Toshiba Developing High-Density 1TB SSD 149
MojoKid writes "A new partnership between Toshiba and Tokyo's Keio University has led to the creation of a new technology that could allow SSDs up to 1TB in size to be made 'with a footprint no larger than a postage stamp.' The report states that the two have been able to integrate 128GB NAND Flash chips and a single controller into a stamp-sized form factor. They've even made it operational with a transfer rates of 2Gbps (or about 250MB/sec) with data transfer that relies on radio communication."
Gaming? (Score:3, Funny)
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better non-DRM copy protection
Really you think? Er, I mean how so?
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Re:Gaming? (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, maybe for consoles where for some reason you don't want to just pre-load content from a BD to an internal NAND-based SSD as you play, but it seems far less cost effective to distribute everything on it's own SSD. Hot-swappable SATA HDDs are faster than current optical media, and the per-GB cost is far lower than NAND flash. But I've never heard of see anyone suggesting distributing console games on individual HDDs.
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You could always produce cartridges with embedded contactless smart cards, or some similar authentication meas
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Also in regards to your point, cartridges are tough whereas optical media is wimpy little girly men.
You drop a cart and it'll survive. I'm sure gamers would appreciate the extra durability...
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You drop a cart and it'll survive. I'm sure gamers would appreciate the extra durability...
And this helps the content providers make even mooore money how exactly???
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>> Also in regards to your point, cartridges are tough whereas optical media is wimpy little girly men.
You drop a cart and it'll survive. I'm sure gamers would appreciate the extra durability...
Yeah, but you can throw optical discs and behead zombies if you're good enough. A cartridge requires much more strength, and is therefore useless during a zombie outbreak. Always plan for the worst-case scenario, dude.
Rule #1: Cardio
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All the strength in the world and the thing will just splinter when it hits something. Maybe it will go in an inch?
I have years of experience throwing old vinyls at sand and other soft to hard targets for fun. Don't worry, I didn't ruin any classics - it was mostly stuff like Cher and the Monkees.
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I really hope all these high-density storage systems will be used for gaming, HDDs are unreliable and large SSDs would allow for fast load times, better non-DRM copy protection and the ability to save games without paying extra.
Yeah, because God forbid the game manufacturers(or anyone else for that matter) take advantage of the 1GB or more of DDR5-speed memory on video cards, or the fact that you can slam 16GB of ultra-fast DDR3 memory onto your average mobos these days for a fraction of what you would spend on this kind of hardware. I mean damn, DDR3 only pokes along at a "measly" 1600MBps...
I really fail to see the setback in this arena. Seriously.
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so you want to pay neogeo cart prices for games? (Score:2)
so you want to pay neogeo cart prices for games?
neogeo games used to cost alot as the price of the rom chips where high back then and while you can get 1tb HDD for under $100 what will a SSD one cost $500+?
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People complain about $60 games... you seriously think $200 games would fly?
People complain about $60 games that are short, crappy, buggy and laggy. Look at for example the Halo series, you pay $60 for a campaign mode you can easily finish in a night.
It also seems you are comparing a single purchase game to an online game.
While they are two different models they both have one thing in common: new content that isn't pay-DLC. While, yes you are paying for it, you don't have to pay $15 to get the latest weapon, you pay $15 to play the game.
WoW on a fast chip would still require a game server.
As would almost any simi-multiplayer game out today.
So the comparison of MadeUpGame with a one time purchase vs WoW is far from valid.
Its only invalid because no one has so far made a game li
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Apparently a company called Data Recovery Services claim the ability to recover lost data in SSD format. Not sure how they do it exactly, but I imagine it involving some de-soldering of chips and replacement of new parts on the PCB.
They've managed to provide a writeup of their claims here. http://www.datarecovery.net/solid-state-drive-recovery.html [datarecovery.net]
Flash drives use write leveling and other algorithms to extend the life of the chips, which have a limited number of write cycles. As a result, even if you *overwrite* data it still logically exists on the chips, it just doesn't show up in the filesystem. They must have a technique to stitch the data of a working drive back together.
