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Why Hard Drives are Here to Stay, and SDD is just a FLASH in the Pan

popularmechanics.com — Sure, they’re taking place on a subatomic level that just won the Nobel Prize for physics. But overlooked innovations in hard-drive capacity, as PM’s senior tech editor sermonizes in his trend column, aren’t just letting you record TV shows and save massive amounts of music. They’re pushing us into a new era of computing.

Who dugg this? Made popular Oct 18, 2007

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  • Kaehyu, on 10/26/2007, -3/+48It's too early to make predictions-- but for the moment my money is on SDD until hardrives stop crapping out.
  • p0tent1al, on 10/19/2007, -0/+34This is what is going to happen (which is happening already).

    People will continue to use hard drives, but start to use SSD for the most important things. I know there is an option on a couple of laptops to have it shipped with SSD and a hard drive. You have the operating system on the SSD, so your computer runs lightning fast and another hard drive on the laptop for all your media so it works out perfectly. The SSD's will continue to get bigger and cheaper, and people will still be using both, but then SSD with phase out the hard drive eventually.

    I mean let's just face facts, hard drives are not reliable to begin with. So no Hard Drives are not here to stay. Hard drives are on there way out, if not very, very slowly while SSD catches up. Around the middle of next year is when they will begin to gain popularity for being used in conjunction with regular hard drives, and it will snowball from there.
  • lord2800, on 10/18/2007, -2/+33Frankly, I see SSD overtaking HDD storage capacities very quickly (relatively speaking). We already understand solid state technology far better than we understood magnetic writing technology at this same point, so I expect that SSDs will explode in storage size at a far faster rate than HDDs.
  • inactive, on 10/19/2007, -1/+27Hard drives ***** suck. Wait until you fry one that has data you haven't backed up (yet). Then you'll see how convenient they are. Almost all of them are individualized now, meaning that you can't repair them yourself (there is a special serial number attached to each drive - if you fry the board, you can't simply get another similar drive, you actually have to transfer the firmware from a chip). All in all, I can't wait for the ***** day I never have to use a hard drive again. SSD I can't wait. ***** you, hard drives.
  • fatadamblog, on 10/18/2007, -4/+19Why Hard Drives are Here to Stay

    I call major bull ***** on that. Hard Drives may take the form of something completely different in the next 50 years. They could be on holograms or something, who the ***** knows and NO one, NO ONE can be certain the future.
  • AndrewDB, on 01/10/2008, -3/+17Don't you people watch Star Trek, holographic storage mediums are the future.
  • AirPortPanic, on 10/19/2007, -0/+9This article has nothing to do with Harddives versus SSDs. It's just about harddrives and how they've evolved over the decades. Not a comparison of different storage mediums.

    Boo submitter.
  • billyswong, on 10/19/2007, -0/+8Two points here:
    1. The headline is misleading. The article referred to didn't say anything bad to SSD. Actually it said "there is reason to question the future relevance of our spinning platter workhorses in home PCs. ..., flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs) are chasing HDDs up the capacity ladder"
    2. SSDs are not necessarily more reliable. When harddisk fails, if you have the money, it is still possible to resuce - there are companies that can open the drive and investigate it in more detail, pick back up bits the ordinary read-head can't read. But what about Flash Drive today? They do have a limited lifetime, and worse, you don't know it's going bad until it actually fails! Flash drives as an external storage device fulfills its job well, but there is not enough real world data to claim it is more reliable when it is exposed to more intensive usage - such as swap.
  • merwin, on 10/18/2007, -0/+8Bittorrent anyone? We're in the days of mass multimedia storage. On top of that, web browsing (cache!) causes a lot of extra write operations.
  • SiliconRain, on 10/18/2007, -0/+8Interesting point. Few people disagree that the tyranny of Moore's law is finally fading and limits are being or have already been reached. We are now seeing incremental, rather than exponential increases in computing power, memory space etc. Hard drive technology has plodded along at a different pace for a while, and will probably continue to do so. However, the one sector that seems to be looking forward to continued exponential growth for the foreseeable future is comms.

    Network speeds are set to jump dramatically over the next five years as back-bone infrastructure is upgraded. Soon, we won't worry so much about whether our data is local or remote, because the time to transfer will be insignificant. We can already see trends like this in, for example, Youtube; people don't worry about saving their favorite videos of people being hit in the nuts with a football on their local machine, because they know they can watch in any time, any place, with only a few seconds wait.

