Hard drives

[kingtas]

So why do hard drives still use platters and moving parts when there is solid state technology? Is it still too expensive to hold many gigs worth of data?

 

[Netopia]

Compare the price of an 8GB flash card to what sort of hard drive you could get for the money and I think you'll have your answer.

It will come... but it takes time. It wasn't that long ago that a 15" LCD cost more than a 19" CRT, but now look at what the market is like. In a decade, we'll probably have mainly solid state drives, but until costs come down and production goes way up, we won't have them.

Joe

 

[Noema]

Like Netopia said: price. Samsung is already selling 16 and 32GB solid state drives (to manufacturers, at least), but they cost approximetly per $16 Gigabyte , whereas platter HDD can be had at about at less than $1 per Gygabyte. It's just a matter of time though. I bet my left eye that by 2020 they will be the standard and it will be common place to see 50TB+ SSD with writting, reading and transfer speeds unheard of today. Probably almost as fast as DDR RAM today. With that, one of the biggest (but not the biggest...we still have to cope with serial CPU architecture) bottlenecks in computing will be removed.

HDDs have moving parts and as such their days are counted inside PCs.

 

[Aluvus]

Cost and a more limited lifetime for the nonvolatile solid-state devices.

 

[MrUniq]

I read somewhere that solid state isn't ideal concerning seek time and general file access...i was researching car pc's at the time.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: MrUniq
I read somewhere that solid state isn't ideal concerning seek time

Access time for solid state is almost nothing...
That's snappy! :laugh:

 

[Quasmo]

Sustained write and read speed is terrible, we will most likely see hybrid drives, that have alot of "cache"

 

[corkyg]

Solid state memory is not quite ready yet for prime time in the sizes the market demands - i.e., 100s of GB!

 

[Goi]

Actually sustained read and write speeds of several solid state drives are already pretty respectable. Samsung's new SSDs claim over 50MB/s sustained read and over 30MB/s for writes. Adtron and Bitmicro also make pretty fast drives. The problem is price, but I think the new Samsungs are A LOT cheaper than the offerings from everyone else, so it might be a hit.