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HDDs are extremely unreliable. Moving parts equals higher likelihood of failure. I'm not sure I'd say you're lucky to never have experienced unexpected drive failure, but I'm not sure I wouldn't either.
Re:Gaming? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most SSD manufacturers do a fair number of tricks to maintain high performance while doing wear-leveling.
The technology hasn't got to the "boring ho-hum" stage yet.
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I have only heard of performance-related bugs, not about any which threaten the actual data. I'm using an original X25M without bothering to upgrade firmware, so it would be nice to know if I'm tempting fate.
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I have yet to see one of my drives unexpectedly fail.
Same here. Mind you, I expect my drives to fail every 12-18 months...
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Really.
The people that are worrying about the write limit on SSD's are bad at math. Assuming a 100MB/sec constant write speed (I choose this because thats about the best you get from a standard hard drive) it would take nearly a year (289 days) to wear out the write limit (10000+ cycles) of one of the larger SSD's (512GB) on the market right now.
In other words, the SSD could be written to full blast for nearly a year before it couldnt be written to any more. Try writing to a standard rotating HD
First (Score:1, Funny)
First postage
Thank god. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank god. (Score:5, Funny)
Research shows that by 2012, Toshiba will be delivering Solid State Drives with an information density of 0.1 LoC/(ps^3).
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2012? Oh, you mean MMXII! Sorry, I mean the Year of the Dragon.
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Good. (Score:2)
Now get back to me when you've built 24+2 of them into a 1x10x10 cm 12 core blade with water cooling.
Or 256 of them into a 1U half-depth fanless storage array.
I loathe seeing racks upon racks of heat spewing, power sucking, storage arrays.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Funny)
Radio? (Score:5, Interesting)
"...with data transfer that relies on radio communication."
Well that sounds like an eavesdropping invitation if I ever heard one.
Re:Radio? (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding, from TFA, is that the radio communication being used is very short range, a substitute for the usual maze of tiny and hard to fabricate gold wire interconnects that go between stacked dice. Die stacking itself isn't new; but the real-world manufacturability drops off unpleasantly as you stack higher, because of all the little wires. If you can use very short range RF instead, your life becomes rather less painful.
Assuming a suitable faraday cage layer isn't baked in, somebody with a nice antenna and some serious DSP could probably capture some of the traffic from the chip if they could get within a few cm of it. I'd hesitate to base the next generation of smart cards on such a thing; but it isn't as though it would necessarily be a radical advance over what you can do today with a few needles and a logic probe.
Re:Radio? (Score:5, Interesting)
Radio communication does not say it has to be over the air, it means that there is a carrier wave (in the wire) that has the signals put on top of just like radio.
Who cares about size... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would love to replace my hard disks, arguably the most critical and vulnerable components of my computers, with SSDs, but only if they are more reliable in the first place, and can thereafter be regarded generally as an improvement.
Re:Who cares about size... (Score:5, Informative)
Whereas mine ran for 3 years until I replaced the whole device.
Aren't anecdotes great!
Re:Who cares about size... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who cares about size... (Score:4, Funny)
Not really. I heard an anecdote once and it was really lousy.
Colour me surprised. I remember hearing once that 95% of all anecdotes are shite.
Re:Who cares about size... (Score:4, Funny)
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So's your face!
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I was using an el-cheapo USB flash drive as the system drive - it had /usr, /var, /etc, and so on. It was just running a upnp to server video from 4 RAID5ed USB hard drives.
And yes performance was awful (though good enough to manage that simple task) and I'm no longer using it. But the flash drive didn't die.
Re:Who cares about size... (Score:5, Interesting)
More broadly, though, size and reliability are actually closely linked with Flash SSDs. It is inherent in the nature of Flash that it will only survive a limited number of writes before a given block of cells becomes unwriteable at best and unreliable at worst. SSD controllers deal with this by trying to spread writes as evenly as possible over the available Flash space, and by having some amount of reserve space that can silently be substituted for failed blocks. The trouble, of course, is that since Flash is expensive, there is a strong commercial imperative to make as much as possible of the Flash you include visible storage space, so you can put a big shiny number on the box, and as little as possible reserve space, since that is hard to brag about. As a consequence, you'll note that cheap consumer SSDs ship with substantially less reserve flash than do the expensive; but reliability focused, enterprise ones(some of which will even let the customer adjust the allocation between storage and reserve).