    As for SSD vs rotating disk drives, this article makes some good points, but I think it's too early to judge.
  • manitoba98xp, on 10/18/2007, -0/+8Actually, isolinear data chips are the primary storage medium for the Federation in Star Trek. :)
  • digitalhippie, on 10/18/2007, -0/+8I also think that the low power consumption and faster boot time will crown SSD as the winner over time. Hopefully in the relatively near future. As far as storage size and price, these two will surely be resolved in time. But you never know.
  • Xonay, on 10/18/2007, -1/+8What about external storage in the future? And with external storage I'm not talking about a USB drive, but more about network (Internet) storage.
    If all content is streamed, end users don't need huge storage, and FLASH will probably be sufficiënt.
  • brundlefly76, on 10/18/2007, -0/+7I have a 32-GB MTron SSD - one of the first SSDs available which kicks any hard drive - even 15k SCSI and Raptors - in every way but price.

    I was amazed when I replaced a 15k Fujitsu MAS with it as a MySQL drive for a 10M record text search - took some problem queries from 40s to 2s.
  • brim4brim, on 10/18/2007, -4/+10The reality is there is room for both depending on the application.

    There is no one size fits all solution. Different companies/people have different requirements.

    SSD is inevitably good for the end users.
  • SteveMax, on 10/18/2007, -0/+5Yeah, it's just a series of tubes, not a truck where you can just throw things :)
  • awhiteflame, on 10/18/2007, -1/+6Wait what?

    The internet isn't a magical storage device, somewhere, somehow, it's stored on a harddrive.
  • CarzorStelatis, on 10/18/2007, -0/+4Durability, form factor, both true but you missed the 800-pound gorilla as regards laptops: power consumption. Take a very unscientific example: many flash-based audio players will happily run over 30 hours on one recharge. Most hard disc players struggle to break 10 (and I mean in actual life not manufacturer claims).
  • ICSU, on 10/19/2007, -0/+4Funny you should say that because Moore recently said his law will stop being true around 2020 with current technology trends.
  • chris9902, on 10/18/2007, -0/+4The truth is out there man.
  • grumpyrain, on 10/18/2007, -0/+4SSD
  • UtopiaInTheSky, on 10/18/2007, -0/+4I personally believe they meant "STD".
  • RadicalEdward, on 10/19/2007, -0/+4I also think it's odd so many people keep talking about all this cloud storage and how we won't need that much local storage. To those of you who say that ARE YOU CRAZY?!?! When's the last time you backed up a 50GB Blueray disc to some place on the internet? ?You honestly think your upstreams going to handle that in the next 50 years? No.
    People used to say we wouldn't need more than a few MB hard drives. Content changes with time and file sizes ALWAYS get bigger.
  • ePlus, on 10/19/2007, -0/+4The hard drives can stay in desktop computers and servers but not in laptops. The benefits of having a flash based hard drive in your laptop are more than a mechanical one.
  • grumpyrain, on 10/18/2007, -0/+3Also the lower seek time. Whilst hard drives have a higher sequential transfer rates, they are not even playing in the same league when it comes to random access speed. Not to mention durability (drop both onto a concrete floor and see which fairs best), and form factor gives SSD a massive edge into the laptop market.
  • inactive, on 10/19/2007, -0/+3I firmly believe that Ferro-electric RAM will become the mainstream after RAMTRON's patents run -out.
    IMHO: The FRAM technology is by far the best advance in "permanent" data storage that has ever been
    achieved. It's fast, relatively low power, "never" wears out (10E12 lifecycle versus 10E6 for Flash & EEPROM).
    I think the reason it has not flooded the market is due to a combination of a few factors:
    (1) The Flash memory suppliers (INTEL, etc.) want to bury it.
    (2) The technology is patented by a single company and (so far) nobody else is fabricating it under license.
    (3) Lack of advertising.

    If RAMTRON did the kind of advertising blitz that INTEL does, (if they could even afford that) FRAM's would be
    a household word.

