End Of Days for Hard Drives?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/16/bitmicro_altima_tb_ssd/

Solid State Drives of up to 1.6TB to ship 2nd quarter of 2008.

Imagine how quickly the Windows swap file will kill those things :D

lol! You'll need to of them for Vista and Vista Service pack 1 to be installed.

[edit] Can you imagine the kind of fantastic bloat applications will come with when these drives become standard.

Considering all solid-state drives, so far, have a finite amount of write operations that can be performed before they're useless, no, hard drives won't be going anywhere. Plus, have you seen the prices on them? Good god, I could finally buy a car with the money some of those things go for.

I was just reading in this month's Popular Science (I am probably behind the curve here as I recently moved and had to wait for the magazine to be forwarded) that Dell is now shipping the first laptop with a flash drive as the main permanent storage, no hard drive at all. I wonder what kind of speeds the thing gets and how long it will be good for.

SpaceAce

well if you think about it what a better way of getting you to upgrade to another drive than make one that has a finite amount of uses. Old hard disks also have a finite amount of uses that why after so long they become naff.

Awesome! No moving parts.

Eventually, solid state drives probably will replace HD's.

However, I'm sure that it won't happen next year. The announced drives listed in the article are available from 16GB to 1.6TB. However:

You currently can get the samsung 32GB solid state drive already, but they have a MRSP of $530.
I'm sure that the 1.6TB drive mentioned in the article will be many thousands of dollars. Unless the price/size of a solid state drive comes close to that of a HD of equal size, nothing will change outside some high-end rigs and specialty systems.

(I'd love to go solid state myself, but I have a feeling that a 500GB solid state drive is still going to be a ton more expensive than a 500GB normal HD)

Oh -- I guess i'd also like to see how those solid state drives actually hold up in real life. Over the past 7 years none of my harddrives quit on me, but three USB flash drives have.

Just because it has no moving parts doesn't mean it will work forever...

SSDs are a lot faster than HDDs, so they're first choice for time critical servers. E.g. CCP runs their EVE database on a SSD machine.

There no way of knowing how good these drives are going to be, but as time gose on they will get better.

I had a quick look at the Samsung Flash http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/products/flash/Products_FlashSSD.html to see what life expectancy
you would have with regards to read/write operations. The only infomation I could find was the MTBF (2,000,000 hours).
Now as far as I know the average desktop HD has a MTBF of about 1,000,000 hours, now you would think that would mean that the SSD HD would last twice as long right? Then you could be caught out. Here's a bit from wiki to explain this.

MTBF and life expectancy
MTBF is not to be confused with life expectancy. MTBF is an indication of reliability. A device (e.g. hard drive) with a MTBF of 100,000 hours is more reliable than one with a MTBF of 50,000. However this does not mean the 100,000 hours MTBF HD will last twice as long as the 50,000 MTBF HD. How long the HD will last is entirely dependent on its life expectancy. An 100,000 MTBF HD can have a life expectancy of 2 years while a 50,000 MTBF HD can have a life expectancy of 5 years yet the HD that's expected to break down after 2 years is still considered more reliable than the 5 years one. Using the 100,000 MTBF HD as an example and putting MTBF together with life expectancy, it means the HD system should on average fail once every 100,000 hours provided it is replaced every 2 years. Another way to look at this is, if there are 100,000 units of this drive and all of them are in use at the same time and any failed drive is put back in working order immediately after the failure, then 1 unit is expected to fail every hour (due to MTBF factor).

And the wiki link with all the heavy math http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF

When it comes to hard drives I alway look at the warranty and back up any important data on DVD/CD and put them in a safe place.

Hmm very interesting. I REALLY looking forward to these so that disk operations are no longer a MASSIVE bottleneck. They'll come down in price and increase in reliability with time, like everything.

>SSDs are a lot faster than HDDs, so they're first choice
>for time critical servers. E.g. CCP runs their EVE
>database on a SSD machine.

But is it Flash based harddrives or UPS powered DRAM drives?

Well, I'm only a consumer, and I want reliable and fast storage, if someday the SSD become very reliable and in reasonable price range, I'll buy.

I know with current technology, flash dies VERY quickly if used as a system disc, because as mentioned previously, it has a very limited number of write cycles. There have also been advances in hard disc technology that will see a leap in data storage density (and probably read/write speed as a side-effect), so the whirly things have some life in them yet.

I remember reading about some company five or so years ago. They had built CD drives and harddrives using up to four different read/write mechanisms, which basically meant that they were up to four times faster than then current tech.

The harddrives were 5.25 inch drives in order to fit the extra parts inside, but the CD drives were standard sized.

Of course I don't recall the company name...