If you can make Flash denser and cheaper, you'll make it more likely that, for all but the crappiest fly-by-night shops soldering together stuff stolen from nearby dumpsters, adding more reserve Flash is cheaper than processing RMAs and dealing with angry customers. Improvements in the intrinsic reliability of Flash cells would be nice as well, of course; but we are already using vaguely RAID-like techniques to turn quantity into reliability, so improvements in density and cost are almost as good.
Which make/model of SSD drive? (Score:3, Interesting)
Would you care to provide the model number of the SSD you used for reference?
Thanks!
Re:Who cares about size... (Score:5, Funny)
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I seriously thought about ssding it this time around when purchasing a laptop. I just couldn't quantify the supposed advantages in power use of SSD over a HD. Still, SSD may have other advantages in random access situations. It would have been nice to try.
Anyway, I'm thinking of putting my whole installation on a 16 GB usb keychain thingie, and using the hard drive for archival purposes. Maybe I can just shut the HD off when not in use. Still, those aren't very big. There'd be a lot of writing going on
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I seriously thought about ssding it this time around when purchasing a laptop. I just couldn't quantify the supposed advantages in power use of SSD over a HD. Still, SSD may have other advantages in random access situations. It would have been nice to try.
Anyway, I'm thinking of putting my whole installation on a 16 GB usb keychain thingie, and using the hard drive for archival purposes. Maybe I can just shut the HD off when not in use. Still, those aren't very big. There'd be a lot of writing going on for just 16 GBs.. Maybe it would die quick. Still, maybe 128 gigs will be cheap soon..
It's not about the power, many SSDs use about the same amount as a normal hard drive. It's about speed. An SSD vs a traditional disk is a night & day difference. It's like computers have been reinvented. There's just no comparison, and no going back!
The only other time I got a speed boost this big was when I switched from floppies to hard drives back in the IBM XT days.
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By the end of 2008 the Intel X25-M was supposed to be the best thing around, but even that model suffered from a form of low-level fragmentation that was the result of using both wear leveling and write combining. These are workarounds for problems tha
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... it's reliability that's the real issue. SSDs are a great idea in theory, but in practice the only time I tried to build a server around one, taking great care to ensure that as little as possible would ever be ever written to it (e.g. turned off atime, while /var, /temp, /home etc. were located on hard disks), it ended up lasting only about a month.
I would love to replace my hard disks, arguably the most critical and vulnerable components of my computers, with SSDs, but only if they are more reliable in the first place, and can thereafter be regarded generally as an improvement.
You either used a really cheap drive meant for netbooks, or you simply got a broken drive and didn't do a burn-in period. It's not like mechanical drives never fail, so just because you had a bad experience, once, that doesn't mean you should give out bad advice based on an anecdote.
Even a decent desktop drive can be overwritten at least a thousand times, and most 'enterprise grade' drives are rated for 100,000 or more. At the high-end, look at the products made by FusionIO or EMC, you'll get drives that m
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... it's reliability that's the real issue. SSDs are a great idea in theory, but in practice the only time I tried to build a server around one, taking great care to ensure that as little as possible would ever be ever written to it (e.g. turned off atime, while /var, /temp, /home etc. were located on hard disks), it ended up lasting only about a month.
You had a broken/faulty unit, this can happen with any kind of disk. Even cheap USB flash sticks easily last over a year of the kind of use you describe. Intel X25-M SSDs for example, are specced for 24/7 use with 100gb of data being written to disk EVERY DAY and this is a consumer MLC SSD. Enterprise SLC disks are much more resilient then that (albeit a lot more expensive).
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... it's reliability that's the real issue. SSDs are a great idea in theory, but in practice the only time I tried to build a server around one, taking great care to ensure that as little as possible would ever be ever written to it (e.g. turned off atime, while /var, /temp, /home etc. were located on hard disks), it ended up lasting only about a month.
