storage with no moving parts .... ?

[jimmyhaha]

How come the storage with no moving parts
i.e. CF, MMC, SD, SM, PCMCIA... etc

is much more expensive than the one with moving parts ?
i.e. harddisk, cd-rom, dvd ?

and can someone explain to me why storage with no moving parts can work ?

 

[PowerMacG5]

The reason solid state storage costs so much more to manufacture than moving part storage is because the fabrication of solid-state drives is fairly complicated. A moving part storage like a HDD is fairly straight forward. It works by changing the electron spin of the electron in a specific area in the magnetic field (the reason they warn to keep away from magnetic sources is because it will de-polorize the field and all of your data will be corrupted). The way a solid-state storage system works is by using chips and storing the data in their by using digital signals (1's and 0's). A HDD is also very simple to produce, all you need is a motor, the magnetic platters, the cylinders, and a few electric components. To manufacture solid-state devices it requires a PCB (printed circute board). This is a board that has the chips pressed into them, the soddered to keep it there. These devices also use the substrate to hold all of the "wires" that connect all of the different parts. This board with the integrated "wires" must also be manufactured.

 

[ttn1]

Actually the non-volatile solid state storage that is under development is very much like the magnetic storage we all know and love. The main reason solid state is more expensive is partially what the previous poster said about production technique. The truth is that solid state storage has the potential to be close to as cheap as harddrives.

The main thing is that researchers figured out how to throw a bunch of magnetic material onto a disk and it worked to store data. Since there wasn't any need to use expensive masking processes to create integrated circuits, this was much cheaper. If people could figure out how to get memory cells to "grow" themselves on a piece of silicon we would be all set.

As large scale memory modules become more common place, we may be able to catch up with harddrive capacity. For a reasonable cost right now people could have a 4 GB RAM drive on their computers. Then you could just use the harddrive to back up data. Alot of large search engines do just that. Check out the specs on Googles search cluster. I believe they have terrabytes of ram drive space.

 

[Acanthus]

that and hundreds of thousands of SRAM chips isnt exactly cheap either 😉

 

[ttn1]

Actually with 1 and 2 Mbit ram chips becoming more the norm, you would only need 400 2Mbit or 800 1Mbit chips to make a 100 GB drive. The problem is that unless there is some sort of battery backup, you loose all the data on shutdown. There are at least a few companies making these drives in various flavors right now. In mass production, they would still be slightly more expensive than platter drives, but not by much.

Edit: Cray has a solid state drive that has access speeds of 80 GB/sec and 224 GB of storage space.

 

[Passions]

Like that previous person said, the technology behind solid state storage is much more complicated than normal hd storage. Physically, they are smaller, no moving mechanical parts, consumes low power, nothing to wear out and fail, can withstand much greater pressure and vibrations, and more tougher and durable. Kinda get the drift why they are more expensive? Heh.