Solid State Hard Disks...

[jamin]

With the advent of 1gb and up flash / solid state disks, how long do you think it will be before the mechanical beasts within our pc's are replaced by these electronic storage mediums?

Solid state (electronic) storage medium has many benefits over existing hard disk technology. ie data transfer rate, shock resistance, size, noise reduction.

Remember that 10 - 15 years ago, pc's had 10mb hard disks and only 1 - 4mb ram (ish). Technology has come a long way!

[Trash Man]

Can't see why not. I read something not that long ago about they had just made a 3gb flash disc/card but the price was like £6000 or something stupid.

I voted for the 5 year mark.

[Stoo]

Yeah, look at drive capacities 5 years ago, it was a luxury if you had a 13 gig drive, so that's about a tenfold increase (if not more) to todays run of the mill drives..

[Trash Man]

Originally posted by Stoo
Yeah, look at drive capacities 5 years ago, it was a luxury if you had a 13 gig drive, so that's about a tenfold increase (if not more) to todays run of the mill drives..

If that is the case then in 5 years time a flash hdd would be around the 30gb mark, but in 5 years time 30gb is gonna be next to nothing.

[luke313]

A 30gb flash boot drive would be cool. Super-quick, reliable, but expensive. Replacement for scsi maybe???

[Stoo]

Originally posted by Trash Man
If that is the case then in 5 years time a flash hdd would be around the 30gb mark, but in 5 years time 30gb is gonna be next to nothing.

it'd make a nice *small* ipod though

[DaBeeeenster]

I think it will happen. There will come a point where we cant fill up our drives, and as memory prices keep falling they will become financially viable.

Video storage is the last medium in terms of storage requirements; nothing else that the average user requires needs more storage space, and once the price of memory falls to say 2 quid per GB it will start making sense.

What about reliability tho? What if your system gets a power spike or something?

[Bindibadgi]

5 years definately. Current disk technology is reaching saturation cause people want speed not size as few people need a quarter of a terrabyte harddisk space.

Tbh i cant wait for solid state tech - cooler, quieter and 1000x faster drives! YES PLEASE!

[St3v3]

It's all about the price/performance ratio.

As soon as larger drives in excess of 40gb come out, then maybe they'd become more common. There are huge advantages to solid state storage over hard disks but hard disks are still a little bit faster so I'm led to believe.

You would also have to come up with a dedicated bus for these drives in order to make them faster as USB2 and Firewire aren't designed for accomodating drives of that speed (just look at external hard drives as an example). Maybe if Serial ATA was to have support for these solid state disks then it'd be more likely to happen.

[Bindibadgi]

i think they should be wired straight into the PCI-E bus tbh. plenty of bandwidth. We wont see the disks till then.

They wont be solid state like we know it now, they are developing derivitives of RAM to hold the data iirc.

[acidrainy]

I think they will be......
I can picture TFT monitors with 50gig flash drives in them
Could be handy in the mobile world of computing for power consumption I suppose....

[PMM]

Highend machines will prob continue to use mechnical
storage medium purely due to the high density and large
surface area.

However low spec everyday machines more than suitable
for internet surfing misc this and that should be just around the
corner Psion have been using CF cards for years esp to good
use in there Series 7 Netbooks.

There is nothing stopping the PC world in creating PC compatible
machines runnning CF only setups in compact units or all in one
LCD panels.

There is currently a 4 Gig CF card available for $1499
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0308/03...xar4gbship.asp

Expensive but more than enough space to run a Windows install
and a few Apps

The world of technology moves fast these days.

I Admit to using my 512meg CF card as a type of floppy disk drive
between my PC and my Cam & Psion Series 7 and for gen data
storage i can take anywhere anytime by just slipping it in my
pocket.

[acidrainy]

Originally posted by PMM
The world of technology moves fast these days.

That will be that Moore's law kicking in again then..

Damn that 18 month cycle!