News - Seagate launches Solid State Drive products

[jim]

Or, back to the engine analogy, just because the majority of unity end up being electric, doesn't mean there will never be a petrol/diesel motor made again. They still have their uses, and will continue for a very long time.

I know SSDs are getting cheaper and more spacious, but it will be a very long time until mechanical drives are completely replaced. There will always be a need for bulk storage accessible at reasonable rates (if it can saturate a gigabit network, it's "fast enough" for a lot of things).

Definitely. Although the one thing you do have to say is that there is no real limit to flash memory. If you genuinely filled a 3.5" drive with the highest density flash modules the capacity would be ridiculous.

By comparison, the hard drive isn't really going places right now. We had a 3TB drive in 2010, almost 3 years ago now, and there's no sign of anything above 4TB in the immediate future. Meanwhile we've got consumer 1TB 2.5" SSDs on the market, right now.

Okay, there are some interesting new technologies appearing in hard drive capacity every few months, but none appear to have actually come to fruition yet.

I agree that they'll probably be sticking around for a good few years yet, but I just don't see where WD and Seagate are going to go in the long-term.

[Funkstar]

I actually don't think they need to past 3-4TB at the moment. And yes, you can build a 4TB SSD, it's just going to be massively expensive, 15-20x the price of a 4TB HDD.

The people that need more than 4TB in a single volume are going to go RAID anyway for redundancy/data security/availability. I know that's what I would be doing. But eventually we will see the need for larger capacities. Once consumer cameras are capturing 4K video at very high bitrates, which will happen long before we get any 4K streaming or broadcast (a GoPro3 can do it at 14fps today, next year it ill be 4K @ 30fps for a few hundred quid, then 60fps, then 120fps...) Then more people are going to need and want very large drives.

But thinking about it, perhaps you are right. I don't know if it's practical, but what would be good is a kind of flash memory that is very cheap to produce, but doesn't need to be very fast. A direct equivalent to the HDD, slow and cheap and manufactured on a massive scale.

Only time will tell. All this talk of SSDs and large HDDs just reminds me how desperately I need to upgrade to a SSD in my desktop, swap the 1TB drive for photos to something bigger and get my file server back online again