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- geminitojanus, on 12/01/2007, -1/+77Oldest Flash troll ever. Wear leveling on current generation Flash devices can give you 1,000,000 writes/block. With a 1GB module, that's 1 million times 2,097,152 (512 bit blocks, +/- 16 bits from vendor to vendor) = 2.097 trillion write operations before you're _guaranteed_ to burn out one of the tiny 512 bit blocks (with the caveat that random algoritms aren't perfectly random, flash cells aren't created equally, yadda). Writing a meg file to the device every second would put the lifespan at about 30 years before absolute guaranteed failure. In reality, you can expect that number to be less than 10 years (due to physical damage, and other silicon imperfections).
In other words, the bigger the Flash device, the longer it lasts (due to wear leveling spreading the damage out better and better). SSDs will last longer than hard disks due to fewer moving parts, less heat generated, and less overall stress to the device, and may very well help other components in the system last longer for the very same reason. People cling to this notion that Flash fails fast from back when Flash would die after 10,000 writes, and wear leveling was a completely new concept, about 3+ years ago. From an engineering point of view, it's a solved problem. From a practical software engineering point of view, it might mean a small change to file systems to keep redundant copies of data around (since there's really no reason not to given today's capacities; something like a logical RAID 5 file system), but even this is unlikely. - geminitojanus, on 12/01/2007, -2/+51"I think the biggest problem with this outlook is that a 250GB hard drive is about $65. A 100GB SDD is around. . oh. . . $1,200."
And a 25MB drive 30 years ago was $4,000. Prices change over time. Silicon prices drop drastically over time because processes change. In 2005, Flash was about $100/GB. The next year, the price had fallen by over half, to about $40/GB. This year, prices are down to as little as $12/GB. Hard disk prices over the same period of time haven't shifted nearly as drastically (2005 $1/GB, 2006 $0.70/GB, 2007 so far about $0.45/GB), meaning we're in the long tail of hard drive capacity's growth, and still in the quick turning curve of Flash's capacity growth (which will only get faster as more and more companies shift to producing Flash, and as the polysilicon shortage lifts next year when extra capacity comes online).
Following progression of exponential increase of the density of flash, it's not hard to see that in two years time we will be paying ~$1-2/GB, which will make SSDs not only palatable, but favorable over HDs as more and more devices go mobile and need to ditch moving components for battery life. Hard Disks likely won't be replaced by Flash in desktop PCs for much longer to go, and not in servers for at least another 5 years, but it's very easy to see that late 2009 is going to be a turning point. Most people don't need or even use more than 8GB of space on a day to day basis, but people in this community can't realize that because nearly all of us are exceptions to this case (torrent users and abusers, multimedia producers, podcasters, audio geeks, etc), so only having a 100GB laptop would be more than enough, even in 2 years time (especially in 2 years time considering bandwidth isn't getting any cheaper and multimedia companies are psychotically reluctant to release digital media). - Smwbigboss, on 12/01/2007, -4/+32Each time you fill a block, it dies a little on the inside.
Kind of like that slutty girl with the low self-esteem you knew back in college. - TheAttacks, on 12/01/2007, -8/+35I think the biggest problem with this outlook is that a 250GB hard drive is about $65. A 100GB SDD is around. . oh. . . $1,200.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a computer GEEK. If I could get a 100GB SDD for less than $300 I'd just all over it, but I just don't see the prices dropping that much in such a small about of time. - 11Heather, on 12/01/2007, -1/+27Think some of the valid commentators have missed a couple of points from the headline: "Solid State Drives replacing HDD laptops in 2009"
Laptops - so not gaming pcs
Replacing - the serious start of a shift in 2009, not completely displacing in 2009
The article talks about the coming 4 layer SSD's, and of how fast prices will drop (just like ipods) when demand picks up. So technology improvements and price economy will have a big effect.
Remember too that laptops will be smaller, not require a fan and batteries will last MUCH longer. Who doesn't want these 3 winners? - theWrkncacnter, on 12/01/2007, -12/+37Solid state has many many benefits, but can't they become worn out by multiple writes pretty quickly compared to hard disks? I can see this being a problem for files the OS has to write to frequently.
- Salgat, on 12/01/2007, -2/+26The limit is around 100,000 writes. Writing to every sector on your SSHD 100,000 times will take many years. There are embedded techniques to spread out the load of writing, so this isn't an issue.
- moocow1452, on 12/01/2007, -2/+19I think this is it. This is the one, no more storing data on a spinning magnet wheel that can go corrupt after a few years. And once it reaches that magic ratio of $ to Gigs, I think the shift will be rapid and all consuming. Imagine a laptop with no moving parts, with a super effeicent battery, and ultra fast boot and program load times. It's coming, fast.
- i4mt3hwin, on 12/01/2007, -3/+19How the hell is a MP3 player a thing of the past?
- Smwbigboss, on 12/01/2007, -2/+17Now we have MP4 players. Keep up with the times, grandpa.
