Back in 1994 when I owned my first PC (well actually it was my dad's) I have been thinking over the idea of memory based hard drives. No moving parts, lightning write/read speeds, it's seems like a winner. My dad predicted that classical hard drives will be replaced my flash drives in matter of a year or two. But that didn't start to happen until middle of last year. There were issues with solid state drives which are just now being overcome. As it turned out Flash memory, was extremely slow for writes and reads when comparing it to the volitate memory (such as RAM). Even slowest of mechanical hard drives are usually faster than flash chips. That was one problem. Another one was that flash memory didn't have a great life span. Every chip is rated for certain amount of writes, after which it stops storing information. This sounds bad, but in actuality 100,000+ rewrites is not that small of a number for average computer user. Even better, problem was fairly easy overcame with special controllers which now spread out sectors of flash memory chip so it wears down evenly. It also maps out any bad sectors on the fly, so almost no data corruption occurs. Speed problem was solved recently too. Using new technologies Solid State drives are many times faster than mechanical HDDs. Capacity also was a culprit, but just today (Feb 5th, 2008) 1.6Tb SSD was announced by company Bitmicro.
I pretty sure that's currently more storage space than what HDDs offer. This drive really expensive of course (over $20K I think). All SSDs are expensive right now, but I'm sure price will drop dramatically by the beginning of the 2009. Dell and Apple currently the only two companies that sell laptops with SSDs as an option. Be prepared to see more and more devices implementing SSDs. I belive we will see SSD based iPod this summer. Fourteen years was a little bit too long to wait, but I'm happy to report that non-mechanical hard drives are finally here to stay.
No comments:
Post a Comment