What moving parts of a PC will eventually become Solid State?

[MadRat]

Simple put, what moving parts of a PC will eventually become Solid State?

 

[TunaBoo]

When it becomes feasable for the average american.

 

[Viper GTS]

How many moving parts are there?

HD's
CD/DVD ROM's
Removable Media drives
fans

And that's about it.

HD's - You can already get these, but they're expensive as hell & small (couple gigs are the biggest I've seen). Once the price drops & capacity increases 100 fold, then maybe.

CD/DVD ROM's - Not a lot of room for solid state on these, but they'll probably be phased out for some sort of solid state non-spinning media. At least I hope so, I hate the noise.

Removable Media Drives - Floppy & Zip are headed to the grave already, until someone finds a cheap replacement for CDR/W removable media is probably going to stay the way it is now.

Fans - Umm... No comment.

Viper GTS

 

[Train]

eventually very fast, very high capacity, very durable solid state HD's will replace ALL moving parts, then i guess all we have left is the fans, hmm, which some case makers have already gotten rid of

 

[w74656]

if anybody has a Solid State hard drive that they wish to donate, send it over!!!!
has anyone used one? what kind of seek times do you get on HDTach?

there isn't too many moving parts in a PC as Viper said, maybe they could make a silent CD/DVD if they have magnetic suspension on the disc or simply put the disc in a vaccuum...

 

[obeseotron]

A solid state hard drive should be in most cases be able to max out the interface it is connected to. This is why slower RAM chips are used usually. PC100 delivers 800MB/sec, but if the 32 bit PCI bus can only handle 133MB/sec, no matter what kind of interface you have plugged in, you will have at best maybe 100MB/sec throughput. Things like access time and fragmentation should be non issues however.

 

[Renob]

The fans.

 

[DaLeroy]

Only prob with solid state HDD using ram is that it needs to be written to a permanent source before you switched the pc off, otherwise it's bye bye data

 

[Gustavus]

There is an interesting device called a Hilsch tube in which only air moves and cold(er) air come out of one end and hot(er) air comes out of the other. Air is blown in tangentially at the middle of the tube and the longer mean free path cooler molecules are centrifugally separated to the outside and the shorter MFP hotter molecules to the inside. The Germans used a Hilsch tube to cool cockpits in WWII and it has seen some applications since. It would be an interesting innovation to simply supply compressed air to a separator that then blew cold air into the computer case -- or through conduits onto the components where heat was being generated. You do need a source for the compressed air however.

 

[McCarthy]

CDs...optical in general...

I've always wondered if it would ever be feasible to have a non spinning disc, instead have an array of lasers which could scan it while it sits still. Sure, going to be a problem with angles, the closer the worse it'll be, but it was just a pondering.

HDs - actually they don't bug me. Newest generation ones are so quiet they're hard to hear. Then again, without CDs and fans we might be able to. But noise wise, bottom of the list. Like the current price/performance here too

Fans - what can I say? BE GONE WITH THEM. It's funny, when I saw the first flip chips I thought "hey cool, looks kinda like my 386SX-16...wonder if they're going to run cooler now". Heh. Wonder where we stop. When the first 486's required fans I said "never work, they'll get plugged with dust and die" And some did. When I saw Pentiums reqired bigger ones I said the same. And some did. When I saw the heatsinks around the early PII overclocking days, the Celery Sandwhiches and what was coming next I said "There's no hope left" and pierced my eardrums with icepicks.

 

[Workin']

In every case the USER will inevitably become solid-state. If you are 20 now, in about 50-80 years you will stop moving.

 

[dullard]

<< There is an interesting device called a Hilsch tube in which only air moves and cold(er) air come out of one end and hot(er) air comes out of the other. Air is blown in tangentially at the middle of the tube and the longer mean free path cooler molecules are centrifugally separated to the outside and the shorter MFP hotter molecules to the inside. The Germans used a Hilsch tube to cool cockpits in WWII and it has seen some applications since. It would be an interesting innovation to simply supply compressed air to a separator that then blew cold air into the computer case -- or through conduits onto the components where heat was being generated. You do need a source for the compressed air however. >>



I've worked with one of those tubes. They are great for cooling in places which must be dust free. The compressed air is a major problem though:
1) Much more expensive than the electricity for a fan,
2) You must constantly re-order compressed air containers,
3) If you run out of air, you wouldn't be able to use the computer until the next shipment arrives.
4) You could have your own air compressor, but they are extremely noisy and expensive.

As far as I know, the true method which the Ranque-Hilsch tubes use in seperating the air is unknown. However the most widely accepted theory is not what you mentioned (centrifugal forces). Instead the theory states that there is a vortex inside the tube with the center of the vortex having a tangental velocity opposite the tangental velocity of the outer part of the vortex (imagine flushing the toilet and the center water squirts out toward your face while the outer toilet water moves as usual). Due to viscous forces (fluid friction) the outer vortex must rotate with the same angular velocity as the inner vortex part. However, this is only possible if energy is transferred from one to the other (thus cooling one stream and heating the other). Imagine a ice skater who brings her arms in during a spin, she will speed up. In the vortex tube, this speed up is impossible due to viscosity, so instead an energy flow is created.

