$olid $tate hard drives comming?

[Zebo]

Called these people on friday Bitmicro and it's $5,999 for a 5.2Gig drive.

.048ms access time or better and you can write/rewrite 200 gigs a day and it will still work 50 years from now and it's silent.

 

[Tab]

HOLY SH1T! If I was rich

 

[buleyb]

Don't expect them to get cheap, because there is no reason for it now. This isn't a matter of good technology being pushed to the masses because it would be useful. This kind of drive has a purpose and a bunch of niche markets.


Besides,

and it will still work 50 years from now

is a fairly useless comment. In 50 years the device might still be functional, but who says you'll have a working system to use it with. The reason current hard drives aren't rated for 50 year use is because nobody needs it. If there was a market for long term tech like this, the products would exist.

I'm not saying this isn't a cool product, but it definately isn't mass market. What do you need a solid state drive for?

 

[buleyb]

DP, my bad

 

[Zebo]

Originally posted by: buleyb
Don't expect them to get cheap, because there is no reason for it now. This isn't a matter of good technology being pushed to the masses because it would be useful. This kind of drive has a purpose and a bunch of niche markets.


Besides,

and it will still work 50 years from now

is a fairly useless comment. In 50 years the device might still be functional, but who says you'll have a working system to use it with. The reason current hard drives aren't rated for 50 year use is because nobody needs it. If there was a market for long term tech like this, the products would exist.

I'm not saying this isn't a cool product, but it definately isn't mass market. What do you need a solid state drive for?

Depends. All this is is a gigantic flash card which is only limited by bus speed at the momnet unlike todays magnetic drives. I don't know what the bus speeds will be in 50 years but they probably won't be as fast as the memory in this drive so it may still have some use..with interface changes.

Use?
I would'nt mind having a 4 second boot time. Thats what the tech said when i called. 4 seconds from pushing the power button to launching your favorite game.

 

[sdemaio]

Wow, that's pretty darn fast access time. Too bad that it costs 1/2 of my yearly salary. I'm poor.

 

[Dug]

The reason current hard drives aren't rated for 50 year use is because nobody needs it. If there was a market for long term tech like this, the products would exist.

Actually the entire industrial market would have use for a 50 year drive. Any archiving facility, goverment facility, etc.
There aren't any hd's that are rated that long because there aren't any that could make it.

 

[ELopes580]

I have a friend who keep talking about getting one of these drives and how its the wave of the future. He claims that current platter based hard drives are crap and old tech. He also says the same with DVD and any rotating based media.

After I saw the original post, I sent my friend the link. Now he replied to me saying that in 2 yrs it will be the next big thing.

So I reply back, " Ya sure, you buy your 5.2GB drive for what... $3,000 maybe? Ill be crusing on my dual 400GB drives ( hopefully 10K RPM ) that will cost me around $300-400 or so"

 

[stinger25]

Exactly. Don't discard SATA Hard Drives either. Their data rate is 150mb/s, and I have two of mine setup in RAID 0!!

 

[dullard]

1) That 5.2 GB disk is about $1 per MB. Regular hard disks crossed the $1 per MB level about 12 years ago. Now it is quite close to $1 per GB. Thus for a price reason, solid state drives have a lot of ground to make up before they will ever get off the ground.
2) You realistically need a 10 GB drive for today's OS and some important programs that you want to run fast. I've never found a 10 GB solid state drive yet. And from #1 that would cost a fortune.
3) There is a problem with the 50 year claim - the drive size. I can see two uses for a long life drive (a) backup and (b) daily use, moving the drive to each new computer you get. For backup purposes, 5.2 GB is no where near the size that companies need. For daily use, 5.2 GB is no where near the size that individuals need. Hard drives have historically increased in capacity about 70% a year (and program size has gone hand in hand). I realize that extrapolating data is dangerous, but if that trend continues, in just 20 years the enthusiast will be using 5.2 TB drives and your 5.2 GB drive would be completely useless. It is even possible that the next Windows operating system won't fit on it. Are you still using your 20 MB drive from 15 years ago?

