$olid $tate hard drives comming?

[Emrys]

Originally posted by: martind1

Originally posted by: Joeyman
drool............with HD as the primary system bottleneck this would make any system fly. Just gotta win the lottery now.


Hey Anand, you should try to get your hands on one of these drives to review. More public exposure to this tech would drive the costs down faster.

no. no it won't.

Exactly, there is no market for these drives, or atleast not one large enough to offset the product development. Do you really think hard drive makers have hit their peak in how fast they could make a drive? Of course not. There is no need. Right now what the big drive manufacturers are doing is continuously improving the drives out there right now. The biggest sellers are 60-80gigs right now and are for home computers. Anything that would use something that fast would need to be redundant and have much more space. This may be interesting, but right now, unless the major manufacturers jump into it, I wouldn't plan on seeing it much in the next few years, if even 10.

 

[CQuinn]

I just did a quick search thru the forum archives on "solid'.

There are threads on solid state hard drives (based on that search) going back to october of 2000.

So folks have been predicting SSD "real soon now" for over 4 years already.

The good news is in that time the price of Solid State drives has come down considerably, and the
capacities have come up a little.

The bad news is the price of regular hard drives has also come down, and the capacity is many
times what was estimated to be the limit of the technology at the time. So hard drives have actually
improved in value while solid state is still struggling to move into mass consumer space.

 

[JoeKing]

Originally posted by: martind1

Originally posted by: Joeyman
drool............with HD as the primary system bottleneck this would make any system fly. Just gotta win the lottery now.


Hey Anand, you should try to get your hands on one of these drives to review. More public exposure to this tech would drive the costs down faster.

no. no it won't.

you havn't done any video editing or large graphical work have you? Imagine how fast it would load BF1942

 

[JYDog]

The next question up is how much faster can today's hard drive be pushed to. With higher density disc platers you can pack more data in one revolution(rpm) this would yield higher transfer rate, however, it wouldn't help very much in the area of access/seek time(the main short comings of hard drives in general). You can gain in this area by pushing higher disc rpm, but the downside is reduced reliability and greater noise. Perhaps new designs coming out in the future will adress these issues.

 

[stephbu]

in just 20 years the enthusiast will be using 5.2 TB drives

I doubt that'll it be much beyond a 3-5years before that volume of data is common place.

Some driving factors :
1) continual reduction in storage cost and growth in capacity
2) Digital media convergence in the consumer market
3) Richer online/offline media experiences

Some already visible signs of this
Digital Media Ripping - Video/Audio
Computer manufacturers eating into traditional electronics manufacturer markets
Tivo/XPMCE etc.
1TB of storage for <$700

 

[sharq]

Well, as being one of those who is saying solid state is the future, I don't mean tomorrow, I know it will take years. My best bet is anywhere from 8-10 years before these drives start to become more mainstream. If in 10 years we aren't seeing solid state as being more common place, then "oops"?
There are advantages to it over the platter design. They will be quieter, have the ability to be faster, last longer, more stable (that's all I can list off the top of my head). So, for now platter based drives are cheap and sufficient for the average home user.

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by: JYDog
The next question up is how much faster can today's hard drive be pushed to. With higher density disc platers you can pack more data in one revolution(rpm) this would yield higher transfer rate, however, it wouldn't help very much in the area of access/seek time(the main short comings of hard drives in general). You can gain in this area by pushing higher disc rpm, but the downside is reduced reliability and greater noise. Perhaps new designs coming out in the future will adress these issues.

The next evolution is already starting. The move to 2.5" drives. Smaller platters equals lower noise, less heat, and less power, for the same spindle speed. Smaller platters mean better average seek time, and smaller and lighter actuator which will decrease seek times as well. The move to vertical bit storage on platters will lead to a significant increase in data areal density over the current horizontal, so there is no limit in sight for the winchester drive design at least for the next 10 years. The prediction I saw recently was 500-600GB drives by 2007, so I wouldn't be looking for multi-terabyte drives for quite a while.

 

[Dug]

Originally posted by: Pariah

Originally posted by: JYDog
The next question up is how much faster can today's hard drive be pushed to. With higher density disc platers you can pack more data in one revolution(rpm) this would yield higher transfer rate, however, it wouldn't help very much in the area of access/seek time(the main short comings of hard drives in general). You can gain in this area by pushing higher disc rpm, but the downside is reduced reliability and greater noise. Perhaps new designs coming out in the future will adress these issues.

The next evolution is already starting. The move to 2.5" drives. Smaller platters equals lower noise, less heat, and less power, for the same spindle speed. Smaller platters mean better average seek time, and smaller and lighter actuator which will decrease seek times as well. The move to vertical bit storage on platters will lead to a significant increase in data areal density over the current horizontal, so there is no limit in sight for the winchester drive design at least for the next 10 years. The prediction I saw recently was 500-600GB drives by 2007, so I wouldn't be looking for multi-terabyte drives for quite a while.

2.5" drives!! when? Not counting laptop drives.

 

[JYDog]

2.5" drives!! when? Not counting laptop drives.

Expect Seagate to come out with something this fall. What I've seen is its a 2.5" 10K rpm at capacities of 30G and 70G. Very interesting drives. Now if we can just get Ultra 320 saturation with these in Raid 0 (on two drives)...

 

[Pariah]

Both Seagate and Fujitsu have announced 10k 2.5" drives which are already sampling and should be out around the middle of the year in FC and U320, with SAS to follow later in the year.

 

[batmanuel]

You can get these built into a system now, as a PuRam drive (goofy name ain't it?), from Liebermann, Inc. The website is kinda funny, just because a bit of technobabble creeps into their sales pitches (even though the stuff they talk about is basically vaild technology and available to purchase if you know where to look). Plus the look and feel of the site is sooooo stolen from Apple.

Behold the PuRam Drive!

And let's not forget that they will (at no extra cost, besides the horrendous markup) put a polished rock on the front of your machine.