    I think the BIG Flash magnates are playing a waiting game with intent to starve them (RAMTRON) out and then
    swoop in to scoop up the patents.
  • UtopiaInTheSky, on 10/18/2007, -2/+5SSD.
  • ramiro, on 10/18/2007, -0/+3Someday we will carry keychain drives loaded with operating system and work environment and computers will just have the CPU and transient memory but no long term storage.
  • CarzorStelatis, on 10/18/2007, -0/+3Inevitably good? Sandisk 32Gb SSD: $600. Western Digital 150Gb Raptor HDD: $180.
  • gummih, on 10/18/2007, -0/+3I totally agree, in a few years I bet my PC will have something like a 250GB SSD for the OS and programs (I want my OS in flash dammit) plus a 10TB hard drive for my media and other files
  • Lasereth, on 10/18/2007, -1/+4Summary: spin-based HDDs are getting really big and SDDs are getting big also. Move along.


    PS: buried for the extremely inaccurate title
  • AlanJV, on 10/18/2007, -0/+3SSD>HDD. Can't wait to buy a notebook with an SSD.
  • RadicalEdward, on 10/18/2007, -0/+2I think they are thinking Solid Disk Drive, but your right, it is Solid State Drive
  • Ascus, on 10/19/2007, -1/+3in 25 years there will be about as many magnetic hard disks as there are Vinyl Albums today. Flash Memory is just too efficient and reliable. And when it becomes cheaper than HD space (expected in 2010), HD will go away faster than LPs were replaced by CD and the VHS recorder was replaced by DVD recorders.
  • jacquesm, on 10/18/2007, -0/+2Flash technology will overcome rotating media within the foreseeable future. Why ? reliability and price, price, price. (and for laptops power consumption and no 'spin up' time) . Since flash contains no moving parts the economies of scale of the chip factory apply, harddrives do not have that edge, they'll always need bearings and axles and servos. This means that some of their components must always wear out and can not take advantage of improvements in photo-litographic processes. Every advance in the CPU/memory/general fabrication arena will probably impact flash positively. There are unbelievably large budgets for this R&D, much less 'just' for revolving storage.

    So, long term: flash wins. Medium term: probably hybrid drives. Short term: sharp drops in prices of 'regular' harddrives to stave off the loss of business to a new medium. The really interesting thing will be when the first > 100G solid state drive hits the streets at a price point comparable or less to a regular harddrive and with similar performance would hit the street. Laptops manufacturers would adopt that puppy in a heartbeat.
  • EBFoxbat, on 10/18/2007, -2/+4If my iPod Classic out-lives my iPhone, I'll believe that SSD will fade until then, I'll love flash thank you very much.
    Excluding OS operations, most people write to a disk very infrequently. A desktop could be made such that frequent write space (say caches and swap space) are modular. It would only involve an optimization of an OS. A hidden (say 4 Gig) flash drive that's for the OS and a (however many Gig) SSD that's the actually hard disk. If read/write speeds are a serious concern, RAID them. I think it's the read/write speed that will see the largest growth in the coming years, not the actual disk size. You could make a 3.5" internal drive that holds 250 gigs of flash right now. It would cost a penny or two, but it's technologically possible.
  • brufleth, on 10/19/2007, -0/+2...and write speeds. Flash drives still aren't beating traditional drives when it comes to writing. Tomshardware just did a very nice series of benchmarks comparing SSD and mechanical drive storage. They even put two SSD in RAID 0 to improve performance. You're still not looking at great write speeds and for database uses I believe the conclusion was it still lagged behind.
  • SiliconRain, on 10/19/2007, -1/+3But flash is just as unreliable as rotating magnetic disks. Most commercial flash today can only do about 100,000 write-erase cycles before it becomes useless. You want all your data on something like that? And just one power-surge and BAM! - complete and permanent loss of data. At least with a magnetic disk recovery is possible.
  • pak314, on 10/18/2007, -0/+2FRAM and similar technologies cannot compete with NAND flash in terms of capacity currently. People think 100 GB NAND drives are expensive already so FRAM based drives will be even more expensive. Also there are scalability issues with FRAM technologies that have not been solved.
  • CarzorStelatis, on 10/18/2007, -0/+2Yeah, because 'solid disk drive' implies that magnetic HDs are not solid, which they clearly are. 'Solid State Drive' is correct.
  • r00tus3r, on 10/18/2007, -0/+2SDD ??? Doesn't he mean SSD ?

