Solid state disk: show me

Solid state disk: show me

Posted Mar 29, 2008 0:22 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Solid state disk: show me by flewellyn
Parent article: Predictive ELF bitmaps

And as in 1978, they are more expensive than moving-head disks. Even after you count the cost of the slowness and the engineering to avoid the seeks.

That's on average, of course. Solid state storage gets used more and more every year as more applications fall out of the disk-costs-less category.

I think one of the great pastimes in the computer industry these days is guessing when more than half of storage will be solid state. While non-professionals have been saying "a couple of years" for about 20 years, I'm now beginning to hear 5 years, for new storage, from credible professionals.

I know some day the use of moving parts in a computer will be a subject of ridicule. It already seems perverse.

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Clarke had it taking a million years in _The City and the Stars_. It seems 
like we might manage the no-moving-parts dictum, in computers at least, a 
good bit sooner than that.

(I definitely agree with that dictum: `no machine shall contain any moving 
parts.' As a recipe for long-lived hardware, it has few equals.)

Even with zero moving parts, thermal migration of the material on the silicon will limit the
life of a computer system.

Yeah, but it's *better*. ;}

(now the fix-every-atom-in-place, fix-reality-to-a-virtual-backdrop tech 
they had in Diaspar, *that* was advanced. And probably physically 
impossible, but it feels like it should have worked. Ah, Clarke wrote some 
good stuff in his day.)