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Disk Drives Face Challenge From Chips
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Dec 11, 2006 11:36 AM
from the the-growth-of-hard-storage dept.
from the the-growth-of-hard-storage dept.
WSJdpatton writes "Researchers are reporting significant progress in perfecting a different way to store data in semiconductors, which could replace one widely used type of memory chip and possibly become a credible competitor to disk drives. The researchers, in a paper being delivered at a technical conference in San Francisco, say they used a novel combination of materials to create prototype phase-change components that are more than 500 times as fast as flash chips, while requiring less than half of the electrical power to record data."
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Yeah, but (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if the first unit they put out is 2x [standard size of whatever] but 500x as fast & uses less battery power... don't you think there's going to be a market for it?
Parent
Re:Yeah, but (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd probably still keep the platter drive for secondary storage and put the OS and critical apps/servers/whatever on the phase drive though.
I wouldn't pay twice as much for a drive with half the head room though - even if it is 500X faster. That kind of speed (and especially power consumption) may be a big deal for notebooks, but if density is really a problem, the notebooks would probably have to give up a lot more headroom - relatively speaking. We're finally seeing 200G notebook drives, but keep in mind they're tiny compared to your standard laptop drive. If the new phase drives can store the same or more data in the same space, then yeah, I definitely see the end of the platter drive in mainstream use - once the supply outweighs the demand enough to make it financially realistic. If they can put no more than 30G in a notebook drive, then I think it'll take a couple product generations for that to happen.
Parent
Formats (Score:5, Insightful)
So run out, children, and buy your SD 2.0 standard devices while they're not yet obsolete. That way you can buy your camera again and again for no good reason.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It is only Microsoft's own cut-rate implementation of a disk manager that insists on making FAT32 volumes a maximum of 32GB in size, and I suspect it is solely because they want people to use NTFS instead.
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Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is that flash fails with writes (not reads) and HDD fails with reads AND writes (bad sectors?). Early flash failed after only 10,000 writes per sector, newer flash is in the millions. Flash spreads the writes around, so to reduce the chance of any one sector failing and can do this because flash is genuinely RAM (unlike HDD where location affects transfer speed). Both HDD and SSD employ firmware stratergies that hide sector failure from the OS, only flash can do that without any real cost to performance.
The end result is that if either are working after 3 or 4 years your doing well, and should really be looking for a replacement unit.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, but HDDs are amongst the most reliable storage media. A good, well-built SCSI drive can last for much, much longer than 3-4 years. I've personally seen hard drives as old 10 years functioning without a hitch. RAID can very much mitigate the risks associated with keeping drives around that long, too.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow! I never suspected. You should probably let Seagate know. I'm sure they will want to rethink their 5 year warranty.
Perhaps you buy really cut rate drives, but in my experience hard drives almost always outlast their usefulness. I've disposed of more drives due to a combination of obsolete busses and pathetic capacity than outright failures. If you are really seeing high failure rates after only three years, you should be looking for some external factor because that isn't normal.
Parent
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Flash is good for some things like portable media, but where constant activity is found you should use something more durable.
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Other technologies have come and gone claiming to compete with hard drives for speed and reliability. But the fact is that hard drives are a very mature technology with a low cost per megabyte, with performance and reliability characteristics that have long been considered good enough. The
Re:Good news (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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No more harddrives? (Score:3, Insightful)
Although it could make really cool applications for OS installs. Could you imagine your favorite OS installed on something as fast or faster then today's RAM? I don't want to think about the cost of 4G of this stuff though. *shiver*
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Re:No more harddrives? YES! (Score:4, Funny)
The irony is that this would explain why in the future (à-la-Star-Trek), backups of the computer's memory doesn't exist and cause improbable storylines for us system admins.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
[shrug] A decade ago, I'd never even seen a machine with 4GB RAM, and five years ago, I'd only ever seen that much RAM in monstrously expensive servers. Now I have a machine with that much RAM on my desk. (And yes, I use it; most of my work is pretty heavy number-crunching.) So if this stuff turns out to be viable, it'll get there.