    Now more importantly, why is there so much focus on size? An intelligent user would be MUCH more concerned with speed and the limitations that a spinning disk design puts on read and write times. No one's saying that you can't save your data and back it up on a spinning drive, but your OS, and files for daily use should without a doubt (and probably will be as a matter of course within the next 5 years) stored on a Solid State Drive. I have quite a few issues with this title, and I'm not convinced the submitter took the time to read the entire article.
  • SiliconRain, on 10/18/2007, -2/+4Bah. Moore is a crazy old geezer - I wouldn't listen to him now. Look at a 5 year-old PC now. Chances are it has 256k or 512k of memory, 40GB HDD and about 1GHz processor. You can go out and buy a budget PC with similar specs now. But look at 10 years ago and it's a different story.

    We're down to 65nm technology node now, with 45 coming next year, but truth is, it's pretty unlikely to go much smaller than that. Silicon dioxide insulator layers are already about as thin as they can get (about 5 atoms wide). Seriously, we're through the looking glass now. People now are questioning when the limits will be hit and when the slow-down will happen, but I recon (and I'm in the industry) that in ten years time, people will look back and say the elbow was about now (or maybe earlier).

    Technology progress has long been predicted as a sigmoid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function), not exponential function. If you want proof, just ask yourself, why have PC clock speeds barely increased in 3 years? Why are manufacturers having to switch to hard-to-design and hard-to-program multi-processor architectures?
  • BluesFan, on 10/18/2007, -1/+3Check out fusion IO's new product,1000 times faster than a coventional hard drive and goes into a PCI express slot so it is on the same bus. It comes in 80GB, 160GB, 320GB and 640GB versions.

    Right now they say it will be about $20-$30 per Gig which is Crazy expensive but I bet in two or three years time we will be able to get the 160Gb model for under $500 bucks.

    Here's the demo of it.

    http://www.fusionio.com/demo.html

  • DaWolfman, on 10/24/2007, -0/+2Sorry, got my facts wrong. It was originally $35K. My mistake :)
    (Still a lot worse than a SSD, no?)

    http://www.xml-dev.com/blog/index.php?action=viewt ...
  • jimmyjars, on 10/19/2007, -0/+2Lots of common databases exceed 1gb memory usage on a regular basis. Forums anyone?
  • gaberowe, on 10/18/2007, -5/+6rotating media will never go away, its way too cost effective. solid state data storage requires a huge amount of wiring going to each memory block. In all likelihood there will be a huge transition to computers that are all flash memory based--but probably all of those people will have an external 1 TB HD to load all of their stuff onto. By the way, its like around $90 for 8 GB of flash right now... News flash, you can buy at least 300 GB for that price if its a plain old hard drive....
  • amigabill, on 10/18/2007, -0/+1I'd like to get an SSD to install Windows and frequently used apps onto, with the goal that most of what I'd be doing would not need to spin up the hard drive, and it could turn the motor off much of the time to conserve battery life on my laptop. There's 16GB and 32GB SSDs that fit an Expresscard slot which I'd hoped to use for that purpose, but I'm told on various forums that this cannot be done. I think that's rather disappointing. I was also hoping to get an Expresscard flash reader with large capacity support such as the 16GB SDHC card I've seen available, as one such reader plus this SDHC card was cheaper than the same-capacity 16GB SSD expresscard. Oh well. Too bad these things are only able to be used for data storage... And too bad the notebooks I'm looking to buy soon do not have dual hard drive bays, as with that I could at least make the primary hard drive a flash SSD device.
  • CarzorStelatis, on 10/18/2007, -0/+1Isn't there some sort of new external SATA port to replace USB for external hard drives?
  • geminitojanus, on 10/19/2007, -1/+2It's actually a fairly easy thing to plot; just take the cost/size function of both memory stores and plot them over the years. Using numbers from various different sources, you can make the entire model more accurate. You can also see that we've got at least another 10 years of Hard Disks being around (just due to them being so cheap for the capacity), but by then we will also see scale ups on Phase-Change RAMs and Ferromagnetic RAMs, so Flash won't be the only persistent medium out there (though probably the second cheapest to hard disks).

    The hard disk WILL die, it's just a matter of time. Moving parts vs no moving parts, size, scale, it all spells obsolete. It's just a matter of when that will happen at this point.
  • inactive, on 10/26/2007, -1/+2Exactly. There is only so much porn you really need to store on your HDD. I'd trade HDD MBs for stability and speed every time. I have never had RAM go bad on me but I have lost many HDDs and all the PITA that goes along with it. I'd take a 60 gig flash based drive over a 300gig HDD no problem.
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