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- darkstar949, on 05/29/2008, -0/+68This article actually raises an interesting point - currently the big bottleneck in most computers is the hard disk, but there doesn't seem to be a very good way past this bottleneck short of making everything in the machine solid state. Things are getting better, but right now computers still spend a good deal of time sitting around waiting for the hard disk to spin around to the right sector.
- sgiffy, on 05/30/2008, -4/+50It will be a while before SSD can compete with traditional hard drives in both size and cost. But it probably won't be that long before an SSD boot drive and a regular drive for storing data is standard. Plus you could mirror the SSD to the regular hard drive and be able to quickly restore in the even to failure.
- mcwilshire, on 05/30/2008, -2/+38"Complete with serial mouse, IBM Model M keyboard, and 15" color VGA monitor, it was my parents' hope for making me into a competent writer, but it better succeeded in making me a PC gamer. This ancient machine, 17 years old, is incredibly outdated in the physical basis of every technological detail, except one: its hard disk."
*keyboard - Fergy, on 05/30/2008, -0/+32When are they going to introduce the hybrid drives? Just give me a 1TB drive with 8GB of fast flash storage for 250 dollar. Integrate that flash storage in the drive itself where the firmware will take of everything so I don't need OS support.
- Jeffler, on 05/30/2008, -0/+28Guys, read it from different context. He's being dugg down because most of you think he means keyboard was spelled wrong, but he mans that the Model M keyboard is not out of date (agreed btw)
- vulpoi, on 05/29/2008, -3/+29Or maybe the future just leads to cheaper products and higher quality...?
- Hellman109, on 05/29/2008, -2/+27I run a RAID 0 array (only two disks) on my main gaming PC and it makes the whole thing run allot smoother. Cost ~$110 for an extra 500GB Drive (thats AUD not USD) and everything loads and responsds faster now.
- ChayD, on 05/30/2008, -0/+22"...a copy of the text of the entire Internet, stored by Google and its competitors and searched for text in web search queries, is in the vicinity of 20TB"
20TB? Is that all? I know its only text, but I somehow thought it would be much more, like, in the hundreds of terabytes at least.
Wow, that means that you could store all the textual knowledge (and rants/raves/blogs/fora and other miscellania) of most of the world in a box *on your desktop*! - Balloondoggies, on 05/30/2008, -0/+21yea, I know, it is hard to click on the "about" link and read it:
http://arstechnica.com/site/about.ars
"At Ars Technica—the name is Latin-derived for the "art of technology"—..." - kingmanic, on 05/30/2008, -0/+18The throughput improves with raid but average seek times remain the same.
- darthgoat, on 05/30/2008, -0/+18SSD may very well be the future but I'm cheap NOW!
- wellyuk, on 05/30/2008, -0/+15That you even mentioned FLAC/OGG means you're not a normal user. A "normal user" has never heard of FLAC or OGG.
- lynx44, on 05/30/2008, -1/+14I agree. In the business world I can see that they'll be switching most of their data to SSD if speed is a concern, but for a consumer, SSD only makes sense to put your OS and program files on. I only need terabytes of space for all the media I have, and the speed at which a disc based HD runs is perfectly suitable for that.
- JMellissa, on 05/30/2008, -1/+13Here I go again with the broken record...
Flash is OK, but it wears out after 10E+5 erase cycles.
FRAM wears out after 10E+12 erase cycles.
That's ALOT more zeros... OK?
I wish the "powers that be" would embrace the better technology instead of just
forging the path towards the greater short-term profit. - jdepp, on 05/30/2008, -0/+12I read somewhere that Google uses transit vans with ~120TB of disk storage to drive between different sites rather than sending updates via the net directly, which suggests they're indexing at least 120TB.
- KibibyteBrain, on 05/30/2008, -0/+12You mean actually doing 5 second of research before spending 10 seconds making an ass out of yourself on digg. No way.
- darkened, on 05/30/2008, -3/+15Should we get off your porch?
- Chalks777, on 05/30/2008, -0/+12what's even more impressive is this: "storing complete copies of the text of the internet in RAM"
IN RAM. - Zippo, on 05/30/2008, -0/+11I really have little issue with "traditional" hard drives. They're pretty reliable.
So, until solid-state drives in high capacities are actually affordable, I'll stick with platter drives.