Actually, a better comparison just occurred to me: about fifteen years ago, I paid an extra thousand
Moore's Law and disks (Score:3, Interesting)
My first Vax, 22 years ago, had 1GB of disk, in the form of four washing-ma
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Dark Star (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:No more harddrives? (Score:4, Interesting)
A solid state drive has a higher G-shock tolerance, is quieter and requires less power than a hard drive. These features are why the technology is attractive to the people who need it. And not everyone needs a hard drive that is 400gb in size. Network appliances may only need a small 1gb boot drive, and these kind of devices will need this new phase-change memory, or whatever will work for the task beyond flash.
It would be cool to have something like this that is your main memory AND your storage space in one. We could call it Run-In-Place. We could then have a instant-on computers. Just imagine Windows XP or Linux booting up in under 3 seconds!
Parent
Technology description (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.ovonyx.com/tech_html.html [ovonyx.com]
http://www.ovonyx.com/ovonyxtech.html [ovonyx.com]
Ita about time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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Or power switches
4 years down the road (Score:2)
Cost is what matters (Score:2)
>OUM requires fewer steps in an IC manufacturing process resulting in reduced cycle times, fewer defects, and greater manufacturing flexibility.
>a process that deviates little from a basic CMOS logic flow.
I get nervous about people who make claims like
>the OUM memory state can be written more than 10 trillion times
unless they've tested it to a trillion cycles, which is just possible.
Anyone else nervous that they didn't say anything like "write time N nanoseconds"?
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I can't seem to find hard numbers on the chips, but USB Flash being able to obtain upwards of 13MB/s now puts it faster than U320 SCSI
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Re:Cost is what matters (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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>the OUM memory state can be written more than 10 trillion times
unless they've tested it to a trillion cycles, which is just possible.
Considering the size and quantity of their prototype I'd say your skepticism is warranted. It's probably more likely derived from theory and marketing rather than a real world test.
Or...
I'll believe it when the MFR's warranty bears that claim.
The real challage is price. (Score:5, Insightful)
Price is a major driving force in memory.
CPU Registers are the fastest but most expensive (very small amount is used)
Cache is the next fastest and the second most expensive. (4 Megs or so)
Then comes normal RAM Memory Still slower then Cache and cheaper normally systems now have about a Gig or 2 of that.
If price wasn't a case Computers wouldn't have much RAM but all Cache, or huge amount of registers. But in real life price is the final decision.
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But, leaving the computers on also costs money in terms of electricity. This is also a big price to pay. If the computers would boot significa
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Re:The real challage is price. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You're a bit on the high side there... SATA/PATA drives are down around $0.28-$0.32 per gigabyte and have been for a while. The sweet spot seems to be the 250GB drives for $70, with the 200GB, 300GB, 400GB sizes at around $0.32/GB.
(Which hasn't changed a whole lot in the past few months. But Seagate's 7200.10 series is one of the cheaper $/GB drives on the market even though it's brand new tech.)
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Magnets and rust (Score:2)
On our way to the future (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe we need to perfect holographic 3D displays first?
Abstract of presentation. (Score:2)
Ultra-Thin Phase-Change Bridge Memory Device Using GeSb
Y.C. Chen, C.T. Rettner***, S. Raoux***, G.W. Burr***, S.H. Chen, R.M. Shelby***, M. Salinga***, W.P. Risk***, T.D. Happ*, G.M. McClelland***, M. Breitwisch^, A. Schrott^, J.B. Philipp*, M.H. Lee, R. Cheek^, T. Nirschl**, M. Lamorey^^, C. F. Chen, E. Joseph^, S. Zaidi*, B. Yee^, H. L. Lung, R. Bergmann*, and C. Lam^, Ma
Bah (Score:3, Funny)
ten states per 20 nanometer cell (Score:3, Insightful)
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"The chips won't work in brown devices."
"Doh!"
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dirty f'in racist chips.
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