- Blueee, on 12/01/2007, -4/+18No, hard drives are almost unlimited in theory. The only problem is mechanical.
Per block, it is around 100,000 writes. - inactive, on 12/01/2007, -0/+12i think its funny how seagate ceo said there wasn't a future in it
- univers3man, on 12/01/2007, -0/+11The fact is that you are completely right, and people are still digging you down. I smell a troll.
- Phyltre, on 12/01/2007, -1/+10Great post, except that prices cannot drop by more than 100%. Once they drop by 101%, the company is actually paying you to take the products away since ALL of the original cost is gone.
- borninda818, on 12/01/2007, -2/+11Agreed, 2009 is just way too early. For at least the next 5 or 6 years we will have fast SSDs and huge HDDs. SSDs may eventually take over, or the honor may go to some new technology, who knows?
- JRootabega, on 12/01/2007, -1/+10So are you, apparently! ;)
- RoboRay, on 12/01/2007, -0/+9Access time is not slow for flash memory; it's very fast. The problem is that sustained read performance is slow, and write performance is abysmal.
- grumpyrain, on 12/01/2007, -1/+9All modern SSDs wear leveling to minimise this effect. Statistically, these drives are more reliable than magnetic disk based. They consume less power, are more shock proof, have (significantly) faster seek time, don't need to be de-fraged, are cheaper at lower capacities, and take a more convenient form factor. On the downside, they have less capacity per dollar at high capacities and are slower at reading/writing consecutive data. On the whole I would expect better performance out of a SSD.
The article points out basically what we already know, and you don't need to be Einstein to figure out. When SSDs are 'big enough', they will replace hard drives for all but niche applications. - TheAttacks, on 12/01/2007, -1/+9Oh, no doubt SSD will overtake HDD, but like we've agreed, not this soon. The price per gigabyte is just outrageous compared to HDDs. Coupled with the fact that most people who don't play video games don't really notice the increase in loading time when opening an application or image file, there jus wouldn't be a demand for them in todays market.
Once the price per gigabyte is within spitting distance of HDDs, then they might make a break through. I'd say anywhere from 50% - 150% percent more per gig than HDD and you'll have a hot selling SSD. - Arkz, on 12/01/2007, -0/+7Seeing your post modded down makes me sad... are people really this thick? 100% of the price of something is... yes 100%... so if the price of a £50 HDD goes down 100% then its free...
- shawnanigans, on 12/01/2007, -0/+7What will also serve to make SSD drives the laptop standards is its exponential gains. If we are at 16GB now then we are 2 steps away from 64GB and 6 away from a 1TB.
- Bob042, on 12/01/2007, -1/+8It's oddly worded, but I think they meant HDDs in MP3 players are a thing of the past. Most of them use flash memory now, at least the small ones.
- geminitojanus, on 12/01/2007, -0/+7Gamers would likely be the first consumer group to want to switch; who wants to have to wait for levels to load as they go out to disk to prefetch things, and who wants games levels to be limited because the designers of the game had to choose between caching textures in RAM at the beginning so the game would load quickly, and generating more complex models to fill that space instead.
Gamers also have the money to spend $100 extra on a part that's only going to yield them 5% performance at most; asking them to pay $100 extra for 20%+ better performance is like asking an addict if they want more drugs for the same price. - jav1231, on 12/01/2007, -4/+11Wow! Eventually solid state flash drives will replace hd's. Thanks, Capt. Obvious.
- etsa, on 12/01/2007, -1/+7SSD changes will be extremely fast paced in 2008 and 2009. NAND and subsequent generations will be a bigger industry than standard computer RAM.
SSD has no latencies issues. It has much higher chance of survival in High-G accidents. It is extremely power saving partly because it doesn;t need contant cell-refreshing like RAM.
All major memory manufacturers have moved part of the DDR2 RAM into NAND production.
in 2009, SSD will be much cheaper. Priliminary understanding is the retail price is expected to drop by 150-200% between now till end of 2009.
Recent SSD has more advance logics such as ECC, bit-redundancy. Some uses advance logics similar to RAID to improve transfer rate. - tehbored, on 12/01/2007, -0/+6They would still require a fan, but maybe a smaller one. The CPU still gets hot and even the SSD's get pretty warm sometimes.
- geminitojanus, on 12/01/2007, -0/+6Hard disks being "unlimited in theory" is like "diamonds are forever, in theory". In reality, we know hard disks wear out much faster than that; parts of the disk can become permanently set and unable to be written to, disks can become unbalanced, heat and continuous use wears out bearings, the motor that moves the disk head can wear out, and on and on it goes.
MTBFs on most HDs comes in around 500k-1M. Entry level SSDs provide 2M+. By the time they scale up to 128GB, you can start looking at 3-4M. Some 512GB SSDs are advertised at 5M. And since 1M < 2-5M, it's pretty easy to show the SSDs should last longer.
