What is Digg?77 Comments
- LaCamiseta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Flash is nice, but it still won't be replacing HDDs anytime soon. Flash media supports only a limited number of writes (something like 100,000 writes on each unique area). Unfortunately, with the use of cacheing, as well as the huge ammount of writes that our current OSs make all the time, odds are that flash media will only be used for quick bootup or things similar to that.
- Mousse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5The only advantage flash has over hard disks is that there are no moving parts and it can be made to fit almost any space, which means it's best suited for the cell phone, handheld, and portable storage market. But other than that it's many generations behind rotating storage in terms of dollar per gigabyte and has a very limited number of writes, so there's no way it'll be replacing hard disks in any other niche.
- xiloki, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2A good idea could be to have / on flash and /tmp /var and /home on harddrives.
- moron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Flash based hard drives are going to come, there is no question about it. BUT at the same time there are many limitations that will be placed upon them. Sure the cost will continue to drop and if the demand for them increases the cost will continue to go through floor. I don't for-see the magnetic media hard drives dying out, but more changing careers. Traditional hard drives will become mass storage areas while the flash based drives will become the system drives.
Now, before this can happen the following problems need to be addressed :
1) Re-write life cycles must be extended - Good news, there are many different ways to do this, not just getting better reliability out of the chips, but to create more creative systems of preventing the errors, detecting them when they happen and even correcting them.
2) Data through put. Again, not really a big deal here. The chips are not that slow, but the problem is that access rates to the chips are deceiving, typically they run around 200ns per read / write (depends if you're crossing segment boundaries and what the previous command was) but that is a per bit access; bytes are 8 bits and thus require more accesses. Again, not really that big of deal, a clever engineer can easily increase the performance to where access rates will easily blow away hard drives.
3) Interface - USB is not really acceptable as a main access medium. Period.
Benefits of flash :
1) Power - much less power hungry then hard drives.
2) Space - can be created in a variety of shapes and sizes.
3) Shock resistance - banging the hard drive won't cause it to get sector errors
4) Heat - Hard drives (traditional) generate a LOT of heat, something that will be significantly reduced by going to flash.
5) Weight - it takes a lot of chips to equal the weight of a light hard drive.
Cons of Flash
PRICE - #1 stopping point, it is just significantly cheaper to go traditional drive, no question about it. 30GB is about the minimum you need today; flash just can't compete there. But as demand grows and suppliers advance the design technology, it will drop in price. Anyone remember paying $500 for a 10mb (yes MB) hard drive? I do.
It will happen, it will happen over time, and I think that the hybrid drives will be more common first and that some excellent engineering will have to go into them before they can become really useful.
M - arsenal007, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Flash drives are a wonderful concept but we still have some issue related to performance
Flash drives are relatively slower than hard drives as they mostly work with USB's or iEEE - Wolfman~K, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1errr... umm I still use tape drives, for back up. fast reliable, backs up my unix servers daily. :/
- kungPow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Still a pretty ridiculous story. $45 per gigabyte for flash, and by 2009 it will be $9 per gigabyte. Well, hard drives are already less than a $1 per gigabyte now, and only getting lower.
And the misleading statement about flash hard drives in notebooks in 2006, well, that's just a 1 gigabyte flash cache to lessen work the real hard drive has to do.
Flash drives aren't so much faster than hard drives as hard drives were faster than tape drives and floppies. - SweetsGreen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I call *****.....HD's will not go away for 20+ years. They are just too cheap to manufacture per GB.
- Pooavenger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Definitely not a goodbye.... Something like this would take 5+ years. No way flash is going to replace HDs anytime soon. HDs are larger and faster.
- cryptoz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The "only" thing is cost? Sure. Just as the only thing preventing us from sending manned spaceships across our solar system is cost as well. Only? Right. Cost is hardly a time to use "only". Grrrr.....
- aMillionAndNine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1While I think the idea of using flash memory for hard drives has been over hyped lately, the article seemed pretty reasonable in its expectations. In several years I would expect to see laptops with flash memory. That does NOT mean that hard drives are going away. Just because a new technology is used does not mean it will push out the old.
- SavannahLion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Did any of the pro-flash people actually read the article? No Digg.
- MasterDwarf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Yeah, so long to moving parts!! Hello longer life!
- davdav, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Just give me more, faster storage space.. I don't care what medium
- blistered, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Part of this story went over my head sooo fast. How does 8 gigabytes = 1 gigabyte?!?"
You mis-read it. It says 8 gigabits = 1 gigabyte.
Yeah, your correct; I'm a stooge. - NeoTechni, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Hello longer life!"
You mean shorter. Dont you know anything about flash? - YamahaSteve, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"I'm waiting for somebody to invent the medium that gives us infinite storage."
They already have it... it is called "Write Only Memory" : ) - mastercheif, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0 I thnk having Flash drives would be great for booting, but that is about it. It would be nice to have a 4 GB Flash drive built into a MOBO that is dedicated for the OS, and then using the HD for storeage.