 

[ELopes580]

Well said Dullard, I just didnt want to type that whole explanation and reasoning out I just dont personally dont see that we will have one of these drives anytime soon and im sure most of you would agree, but my stubborn friend thinks we will have these drives and do away with current drive technology, i.e. rotating platters, within 2 yrs. this same freind also claimed back in 1999 that the analong computer modems would be gone completely and obsolete by 2005 and with the the analog phone system of today.

..sigh.. reminds me of another person who told me in college a few years ago that there will have a dedicated high speed internet line to every house in the country soon. So i ask "who will run the cable and pay for it, the cable company?" He say "yea, basically" ...


Just made me realize something, ppl should stop playing Miss Cleo with technology and talk like they know anything. also im glad these same ppl are not studying engineering. The stuff i hear... geez, ppl should just stick to writing sci fi stuff or just work for BS rumor places

end rant

 

[ElFenix]

we've had solid state drives for years. used to be a ton more expensive, but it doesn't look like size has increased much. probably limited by transistor densities, which aren't increasing anywhere near as fast as bit densities on hard drives are.

 

[andreasl]

Personally I'd buy a 2GB solid state HD if it sold for under $300 or so. I would install XP and the mostly played game on it and use my regular PATA or SATA for archive and other stuff. Although 5GB would be the preferred size, they would become useful already at 2GB.

 

[boshuter]

How can any rational person look at the advancement in ANY technology in the last 50 years and seriously expect a hard drive to still be useful in another 50 is beyond me....

 

[T9D]

..

 

[buleyb]

Originally posted by: dullard
1) That 5.2 GB disk is about $1 per MB. Regular hard disks crossed the $1 per MB level about 12 years ago. Now it is quite close to $1 per GB. Thus for a price reason, solid state drives have a lot of ground to make up before they will ever get off the ground.
2) You realistically need a 10 GB drive for today's OS and some important programs that you want to run fast. I've never found a 10 GB solid state drive yet. And from #1 that would cost a fortune.
3) There is a problem with the 50 year claim - the drive size. I can see two uses for a long life drive (a) backup and (b) daily use, moving the drive to each new computer you get. For backup purposes, 5.2 GB is no where near the size that companies need. For daily use, 5.2 GB is no where near the size that individuals need. Hard drives have historically increased in capacity about 70% a year (and program size has gone hand in hand). I realize that extrapolating data is dangerous, but if that trend continues, in just 20 years the enthusiast will be using 5.2 TB drives and your 5.2 GB drive would be completely useless. It is even possible that the next Windows operating system won't fit on it. Are you still using your 20 MB drive from 15 years ago?

Bingo, intelligence at its best. And the amount of RAM and some flash to boot from on the mobo would be better than a solid state drive. There is your increased boottime, and you can hold the majority of your OS in RAM. Voila, short term problem solved.

And if a tech is telling you to buy one so you can have a 4second bootup, for your favorite game, you're being suckered into tech not intended for you. These aren't the gamers dream, any more than a super fast SCSI raid setup is.

 

[AIWGuru]

It would have several uses:
devices like iPods. Presumably it would use less power and be shock proof because it's not a mechanical device.
Devices like TiVos and quiet PCs. PCs used in sound recording.
Laptops for the same reason as ipods.

 

[JackBurton]

I'll take two for a RAID-0 setup.

 

[wallsfd949]

From Link
Highest Storage Capacities*

3.5": 128 MB to 155.6 GB

Did I not read that correctly.. it does say 155.6 GB right? If the ratio is correct, that would cost ~ $178,800.
No thanks.

 

[JYDog]

burst read write 320MB/s, sustained 230MB/s, just doesn't seem THAT impressive for the massive costs...



EDIT: didn't mean to crap on the thread I guess I was expecting ddr2100, maybe I'm assuming these perform like "ramdrives" or something. Anyways, i'd imagine if these come down to $100/Gigabyte they'd be very saught after....

