The future of hard drives?

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Zoomer30

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#1 Zoomer30
Member since 2003 • 4365 Posts
I guess I should have seen this coming. Samsung has come out with something they call a "solid state drive". The one Popular Mechanics got for review was a 64 GB model. A drive unit with no discs. All flash RAM. This could be really good. AS the article said, the hard drive is the bottle neck of most PCs now. Flash RAM is much faster.
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filmography

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#2 filmography
Member since 2004 • 3202 Posts
yes, think of all the porn that can hold, no wait think of all the HD porn that thing can hold.
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musclesforcier

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#3 musclesforcier
Member since 2004 • 2894 Posts
How much $ is it though, they are expensive.
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yoyo462001

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#4 yoyo462001
Member since 2005 • 7535 Posts
it was not samsung that have started this we have had there them for a while but there really expensive there currently in alienwares atm but for a 160GB SSD you'd be paying something like 1000 dollars for it.. it is the future but not for anothe r3 years most likely... and btw HDD are not bottlenecks for PC's atm because there is still little change in game between SSD's and normal HDD's.
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Gog

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#5 Gog
Member since 2002 • 16376 Posts
Current HD's aren't going anywhere. Price issues aside, SSD's have really low writing performance. Anybody who's tried to copy large amounts of data from a HD to a USB disk should have noticed.
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Zoomer30

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#6 Zoomer30
Member since 2003 • 4365 Posts
Well FLASH is getting cheaper all the time and FASTER. Could be good. I spent $80 for 128KB back in 2004, now you can get 2000 MB for around $30-$40. Cant wait.
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TicTac8745

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#7 TicTac8745
Member since 2007 • 3902 Posts

Well FLASH is getting cheaper all the time and FASTER. Could be good. I spent $80 for 128KB back in 2004, now you can get 2000 MB for around $30-$40. Cant wait.Zoomer30

Don't you mean 128MB? 128KB won't store anything :lol:

I agree with Gog - the writing performance to flash isn't great - I always use my 2GB USB flash drive to copy a large file (around the 1.6Gbs mark) and the writing time is abysmal (from a USB 2.0 port)

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subrosian

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#8 subrosian
Member since 2005 • 14232 Posts
Write performance plus fewer write cycles before it's trashed, combined with high costs and low storage space don't bode well for flash memory to replace our current hard drives.
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badgert

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#9 badgert
Member since 2003 • 924 Posts

I don't think it will replace the current HDDs

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RichterBelmont7

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#10 RichterBelmont7
Member since 2007 • 335 Posts

What needs to happen is that we need SSDs that last longer (flash is only good for around 200,000 writes) and we need it to be more cost effective..but something has to give. HDDs today are quickly becoming like tape-storage was twenty years ago..too slow to keep up with the surrounding system.

PCI-E even x8 is much faster than a HDD's writing speed, there are internet connections that exist today and more coming that can download faster than a HDD can store it, disc/platter-based storage is going to have to go at some point fairly soon.

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RichterBelmont7

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#11 RichterBelmont7
Member since 2007 • 335 Posts

Current HD's aren't going anywhere. Price issues aside, SSD's have really low writing performance. Anybody who's tried to copy large amounts of data from a HD to a USB disk should have noticed.Gog

What we need is a new SSD memory standard and those aren't exactly blazing trails right now. NAND isn't ideal for writing also due to the limited number of write cycles. USB 3.0 should be coming within the next couple of years and PCI-E 3.0 as well so write speed shouldn't be an issue provided we actually get a storage technology capable of utilizing all that bandwidth.

NAND SSDs are likely going to just end up on thinclient systems or go the way of bubble memory, who wants to start a pool on nanowires?

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Zoomer30

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#12 Zoomer30
Member since 2003 • 4365 Posts

:lol: Yep I was work thinking about this topic and I thought 128KB?! wth! I meant 128MB. Still its sad that cost me about $80. Now 2GB costs less than $40.

Flash RAM in a PC would be cool as a "quick boot up" option. You could "save" your current state to it, shut the thing off then boot up off the flash, be up in 5 secs.

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F1_2004

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#13 F1_2004
Member since 2003 • 8009 Posts

How are HDD's a bottleneck for current PC's? And by how much could performance possibly be increased by going to flash drives instead of HDD?

I'm sure one day we'll see something that puts HDDs to shame, but for now it's probably more productive to focus development on actual bottlenecks, such as GPUs and CPUs.

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X360PS3AMD05

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#14 X360PS3AMD05
Member since 2005 • 36320 Posts
More people need to make them so the prices can drop. ^HDD have been the bottleneck for a long while now, CPUs and GPUs advance so quick and what have HDD done? Nothing.
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quocthai

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#15 quocthai
Member since 2005 • 1995 Posts

More people need to make them so the prices can drop. ^HDD have been the bottleneck for a long while now, CPUs and GPUs advance so quick and what have HDD done? Nothing.X360PS3AMD05

well, that is not entirely true. I remember back in around 2001 all the hard drive was IDE interface, it has then move to ATA and SATA.

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X360PS3AMD05

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#16 X360PS3AMD05
Member since 2005 • 36320 Posts
Which provide "theoretical" bandwidth, in real life they're not much faster :|
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quocthai

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#17 quocthai
Member since 2005 • 1995 Posts
the speed increase from IDE to SATA was pretty dramatic for me.
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Gog

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#18 Gog
Member since 2002 • 16376 Posts
Going from an old ATA to a new SATA driveand you might notice the difference but going from a new ATA to a new SATA? The performance has little to do with the theoretical limit of the interface but with the technical read/write and seek times.
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bluebusiness

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#19 bluebusiness
Member since 2006 • 541 Posts
What about the different rpm in a HDD, such as raptors going at 10,000rpm or even Western Digital HDD going at 15,000rpm dont those help? Also isnt there somethijng called Ultra ATA?
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#20 sodoffubugger
Member since 2005 • 162 Posts

It will take a few more years of R and D to see what SSD will be capable of. But for now I can see SSD in server forms. ALmost no seek time and good read times are very nice for servers.

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yoyo462001

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#21 yoyo462001
Member since 2005 • 7535 Posts

It will take a few more years of R and D to see what SSD will be capable of. But for now I can see SSD in server forms. ALmost no seek time and good read times are very nice for servers.

sodoffubugger
it costs sooo much money now that having 5TB SSD may set you back over 20k... the performance increase does not warrant it.