- tmulcahy365, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This may be similar to the "rocketdrive" you describe
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/07/can_gigabyte/ - kc7gr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"...it seems that cost is the only thing that stands in the way of flash sending hard drives into storage along with tape drives..."
Excuse me?
I paid less than $100 for a used two-drive DLT (tape drive) autoloader last year at a used-computer place. $50 more got me a whole stack of 70GB tapes for it. I already had software to run regular backups for both Windows and BSD boxes,
I don't care how many comments of "Oh, it's old" it gets. Tape is still very much a PROVEN technology that has stood the test of time, and will continue to be used for backups.
You don't have to take my word for it. Just visit quantum.com, exabyte.com, or overlanddata.com. Why would these companies be cranking out new hardware with ever-increasing capacities AND (apparently) selling the stuff pretty well if tape was such a dead end?
Better yet, take a look at the data centers of big companies like Boeing, BankAmerica, etc. What are they backing up to? Tape!
"into storage along with tape drives" my arse! - gargamel51, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"In 3 years a GB of hdd space will probably cost $.25. Screw flash, we need a better alternative."
Umm.... a GB of hdd space ALREADY costs $.25. - einsteindesign, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Benchmarks? I could give a ***** about 8 second boot times. I need raw speed for Photoshop, Final Cut, and everything else that accesses my drives.
1.25 TB of drives and counting. 50 MB/s average, 30 MB/s on the slowest/oldest drives. Somehow I don't think Flash will match that without massively parallel RAID-type architecture.
Of course I'm still waiting on the holographic storage. I first heard about Canon's research in 1993 (they have wicked R&D) and 12+ years later it hasn't materialized. - we.are.devo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The article says drive space will cost about $9 per GB. That's $900 for a 100GB flash drive... WAY more expensive than a nice 100GB platter drive.
- Malakin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Flash is really really slow. It's not going to replace hard drives anytime soon.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1What about RAM as a hard drive? Other than price and losing data when powered off, is it better than flash or HD? I'm pretty sure it's faster than both and has nearly unlimited writes. I think the best solution would be a combination of technolgies. Like have the OS, crucial programs, and settings saved and loaded from Flash during shutdown/boot. Load it into RAM, and just do all your computing from there. Never touch the extra storage HDD or Flash for computing tasks. HDD would just be for files like mp3's and non crucial programs. Having your OS, saved states and settings, and favorite programs on a tiny flash card would be cool, take your computer anywhere. I'm just making stuff up, there is always better ways.
- DWatch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Every year this happens.... send a bunch of tech reporters to a big electronics show and this is the level of 'journalism' you get. It's like the reporter just gave a rep from Samsung or Micron a blank sheet of paper and said "here, write my story for me." No fact checking, no opposing views, no research past what they are fed by the company's reps at the booths. Sometimes these stories are line for line the same as the company press releases. Shoddy work, there, c|net (once again).
Do these reporters really think that saying "CEO of ProductX thinks that in a couple of years, ProductX will dominate the market and replace ProductY" is news? Hell, I could be a reporter if that is all it took. I'll just sit here in my house and make calls to all the VP's and CEO's and ask them if they think their product will sell, sheesh! They are just trying to fill up empty web pages with 'stories' and justify their paychecks (and expense reports from their Vegas trip). c|net is particularly bad for this. If you want to see decent CES reports, head on over to Toms Hardware Guide or the like.
And to those guys (and company PR drones), why would I want to boot a computer from a source that is actually way, way, way slower than a hard drive. Yea, you could never turn off the computer, and story the current state of the ram in flash, just as the hibernation feature on laptop's do, but again, writing to the flash and reading back from it is too slow compared to a hard drive. The one and only reason to make the current state of flash a hard drive replacement is size and power. If your hardware application requires a small physical size, combined with low power draw, and you can sacrifice read/write speed, then its perfect. Its not perfect for every situation that currently uses hard drives now. Saying 'goodbye' to hard drives wont happen till some breakthrough allows cheaper per GB storage, without dramatically increasing the read/write speeds. Then we will have a clear alternative to spinning platters of metal with a mechanically actuated pickup head. - bugmenot3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0berean: This is a very real issue. The reason it doesn't effect most people with thier cell phones, cameras, or key fobs is that they simply aren't doing enough writes to disable enough bits to run through the reserve pool that is included in these devices. Try putting one of those devices under the load a typical hard drive is under for a main OS (disk caching, swap space, etc) and you'll find that you kill one of those drives relatively quickly.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0$9 per GB in 3 years is laughable. In 3 years a GB of hdd space will probably cost $.25. Screw flash, we need a better alternative.
- xtracto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@xiloki (0) :
"A good idea could be to have / on flash and /tmp /var and /home on harddrives."
Agree, I use: / on HD, /tmp as ramdisk (/dev/ram0) and /~ at /dev/sda0 (4GB SD card+reader in USB2)
For my music I have /mnt/music on a 120 GB seagate HD.
Of course I have 2 GB of RAM, which I bought quite cheap at ebay. - nxtort, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"They have been talking about this for years…"[par.] - Devork on TWIT talking about something unrelated, but still holds my sentiments.