 

[menads]

I agree that this drive is way overpriced - currently you can get 1GB CompactFlash card for less than $150 while 2GB ones can be had for $400. Of course the reason for this is that CompactFlash cards are mass produced unlike this HDD.
What kills the usefullness of this HDD to some extend is that 5GB is too small - in a good 4 way database server you can actually cache such an ammount in the RAM (coming 4 way opterons are supposed to support 64GB RAM). Of course if we were talking about 50GB for that price (perfectly possible if 1GB CF goes for $150) I will order several for my company in a blink - it will be perfect for time critical portion of a database.

 

[MadRat]

To use FLASH drives effectively for solid state hard drives they'd need to run 10+ of the chips in parrallel, which just prices the device out of sight like that $6000 device mentioned. It makes more sense to boost memory and have some kind of AC-powered, pre-OS data fetching, "hot" solid state drive. What I mean by "hot" is that it requires the power to stay on or else all of the data is lost. The drive would be TOTALLY composed of conventional memory, unlike the complex system of FLASH chips in that $6000 PACKAGE, and a platter-based hard drive for cold storage would still be necessary. The trick here is that the PC would only hibernate (and store critical data to the platters) while the power is off to it, and upon plugging in power the system would prefetch the OS to the hot drive array. No sense trying to keep the entire contents of the hot drive mirrored as only the registered changes need be recorded. An array like that would run a smidgeon of that FLASH beast.

 

[Pariah]

I agree that this drive is way overpriced - currently you can get 1GB CompactFlash card for less than $150 while 2GB ones can be had for $400. Of course the reason for this is that CompactFlash cards are mass produced unlike this HDD.

Your typical compact flash card is capable of less than 5MB/s sustained transfer rates. That's way too slow for a HD. Comparing a flash based HD to compact flash is like comparing a Ferrari to a Mustang.

Flash based HD's will never be anything more than a highly expensive niche market. The technology just doesn't translate well to mass storage. The platter/spindle hard drive design is still here for the long haul. Manufacturers have said they see no replacement for it any time soon, and there isn't any indication that possible replacement candidates are even known at this point.

 

[sharq]

There were PCI cards at one time where you could plug-in PC133 SDRAM, you could get one to go upto 4gigs of space, and use that as a virtual drive, same as if you used your extra ram (not like there is such a thing as extra ram). This was back in the day of win98 which can't handle more than 128mb effeciently(sp?). I don't know anyone who had a ram drive, or bought any such pci card, but a few of my friends looked into it. The company also claimed fast access times and all.
Anyways, I seem to be lost in my own ramblings . I'm sure just like flash cards were expensive at one time, this item, if adopted by the "niche" market, will eventually start to drop in price. There are alot of industries/businesses that would like an extremely fast, and extremely low failure rate drive. An example could be google, ofcourse if google were to buy these at their current price, it'd be out of business tomorrow. But if it was adopted by the select few that make said niche market, and that grew, price would come down.
We all are saying that it's ridiculous etc, but if you had the choice in say 10-20 years of a 999gb platter based drive for $200, vs. a 250gb solid state drive for $500 (I'm just throwing numbers out here), that "niche" market will grow considerably. I would personally choose a solid state one if it's advertised extremely low failure rate was true.
By the way, look at how common the Porsche is now. They built a cheaper version of their sports car, ppl started buying it, whether for name, or quality. At one time Porsche was a very exotic item.
Maybe I'm a dreamer, but I believe that it is the future. How far down the road I'm not sure, but it will become it.

 

[TechnoPro]

Just my 2 cents worth, but I think the claim about lasting for 50 years is more of a marketing gimmick. I would assume that the company is conveying that their solid state drive has a significantly longer USEABLE lifespan than flash media drives which could be seen as a competitive product.

I don't know of many technology producers that aim for 50 year lifespans. Not that devices couldn't last that long, but clearly new and emerging technologies would have rendered obsolete the aging product far before it reached half a century.

Also, from a business sense, it would be illogical to make a product that could last that long and charge so little for it.