will be solid state storage and operate
at memory speeds.....not spinning platter speeds.

I hope. That's what I want.

In article <>,
says...
>
> 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.)

Core makes a comeback...

"Rob J" <> wrote in message
news: z...
> 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

I'm not sure - the expertise of these companies is in harddrives.

They would be competing with companies whose expertise is in flash mem.

Don Hills wrote:

>>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(*).

Yep, AS/400s are 'different' to how the rest of us see PCs and more
reliable than anything short of a mainframe. I did some short term tech
support tech support at a company with 3 AS/400s - they were in their
own separate server room and nobody there knew much about managing them.
But they didn't really need to - issues were so rare, and the servers
would phone home to IBM if any parts were failing etc.

I suspect new comsumer level PCs with solid state storage would not use
some radically different architecture though.

--
Cheers
Anton