 

[airis2001]

No one has talked much about a solid state floppy drive. With flash ram fgetting cheaper( just got a 64 meg smart media card for 44 shipped) thay could be positioned to replace teh zip and flopy drive. Silent, much faster then teh floppy drive, and maby zip disks, depending ont eh connection to teh PC, (anyone know just how fast you can read and write to them?) low to high capacity as needed, you can get 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 meg cards, and getting cheaper, now less then $1 per meg. Could these be used to kill off the floppy drive?
Ari

 

[Pauli]

I agree with airis2001. I already use my USB CF reader and 128MB $70 Mr. Flash as my critical data backup. Fast, convenient, and now, practical.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

what is solid state?

i mean i know what it is, but how does it work on harddrives and cd-roms?

 

[Doomsday]

Magnetic suspension for CDs, or in a vaccum...no comment. If you can't put up with that slight noise you have a very serious problem. If it's making that much noise anyway, the device is probably failing. Asus makes some nice quiet CD/DVD roms.

Haha...a vaccum...you know how big the device would have to be??? And how would you stabalize it without making noise.

Oh yea, about a year ago I remeber reading an article in Popular Science about solid state storage drives. They used something like potassium in a cube, and used lasers to manipulate it for data storage. They said that storage space would be in the hundreds of gigs, but seek times would be rather high, or about the same. Either way when they come out they are going to be an arm and a leg...

 

[neuralfx]

eh just get ear-plugs if it bothers ya.. heh kidding aside, I prefer having good performance over noise. Sure the solid-state idea is cool, but I'm just fine with the way hd's, cdrom drives etc are now, basically. If anything my delta bugs me, but you can get quiet, good performing fans, ala panaflo.. well my .02cents
-neural

 

[rc5]

486 PC don't have a fan at all.

What about peltier? That's also &quot;solid state&quot; cooler

 

[vi edit]

BrunoPuntzJones, solid state as in no moving parts. A solid state HD would be something like a giant compact flash or flash media card that instead of holding a couple megs, it would hold several gigs of information. Data access would be virtually instantaneous. There would no longer be a &quot;seek time&quot; when you are waiting for a tiny needle to position itself over the top of a specific sector. You would also have far fewer failures do to the fact that there are no moving parts to burn out.

Doomsday, I think you are refering to Holographic Storage, or 3d storage. You basically shoot a laser into a cube and create tiny little flaws in the media of the cube to represent data. The laser could be spun around the block writing data in a virtually endless number of positions. This could be the replacement of the CD-R(W) drive in the future. There are two problems with it currently. 1) Cost 2) The equipement needed to burn the image into the cube takes up a large closet.

Turning everything solid state would surely prove to be a huge leap in the portable/appliance market. Energy consumption would be at a bare minimum, reliablity and shock absorbtion would be at an all time high, and the sheer size of things would be drastically reduced.

We just have to wait for prices to drop, drop, drop.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

<< A solid state HD would be something like a giant compact flash or flash media card >>


schweet! good compairson (i know it wouldnt be the exact same but i know what you mean and how it could work). id like to see faster hard drives, about the slowest thing around in a system it seems.

 

[rockhard]

Ive been looking at CF cards for a while as a possible replacement for my HD.
Theres &quot;Serial ATA&quot; compact flash cards which when used with an appropriate controller plugged into one of your IDE ports is recognised as a HD and can even be Fdisked etc - kewl
They can be read/written to a million times and currently are available up to a gig last time i looked.
My idea is to put my OS and Outlook on here and use the rig in conjunction with a Win2K Active Directory Server for data storage etc. Also put plenty of ram in the rig for a ram drive to be used as swap.
The only thing i couldnt find out about was the seek/transfer rates?
Im sure the seeks be great, but the transfer rate has me worried as i seem to remember CF cards being a bit slow in my iPaq
Pop a Cyrix Samuel 3A in there with no fan and use a fanless PSU, the i fancy u would end up with a totally silent rig - even quieter than a Mac cube.
Anyone got any thoughts on doing this?

 

[pdqcarrera]

Forget solid state == howzabout liquid state?

Hey I'm there!!! :-D

 

[Doomsday]

Yep, you're right vi_edit. Now I completely remember the article. Thanks

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

<< A similar data transfer operation performed by an SSD is complete in 0.25 - 0.4 ms (typical). >>

when compared to 8-15ms for normal ide drives. from an article in 1998. i should have saved the link

 

[hans007]

everything will eventually be replaced with solid state. fans will go away once we hit a certain speed with computing. Basiclly look at a winCE PDA, as what the future is. I mean a winCE pda is still way faster than most late 80s and early 90s machines. So maybe in 10-15 more years .