- spinesplitter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0i C, i guess we wont be saying goodbye to hard drives anytime soon, huh!
- Bobster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0down to $9 per gigabyte by 2009? My 300 gig drive would cost $2700 !!!
- NidStyles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0**Of course I'm still waiting on the holographic storage. I first heard about Canon's research in 1993 (they have wicked R&D) and 12+ years later it hasn't materialized.**
Someone just developed holograhic flash not too long ago, but all I could digg up was this article posted today about holographic ROM. I'd say we are not too far off then.
Here's that article on holo-ROM:
http://physorg.com/news9607.html
Personally I wonder why we haven't moved onto upping the density of the drives, but making the platters smaller. That would increase speed, and durability. Size is something that isn't too much of an issue yet. In about two years it will be though, and by then hopefully we will have the solution. - Canuck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0**Of course I'm still waiting on the holographic storage. I first heard about Canon's research in 1993 (they have wicked R&D) and 12+ years later it hasn't materialized.**
You mean like this one http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/06/inphase-to-ship-300gb-holographic-drive/ - blistered, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Part of this story went over my head sooo fast. How does 8 gigabytes = 1 gigabyte?!?
- socket, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Wow so in 2009 I can pay over $180 for a 20 GB flash HD! ***** that, I don't care how fast it is.
- ArmandoM, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Part of this story went over my head sooo fast. How does 8 gigabytes = 1 gigabyte?!?"
You mis-read it. It says 8 gigabits = 1 gigabyte. - kb9vgr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"No, I don't see flash replacing hard drives... ever. Unless they come up with a version that has unlimited rewrites and fast transfer speed.
Solid-state memory could become a reality though, if memory prices keep falling..."
um your memory and in fact almost all of your computer is solid state except your power switches or manual fan speed dials my computer doesn't use old manual relays to do its calculations nope still no relay clicking - digitarius, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0You can get a 2 gig ipod nano for like $200. So I'm thinking that you could get 2 gigs of flash for at worst $100, right? And when you think about it, who really needs all their data on flash? If I could just get the OS, Firefox, and a handfull of relatively small often used applications on there, my PC experience would improve dramatically. Which begs the question, why hasn't anyone built something like this yet?
I remember seeing on TechTV something called a "Rocketdrive" that mounted a virtual drive on some cheap RAM you plugged into a PCI board. They loaded up Quake III with that in a heartbeat, and I was in love. But nobody (that I've heard of) makes a product like that that's bootable. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0ok if flash cant beat them how about joining them?
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/story/0,10801,101330,00.html
nopebook hd's with built in flash cache.
Why? people are demanding battery life. even if you have to replace once a year.. an hour or to of battery life would be worth it..doubt you get that much benefit but still. - CharlieInCO, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Yeah, yeah, death of rotating media predicted, film at 11. Do you have any idea how many times disks were on their way out in the last 20 years?
By the way, just because 9 tracks have gone the way of 8 tracks, don't imagine tape is dead. Sun just paid $4.5 billion for a tape company. They're just big cassettes in really big jukeboxes. - Bostonsox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I just chucked both my HDs out the window! GOODBYE HARDDRIVES!
- matt.rubin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0haven't they said this like 5 times and it sstill has never happened so yet hard drives will be here for a long time till the size of the flash memory can get close to the size of hard drives. WHich looking at 2GB chips being $180 and $100 300Gb hard drives heh won't happen
- oldcyborg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Flash is going to be for specialized hardware, and cell phones, for the foreseeable future. At the current rate of price drop, it is gonna be long time before we see it use on OUR desktops. IOW, it is NOT everything for everybody....
Cyborg
Nah, poor article, too. - Philodox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This story is excellent, you can take any misleading statement and justify it with the last sentence in the synopsis. For example:
Ferraris to replace all mid range cars! It seems that cost is the only thing that stands in the way of Ferraris sending mid range cars into storage along with Mopeds. - DeadlyCouncil, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0wait doesn't flash memory have a cap on the number of read/write operations that can be done on it? Because I have a lot of por... I mean, essential files that I move about alot, and I'd fry a flash-hdd pretty quick...
/sarcasm. - dn11, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0it's still going to be a while. but I look forward to magnetic disks becoming obsolete. they are the most problematic component in existence. i've got so many failed HDs sitting around its not even funny.
- JohnBooty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"oh, another issue is that most file systems don't write to flash efficiently. One method of avoiding the limited write issue is to enforce writing across the entirety of the memory space. This keeps you from killing portions of the flash device faster than others. There's only one fs I know of that does this and it was written specifically for the task of being an fs for flash drives"
True, but this even distribution of writes ("write leveling") can also be achieved at the hardware level by the controller on the flash memory device itself.
I believe that most flash memory controllers already do this. - fiftycents, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0if theyre replacing hard drives, id like to see flash become a lot more reliable first...
- spinesplitter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0BTW, flash is already implemented for quick boot-up's, the only problem is the 1000$ dollar a Gig pricetag, at the least the ones ive seen
-
Show 51 - 75 of 75 discussions
Check out the new & improved 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is