My one wish is that manufacturers start marketing their hard drives in BINARY, not metric... as drives get bigger, the actual difference grows larger and larger... a drive marketed as "1TB" is hardly actually 1TB. - captmorgan555, on 05/30/2008, -0/+10To sum up this article, SSD is still faster but more expensive. The first 90% of the article is a history on HDDs. Nothing is being mentioned other than the new price of 1TB of HDDs. It doesn't even mention the price of SSD.
- stealth210, on 05/30/2008, -0/+10I think you're so wrong on this one. Have you really typed on a model M? It's a treat! I have one at home on my main dev machine and I feel like I can type much faster and more accurately on it than the modern day keyboards. I can't use it at work though because I don't want to disturb my coworkers with the loud clicky sound.
- binorgog, on 08/07/2008, -0/+82 TB SSD for 200.00 (US Dollars) will be by buy point.
- lordmetroid, on 05/30/2008, -0/+8I am concerned that DNA retrieval time is far to great to make it feasible.
- Chalks777, on 05/30/2008, -0/+8do you mean "caching"?
- solid12345, on 05/30/2008, -0/+8Indeed, I could live with my data being wiped on a gaming or leisure PC but when it comes to work purposes I have to have some safety mechanism. I guess the alternative would be to use a SSD as your daily work drive and back everything up on a traditional HD at night.
- bradrichmond, on 05/29/2008, -2/+10I think i'll take the extra boot time for data recovery to be available
- gutistg, on 05/30/2008, -1/+8No, you're not.
- dafragsta, on 05/30/2008, -0/+7The best solution is a hybrid system. Hard drives are STILL fast enough for a lot of things. I can multitrack 24-bit/96khz audio with no problems. The same could be said about video editing. Hard drives will have their place for some time to come. What I want is faster loading programs and no temp or page files on a hard drive, but hard drives are cheap and that's great for storing massive amounts of media.
I think saying that hard drives are the bottleneck is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The biggest problem with hard drives is that it's extremely unwieldy to back up a TB in a reliable way that is not magnetic. Even with Blu-Ray, which is still not widely available, let alone cheap, it would be extremely tedious to burn off a single TB of data onto disc, which would be the ideal format for archival purposes. - HonoredMule, on 05/30/2008, -0/+6Mirroring improves average seek time, but only if you have good hardware raid that knows the platters' current rotational angles (read: not the crap that came with your motherboard, and starting at around 300 for just the controller). More importantly, it improves (roughly doubles) data reliability rather than hurting (halving) it, and doesn't hurt data portability (as in ability to retrieve the data from one or both of the physical discs using different hardware).
I learnt the hard way how pointless consumer raid is, however. I ran a mirror on 2 SATA drives (with a crappy-but-better-than-most onboard controller chip) which improved read throughput significantly, and noticeably shortened boot time. But that was pretty much the only discernible benefit (and who cares when the desktop stays up constantly anyway). More importantly, the performance progressively and irreversibly degraded with fragmentation (defragmenting did not fully recover the lost performance), at a slow enough rate that I did not notice until I changed the configuration a year later. Latency was increasing, and the crappy raid hardware I was using actually degraded response time to whichever drive was worse, rather than pulling transactional data from whichever drive responded first (thus splitting reads only on large operations). When I removed the second disc, performance actually improved and both discs are still in good condition and performing well separately.
At what it would cost to gain a real, meaningful improvement from RAID in anything other than throughput, SSDs are a far more worthy proposition - ahhell, on 05/30/2008, -3/+9Duh!
It took an analyst to come with that startling conclusion?!?!? - sikosmurf, on 05/30/2008, -1/+7Windows-E : Opens up Windows Explorer.
Windows-D : Shows the Desktop.
Windows-M : Minimizes everything.
Windows-L : Locks the computer for password entry.
Windows-R : Opens up the Run dialog box.
Windows-Tab: In Vista, is like a 3D alt-tab, similar to Compiz Fusion.
The windows button is pretty useful. - bluntphallus, on 05/30/2008, -0/+6I'll thrust my drive hard into your mouth and splatter my platters on your sectors.
Yes, I do fail. Thank you. - wicketr, on 05/30/2008, -1/+7When SSD becomes common place, you will be able to have your main hard drive run off of SSD, and it'll be able to make backups to a "traditional" hard drive in the background without even breaking a sweat.
