Your hard drive is now obsolete

[Animal]

LAS VEGAS - Twenty years ago I got my first home computer. It was an Apple Macintosh that someone had modified. They had installed a third-party device called a hard drive, which meant that the computer didn’t need floppy disks to boot up. Those early hard drives were large in size, wildly expensive and had storage capacities in megabytes — not gigabytes.

The rest, as they say is history. Over the years, hard drives have gotten smaller in size, bigger in capacity and a whole lot cheaper. A one-terabyte (1,000 gigabyte) drive was announced here at CES this week.

But mechanically, hard drives haven’t changed much over the years. They still have a lot of moving parts. And, as I can report from personal experience, at some point, all hard drives fail. These are not pleasant memories.

So, when I saw one particular announcement at a show filled with press releases, I got very, very excited: SanDisk Corporation has introduced a 32GB, 1.8-inch solid-state drive (SSD) which is built to be a drop-in replacement for standard mechanical hard disk drives. This means the device has no moving parts.

Large capacity flash-based drives had been used primarily in the military, aerospace and telecom industries which demanded high performance, reliable storage under demanding conditions. But these drives were very expensive. Now, with flash-memory costs dropping, solid-state drives are becoming economically and commercially viable.

In addition to being reliable, these drives are fast. SanDisk claims a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second. In plain English, that means it’s more than 100 times faster than most current hard disk drives.

I can’t begin to tell you what this ultimately means for the computer, PDA, cell phone and portable music device industries. The only thing that might slow down SSD acceptability is the price. Currently, SanDisk’s 32GB SSD will sell for $600. But, I would expect that price will drop as more and more companies choose solid-state drives. A number of electronics manufacturers are currently in talks with SanDisk — although they wouldn’t yet disclose which ones.

Cant bloody wait !!!

 

[advancedkill]

I dont suppose those 3.5" hdd slots in our cases will become "5cm, 2 mm thick slots anytime soon?

 

[maverik-sg1]

Takes the hybrid deisgn one step further - clearly sandisk believe that the performance is there - I have no reason to dispute this.

Durability and price will be the key things here - but this is the beginning of the end of the traditional hard drive as we know it.

Good find animal mate.

 

[maverik-sg1]

I dont suppose those 3.5" hdd slots in our cases will become "5cm, 2 mm thick slots anytime soon?

Think outside the box 8) - this will be a weight, space and power saver - primarily in laptops but this will soon be rolled out to desktops- also the 32GB PCB will probably be stacked to give greater capacity until the technology evolves.

In internal caddy to accomodate these is not beyond the realm of probability either.

 

[unreal]

Think outside the box 8) - this will be a weight, space and power saver - primarily in laptops but this will soon be rolled out to desktops- also the 32GB PCB will probably be stacked to give greater capacity until the technology evolves.

In internal caddy to accomodate these is not beyond the realm of probability either.

Apple funnily enough as mentioned in the article as having a hard drive are meant to be looking at them for the MacBook/MacBook Pro range... NAND memory I believe is the correct term?

Also £350 for a 32GB drive isnt too unreasonable as running 8GB in a GigaByte iRam is going to cost close to this. Added to this they wont wipe themselves without power and its a real winner.

 

[nick25]

You can already get these in some laptops. Is there a limit with how many read/writes you get though?

 

[unreal]

You can already get these in some laptops. Is there a limit with how many read/writes you get though?

If I remember correctly there is, it is a number you might hit but I think someone averaged it at something rediculousy large in usage...

 

[K404]

I`ve been watching this/these for a while. The speed jumps are encouraging, but they`re not ready to take on normal hard-disks yet. I-RAM is suffering from the crazy D-RAM prices at the mo...2xI-RAM and RAM will pass the £500 mark easily, probs closer to £600.

 

[nick25]

Thanks Unreal - I would love to get one. Even the standard 32GB one would be enough space for me as all my files are on a seperate server.

 

[Animal]

Thanks Unreal - I would love to get one. Even the standard 32GB one would be enough space for me as all my files are on a seperate server.

You got that all sorted in the end then m8?

What did you go for?

 

[stocky]

Sounds good. It's about time though, it's like living in the dark ages with these current hard drives.

 

[K404]

Slightly OT....

Just been looking at Samsumgs propaganda about their hybrid disks. Instead of an 8/16MB buffer/cache, these will have a 256MB* (2Gbit... nicely fiddled number to make it look better!) flash buffer so the platters dont need accessed as often.

Assuming the Flash part is as fast or faster than the current buffer then there will be a decent benefit as useful data can now be held in cache...game levels, larger files.

*assuming maths is right!