Solid state hard drives

[Pacioli]

They still cost more per gigabyte than traditional hard drives. When do you think their cost will be approximately the same as traditional hard drives? One year? Two years? Longer?

 

[Turner]

The cost will be approximate when they're manufactured as much as a mechanical hard drive.

Eventually it will be cheaper....

 

[Abaddon]

With traditional being so cheap for such mass storage, the market is still on their side.

 

[Turner]

2TB for under $100 US? yeah.... pretty much!

 

[GoodGame]

I think SSDs will fill a different role than hard drives, and the reason will be reliability vs. speed.

I think that SSDs will trump the fast hard drives like the Raptor, but I think in reliability people will still want slower terabyte drives to dump all their media on. It's just more convenient than dumping it on DVDs. Though that might change if the recordable media significantly improves a generation(s).

 

[Speedo]

Never. Physical HDDs are far more efficient space-wise than NAND flash. They'll both be surpassed by new technology before flash will ever catch magnetic media.

 

[tokala]

If one tries to extrapolate the "price per storage unit" for both technologies, it might happen that both will run into a physical limit before the price will catch up. The harddrives are already there (superparamagnitic limit) but so far manage to trick their way around it. Lithography has (optimistically) only one more order of magnitude to go.

 

[civ_king]

If one tries to extrapolate the "price per storage unit" for both technologies, it might happen that both will run into a physical limit before the price will catch up. The harddrives are already there (superparamagnitic limit) but so far manage to trick their way around it. Lithography has (optimistically) only one more order of magnitude to go.

Actually HDDs haven't hit a limit, they figured out how to octuple capacity to 24TB for 3.5" and 8TB for 2.5"s

 

[Speedo]

Actually HDDs haven't hit a limit, they figured out how to octuple capacity to 24TB for 3.5" and 8TB for 2.5"s

That's not what he's talking about. There are physical limits on how densely data can be packed into a platter. Older drives using longitudinal recording have long since hit the limit. Newer drives using perpendicular recording about 4/5ths of the way to the (estimated) limit of that technology. Once we hit that limit, we'll need new materials or new recording techniques to keep advancing magnetic HDDs.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

What is the biggest single hard drive anyways? Even if only in a labratory. I googled it and got outdated stuff.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

I think SSDs will fill a different role than hard drives, and the reason will be reliability vs. speed.

I think that SSDs will trump the fast hard drives like the Raptor, but I think in reliability people will still want slower terabyte drives to dump all their media on. It's just more convenient than dumping it on DVDs. Though that might change if the recordable media significantly improves a generation(s).

This exactly. SSD's arent competing with the 1-3TB HDDs. They simply cannot, not on price, not on capacity. SSDs are competing with the Caviar Blacks, the VelociRaptors, and all of the 10-15k RPM drives out there.

I have a SSD and its one of the best investments I made in my computer. Its amazingly fast, things run near instantly now, boot time is nil. It will never replace my storage array though.

 

[civ_king]

probably 4TB