The future is obviously going to be SSD. It's only a matter of time and money to get it into the right price range. I'd expect less than 2 years before it's usual for a pro user to be buying these.
Frankly, 1 TB hard drives are just ridiculous for the average person right now. Hard Drive manufacturers have reached the end of that race (for the time being), and now the main push will be in silent, energy efficient, fast drives. I'd say less than 5% of home users need a hard drive over 200GB. - LogicBomB, on 05/30/2008, -2/+8I'm tired of keeping up with the new tech that keeps coming out - give me the best of what's strandard right now and I'm happy.
- cerejota, on 05/30/2008, -0/+6now, that would be to simple and obvious...
- freshyill, on 05/30/2008, -4/+9Raise your hand if you've hit that things by accident way more times than on purpose!
- blah247, on 05/30/2008, -0/+5http://static.gpicon.org/pub/pics/2189457-001.jpg
vs.
http://www.cesweb.org/shared_files/innovations/inn ...
You decide... - freshyill, on 05/30/2008, -0/+5Glad somebody else called them out on this. That article was pretty devoid of anything new. There wasn't even any analysis to it. Just them saying HDs got cheap but SSDs will get cheap too.
- SSCrow, on 05/30/2008, -0/+5SSD for OS and major apps, HDD for regular storage.
- kaptainKraken, on 05/30/2008, -1/+6how about some regular backups?
- Nezacant, on 05/30/2008, -4/+8Ever tried to type on a model M? I know a lot of people liked them, (they were great back in the day) but compared to today's keyboards... I'd rather use a pencil.
- KaivenTor, on 05/30/2008, -0/+4Consider how fast the price of flash drives is falling (not quite as fast as regular hard drives, but it's still much less than it was a few years ago), and I can definetely see this happening in the future. Imagine a single chip able to control the operating system, which then connects into a main storage drive for various programs and files and that will definetely bee a step up for consumer computing. Allow programs to load from the SSD if enough room is there and you've got a pretty sweet setup indeed.
Servers would be a lot more expensive for something like this, but it would still be an improvement, albeit a small one for say, web servers as opposed to file servers.
Just think, the computers of the future using technology that's been around since the TI-81 calculator (or before). - inactive, on 05/30/2008, -3/+7SSDs still have major issues related to error correction and there are only so many times an application can rewrite data to the cells in NAND memory before they wear out and become unreliable. "Wear leveling," software, which distributes data more evenly across the silicon so as to not wear out one area faster than another, and thereby prolonging the life of erasable computer storage memory, is beginning to address to problem it's still in its infancy.
- ahawks, on 05/30/2008, -1/+5Meh, my next storage upgrade is going to be 4x 500gb drives in a RAID5 setup. A 500gb drive is around $80 currently.
There's more to storage than speed. - disher91, on 05/30/2008, -1/+5Well written article, but I don't think people will be trading in their 1TB for a smaller drive any time soon... I know that I can handle a little more wait time for the cost differenct of a normal compared to SSD.
Like sgiffy said, a SSD boot drive might be a reasonable midpoint in the near future... they're just too expensive right now, though... at least on my student income :) - MWeather, on 05/30/2008, -0/+4I think I'll just back my data up and use the faster booting SSD disks.
- inactive, on 05/30/2008, -0/+3I kinda agree with dafragsta on one part.
Hybrids:
I wish that hybrid drives would be more common place and that the SSD side were slightly larger.
If software and/or OS makers would have an install that allows parts of the program to be installed on the SSD ( as a user option only) and then install the rest where things needed to be written to, it would make for the best of both worlds.
But for backups?
If you can fill a terabyte, that cheers, you can probably go out and get another drive to back it up.
Hard drives are still the fastest way to backup data. - stealth210, on 05/30/2008, -0/+3At least show a proper model M with the numpad:
http://www.mikecase.net/ModelM/IBM-Model-M-Keyboar ... - captmorgan555, on 05/30/2008, -0/+33x 10,000rpm in raid 5 would be good for you. Raid 0 would be faster but it sounds like you care about have some redundancy. I would get 2 smaller 15,000 rpm drives for my OS and games and what not and then get a third low rpm/high capacity drive for file storage.
- Nezacant, on 05/30/2008, -1/+4*Raises hand!*
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