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Can Flash Crash The Hard Drive Business?
from the well,-this-should-be-fun dept
While Apple may have eaten up some huge percentage of the world's flash memory market in building the ever-so-delicate iPod Nano, it's got some wondering whether or not flash drives can eventually replace hard drives. That, not surprisingly, has hard drive makers in full on response mode, such as this interview with Seagate's CEO, where he insists that flash memory still doesn't have the access speeds necessary to match hard drive performance. He also points out the price advantages to hard drives. What's most interesting, though, is that he doesn't seem all that interested in challenging the idea that hard drives will remain much larger than flash memory. That seems to be the easiest point of attack, since hard drives have consistently been able to stay ahead of flash growth and flash memory chips are still significantly smaller than most hard drives. That certainly suggests that the claims of flash makers that they're getting closer to much larger offerings have some substance. He admits that power consumption is an issue (flash does much better than hard drives), but seems to believe that people don't care as much about it... which seems to actually go against what most people are saying. Either way, it seems clear that the question of flash memory is a big enough concern that hard drive makers are feeling the pressure to respond.
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Reader Comments (rss)
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No Subject Given
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limited writes
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Flash drives
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No Use For RAM
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vaporware... or the future
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Re: No Use For RAM
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Re: No Use For RAM
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Re: vaporware... or the future
MS website: The maximum amount of memory that can be supported on Windows XP Professional and Windows Server 2003 is 4 GB.
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Re: vaporware... or the future
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No Subject Given
This is an arrangement of memory technologies based on their
speed vs capacity (or, if you like, speed vs cost).
This goes something like CPU registers (fastest, least capacity),
CPU cache, motherboard ram, disk, tape, (slowest, most capacity).
Right now, flash memories has its place in between ram and disk.
Things change if we start seeing flash memories offering capacities
comparable to hard drives...
-cmh
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No Subject Given
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Re: vaporware... or the future
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/64bit/x64/enterprise.mspx
but yes, it smells like vaporware... thus the subject line.
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Sweet silence
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Re: vaporware... or the future
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Re: vaporware... or the future
2^32 = 4,294,967,296 OR 4GB
2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 OR 18 Exabytes
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Uh, no!
You'd have to have:
- a slow down in user consumption of space
- a premium for reduced physical size, durability and/or noise
I think those are both quite a ways off. It will happen, naturally, but it will take a change to wearable computing (and I'm not talking cell phones here), and also a topping out of the storage needs for a user.
I don't think hard drive manufacturers have any sleep to lose, and I think people who are hyping flash memory right now probably have ulterior motives.
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Re: vaporware... or the future
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Re: vaporware... or the future
The Enterprise Edition supports 32GB on 32bit systems (via PAE/PSE36) and the DataCenter Edition supports 64GB.
The 64bit versions probably support more.
Even the 64bit Edition of XP supports 8GB.
Of course, these are arbitrarily imposed limits, with hardware capable of supporting more -- and Linux, FreeBSD, etc. can generally support whatever the CPU itself can support.
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Re: Uh, no!
2GB of flash drive is now $125 or $60 per GB. WD Raptor is 74GB for $200, or $1.5 per GB. The Raptor uses 8 watts in full run mode and about 1 to 1.5 watts in standby. Flash drives have to use a lot less, not sure how much, probably fractions of a watt. So, if RAM is faster than hard drives by a factor of about 1000 then RAM is 2000 times faster than the fastest flash drives. The best application for flash at this time is to augment hard drives which they are doing just now for notebooks etc. This is to reduce HD spin up times and power consumption. Hard drives will shortly be relagated to the equivalent of tape drives in the 1990s. The next use of flash will be to insta-boot the OS out of standby (something allegedly that can be done on the hybrid drives), which in the case of flash will be the normal mode more or less.
Expect to see a quick influx of hybrid hard drives for portable devices. And expect to see a massive influx of flash media in 3G cellular devices and portable entertainment devices i.e. m4a players.
Go SD cards, go m4a!!! Both are cheaper and better than the their competition.
-Fred M.
BSME, MEMS, Geek
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hard vs flash drives
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Re: limited writes
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kodak! what a joke.
come on poor quality american products.
as normal all show and no go.
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GO FLASH!
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There will not in this lifetime be Re: No Use For
Don't get confused with other ideas.
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Re: Re: vaporware... or the future
There are many other high quality OS that are far more secure and robust than MS will probably ever be. This is much closer to the truth. UNIX and later Linux are far superior to MS in most ways. This is not debatable, I am talking about the quality of code, and not about the pretty, pretty GUI which is for looks only and the experienced programmers are rarely involved in the GUI's look.
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Re: Sweet silence
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FLASH WILL END THE HARD DRIVE BUSSNIESS
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