(Also of note, Google's studies have proven HD manufacturer's MTBF numbers to be way off where they should be. Likewise, SSD studies have shown them to be extremely reliable and predictable in their failure (with batches of SSDs failing almost simultaneously in at least one study)). - geminitojanus, on 12/01/2007, -0/+6Not so much vaporware as labware, it takes forever to get these things out of the lab.
- tehbored, on 12/01/2007, -0/+5Well it's good news, but it's news I've heard before. I just wish it would happen already. SSD's are great. They're faster and they're more efficient so they conserve battery life. The prices have dropped a bit, but they're still way too high. 2009 sounds reasonable to me though. They should be affordable by then.
- theWrkncacnter, on 12/01/2007, -0/+5Glad to hear it's a solved problem. I'm really looking forward to buying SSDs once the price goes down some.
- chubbybubba, on 12/01/2007, -0/+5I sure hope not. The last thing we need is Dvorak saying 'I told you so!' ;)
- Darkhacker, on 12/01/2007, -0/+4Well you were wrong. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take my flying, solar powered, car back home so I can play Duke Nukem Forever on my Phantom console while I download porn on my RISC desktop running GNU/Hurd.
- schnikies79, on 12/01/2007, -0/+4I think they mean hard drive based mp3 players.
It's still a crock. - Error601, on 12/01/2007, -5/+9Someone is always making this prediction. Hard drives capacity, speed, and cost just keep winning.
- tempusrob, on 12/01/2007, -3/+7It might be 100,000 writes in the $10 CF cards you buy to use in your phone, but these are a bit better. There's a reason it's as much as $1k for 64GB...
- andrewpmk, on 12/01/2007, -1/+5I can't see having anything more than hybrid hard drives in the near future. Solid state drives are too expensive to provide a capacity that would be considered sellable. They can still save a lot of energy by storing the operating system and frequently accessed or small files - like word processor documents - but too many people want to put music and video on their computer; many people have way more video on their computer than a SSD can handle.
- k3vinmartian, on 12/01/2007, -0/+4in 5 years i will.
- Zap2, on 12/01/2007, -2/+6well since SSD havn't replaced HD even in Mp3 player, for the high range ones....expect it to be a while before they replace HD in laptops...
- likwidfuzion, on 12/01/2007, -1/+4Not too far away with a 32GB Zune2 around the corner...
- nfollmer, on 12/01/2007, -1/+4How long have you had a computer?
- nfollmer, on 12/01/2007, -0/+3Well look at how much thumb drives used to be. They have come down in price significantly over the last couple years. Yeah, it will be expensive at first, but prices will come down.
- geminitojanus, on 12/01/2007, -0/+3Moore's law applies to transistors, so yes it applies to memory as it does processors. Which is a component of why Flash prices have come down so drastically.
- jbond, on 12/01/2007, -0/+3Do the price/performance curves cross at some point and if so when? Because just as SSD is following Moore's Law, Disk drives are following Kryder's law. In the last couple of years we've gone from 80Gb to 320Gb in 2.5" drives. So are SSD doubling in capacity and halving in price faster or slower than disk drives?
What's interesting about this as well is the point where we stop suffering from scarcity and scarcity thinking. In disk drives, I think we're there. The typical commodity PC bought now has a big enough disk that you'll struggle to fill it before it becomes obsolete. In SSD we haven't got there yet. - TheAttacks, on 12/01/2007, -1/+4Cost and capacity, yes. Speed, no. Consider this, there theoretical data transfer rate for an SATA 3.0gb/s hard drive is . . well. . . 3gb/s. The fastest consumer hard drives, the 10,000rpm Raptors, use the older SATA 1.5gb/s interface. Why is that? Even with the increase drive rotation speed, thus read/write speed, the hard drives just can't achieve that kind of transfer rate. Even a 15,000rpm SCSI drive can't do it.
- TheAttacks, on 12/01/2007, -1/+4"Swapping out a 160GB standard hard drive for a 64GB solid-state drive (from Samsung) on a Dell XPS 1330 notebook costs an additional US$950. Considering that the notebook with the 160GB drive costs US$1,599, flash drives aren't exactly economical."
Go for it. And the article still says a 64GB drive will cost up to $300. That's insane. - sstidman, on 12/01/2007, -0/+3Of course he said that. Flash drive makers stand to eat his lunch. Seagate holds a large market share of hard drive sales. There is no guarantee that as sales shift to solid state that Seagate will retain their rank in the market place.
- MikeCerm, on 12/01/2007, -0/+2If I could get a 32GB SSD for $300, I would. That's all I need in my laptop. I've actually found a few, that are all PATA, and the SATA models are much more expensive.
- etsa, on 12/01/2007, -0/+2haha you're right indeed.
sorry i was tripping out with DMT. - etsa, on 12/01/2007, -0/+2i think i meant 1/2 to 1/4 the current price.
- inactive, on 12/01/2007, -0/+2Breaking:
Price drops ahead for memory and cpus as well. -
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