posted
"Near" is an extremely generous term. It'll be a long time before this sort of thing is a mainstream solution.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
especially when priced at 30$.
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posted
True, but that $30 also comes with a lot of advantages over regular hard drives. For large banks of storage, they are cheaper to run, they don't need cooling systems because they don't overheat, and they draw significantly less power, which over the course of a year, at a major server farm, is a serious concern, especially now. Space is at a premium too. I haven't the foggiest clue as to how that compares to a regular hard drive, but they DO have advantages.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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I can remember buying a 40 Meg hard drive for over $200, and thinking I'd never be able to fill it up.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
I was reading the comments on the webpage and will quote one, as it seems very relevant to the price.
"March 1989, Western Digital 20 MEGABytes.
Cost? $900 bucks
Thats:
$52 per MEG $52,000 per GIG!!!!!
But, got back just a few more years:
1984: 20 MEGAbytes for $3150
Check it: $157.40 per MEG $157,000 per GIG!
And a quote to go with it:
"The cost for 128 kilobytes of memory will fall below U$100 in the near future." -- Creative Computing magazine December 1981 "
Posts: 2705 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
I'm not sure how past prices are all that relevant; it's the comparison between the different technologies now that matters. You can get a hard drive for less than 30 CENTS per gigabyte right now, or you can get one of these solid state drives for over 100 times the price.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
There's a long way that tech will need to go before it will replace hard drives. In the short term, they seem to have done a pretty good job of identifying their market (companies with databases that are too big to load into RAM, but not outrageously large, needing every microsecond of query speed; a reasonable market segment).
Unless data integrity and performance can be maintained over years of frequent writes, this won't replace hard drives directly, though. That's a current problem with flash technology.
We might see long term computer storage restructure if the tech becomes cheap enough. A 'frequent write' cache for frequently written files, where the chip can be popped out and replaced as it wears out, and 'infrequent write' storage of this type that can, at low write rates, be used for comparable times to current HDs.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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30$ a gig.
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