Unimpressed with all this new hardware

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Martimus
I know I shouldn't feed a troll, and I didn't after your first post, but WHAT THE HELL? I don't believe anyone here thinks that accessing SSD's is faster than accessing system RAM, or any of the various levels of processor cache. I am sorry that my wondering outloud if we could come up with a feasible way to basically obsolete system RAM, how it would change the computing landscape, would upset you so much. It would be nice if mass storage became so fast that we wouldn't need a seperate "fast" system memory for quick access by the processor. It is obviously possible now for small memory sizes, slow processors, or huge budgets; but I was thinking about mainstream use.

Anyway, I was never trying to anger you with my statements; and looking back at them I still wonder how I managed to do that. I hope that you go home and have a few drinks, and just chill out. Life is too difficult to get stressed over how other people view the world. I hope that you feel better soon.

I didn't respond as well for a reason to that final post he made.

I felt that I made a viable effort to use examples to show anything this side of those examples was worthy debate material, he chose to go and pursue examples on the far extreme side of even my examples in some lackluster attempt to invalidate the basic premise of what you and I are both saying - reasonable discussion on what it will take for the bottleneck to no longer be the hard-drive.

Some folks just can't handle engaging in gedanken experiments in a social setting. Clearly, as we wouldn't have mods otherwise. At any rate I am still crazy excited about the prospects of affordable sub-100us latency SSD's in the coming 2-3 yrs. Flash cadence is very robust, we'll see doubling of capacities for same price every 18months for a while yet.

Good news for Samsung and Toshiba, bad news for Seagate.

 

[v8envy]

Originally posted by: Idontcare


Good news for Samsung and Toshiba, bad news for Seagate.

Don't count the traditional HDs out yet. SSDs still have longevity issues in a lots-of-writes usage model. I know I'm not going long LEAP puts on Seagate, anyway.

I expect the final iteration of magnetic storage to have ginormous many gigabyte caches, powered by battery or capacitor. SSDs too, probably.

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: v8envy

Originally posted by: Idontcare


Good news for Samsung and Toshiba, bad news for Seagate.

Don't count the traditional HDs out yet. SSDs still have longevity issues in a lots-of-writes usage model. I know I'm not going long LEAP puts on Seagate, anyway.

I expect the final iteration of magnetic storage to have ginormous many gigabyte caches, powered by battery or capacitor. SSDs too, probably.

People have been counting out the future of magnetic drives for decades now, because flash technology has been advancing so quickly. The thing is that magnetic drives advanced even faster. We always think that we will hit a wall with magnetic drives, but it just hasn't happened yet - at least when it comes to sheer volume. But SSD's have really hit the magnetic drives where they are weak - in access time. And now, they are available in sizes that are useful for modern applications, and at semi-affordable prices. For the first time, it looks that they really will overtake the magnetic drive as primary storage within a reasonable timeframe (say 3-5 years). Although the advantages of magnetic drives would still make them conducive to mass storage, at least until something else comes that works better.

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: Idontcare
At any rate I am still crazy excited about the prospects of affordable sub-100us latency SSD's in the coming 2-3 yrs. Flash cadence is very robust, we'll see doubling of capacities for same price every 18months for a while yet.

Good news for Samsung and Toshiba, bad news for Seagate.

I am excited too. It wil be nice to have loading times greatly reduced. I can imagine a great many things that were neutered due to data access taking too long that will be able to do things that couldn't be done before. This excites me more than the new Nehalem, or the new GPU's out, or whatnot. I am actually somewhat upset that AMD sold their Flash memory division, since they could have used that to help the company over the next few years. I felt it was a short sited move when they did it, but then they are a publicly traded company, so that seems to be the norm.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Yeah, that will be a huge advance. I'm running a RAID 0 array for the first time and it's the first time I've ever not tapped my fingers impatiently waiting for apps to load. Disk striping helps. but can you imagine disk striping on an SSD array? Creamy sweet. That's probably what my next build in a couple years' time will be based upon.

Right now, I'm more excited about my new iPod Touch than I am even about my 4.1 GHz Penryn desktop. Funny.