Alternatives to magnetic primary storage

[Rock Hydra]

I know that Hard Drives are here and probably will be for a while, but I know they're quite a bottleneck compared to many other devices. Are there alternatives in development for this? I know flash comes to mind at first, at this point it's slower than Hard Disks. And I don't know what price point a resonably fast flash disk would be applicable. Any thoughts?

 

[rlandess]

I've been wondering the same thing... There used to be a thing called a Platypus drive. It was a PCI card with some PC100 slots on it and you could make a litteral ramdrive. But I thinks it's been discontinued. There are otherthings like it through. Solid state drives come to mind but I really know nothing about them except that I can't afford it.

 

[imported_Hamzter]

A few weeks ago a company released the first prototype of a holographics storage drive, I don't think there were any moving parts in it (apart from maybe a lens), so it has the potential to access data much faster than hard drives. They also claim it could store over a TB of information, which I'm not suprised at since it stores the information in 3 dimensions.

There news item is here

Imo, there's no other way forward than 3 dimensional storage, it's simply too hard to keep shrinking the bits. Mechanical devices are also horribly slow compared to pure electronic, optical and magnetic devices. Hopefully we'll see holographic storage soon, cos my HDD bearing's going, it's driving me nuts.

 

[Crescent13]

Millipede