I would love to replace my hard disks, arguably the most critical and vulnerable components of my computers, with SSDs, but only if they are more reliable in the first place, and can thereafter be regarded generally as an improvement.
Um, those of us who would like a much smaller desktop or a smaller (and lighter) notebook computer care about size. If you can have 1 TB postage sized hard drive, engineers would have a MUCH easier time creating smaller form factors. Furthermore, besides the smaller size, you also have far fewer concerns about heat AND moving parts (a factor for notebook computers which are dropped fairly frequently). With non-server usage levels, SSD's in my experience have been quite reliable.
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That's odd. SSDs are far more reliable than hard drives. So either you did something very wrong, or they were defective and I hope you had them replaced since they would be under warranty. Did they tell you why it failed? Even large-scale MMOs run on SSDs [ramsan.com] and don't have reliability problems.
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Did you just make a claim that 'large-scale MMOs' do not suffer from server reliability problems?
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lol, only if you take it out of context.
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Yeah but the minisec recorded audio, not video and handled email and encryption. I don't think Clarke thought that device would store more than a few gigs of data.
Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. (Score:5, Interesting)
It would take about 200TB to record a lifetime of audio at CD quality.
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It would take about 200TB to record a lifetime of audio at CD quality.
Yeah but this was just a note taker, and it could offload storage to bigger machines anyway.
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You sure about that? 75 years is 657,000 hours. At FLAC sized files (350mb/hr) it would require 229,950,000 megabytes. I guess you are pretty close there!
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My number was using raw CD quality (16 bit 44.1KHz) PCM recorded in mono and a life expectancy of 81 years.
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Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. (Score:5, Funny)
It would take about 200TB to record a lifetime of audio at CD quality.
Sure, but would you want to record your *life* with the empty soundstage and lack of warmth inherent to mere "CD quality" ?
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... or about 35 TB to record a lifetime at 128k MP3, stereo, "near CD quality".
Really - do you need your entire life recorded in CD quality? Mostly, you'll worry about proving crimes you didn't commit, so anything better than 32 Kbps MP3 is probably a waste. And while there will be those precious moments, most of your life will consist of you sitting and consuming media that's already recorded elsewhere anyway. Really, do you want hi-def audio copies of the Dresden and Star Trek reruns that you watched?
A TB
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And while there will be those precious moments, most of your life will consist of you sitting and consuming media that's already recorded elsewhere anyway.
Oh heck, its worse than that. I'd contend that fully 3/4 of a person's life isn't fit for being recorded at all:
Sleeping
Driving
Toileting/Grooming
Showering
Cooking
Eating
Cleaning
Consuming Media
I'd say that the vast majority of those recordings would be of you talking to yourself, at best. Without video, the time spend doing most of it would lose its context anyway.
In short, I'm guessing you could get all the important bits on less than 9 TBs...
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It would still be an iPad, so everyone would mock it.
What's that? I'm missing the point? Hmmm...
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I wonder what a useful device like the "minisec" would be without it being straddled to a crippled-by-design product like the iXXXX.
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End of the hard drive soon (Score:2)
---
Storage Feed [feeddistiller.com] @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
Re:End of the hard drive soon (Score:4, Insightful)
Hard drive development just hasn't been keeping place with flash memory.
I think you're confused. I happen to have a hard drive in a system that creates and deletes thousands of gigabytes of files a month. It's been doing that for seven years straight. Show me any SSD that can achieve the same. Hard drives and flash memory have different properties and that necessarily makes them more or less applicable to different usage scenarios.
Re:End of the hard drive soon (Score:5, Insightful)
10,000 Erases * 128 GB = 1280 TB of data written/deleted
It seems like any SSD of appropriate capacity will do that. 10,000 erases is actually extremely conservative, most SSDs advertise 2-3 orders of magnitude more than that. It'd take continuous writing at maximum speed for more than a decade* to kill most modern SSDs. Or at least that's the theory, I'm sure someone has gotten a defective one that died in a month or something.
* 5,000,000 Erases * (256 GB / 100 MB/sec) = 405 years
Flash is also way too expensive (Score:2)
It has to come down in price a lot to compete with magnetic storage. Right now, I'd say you'd have to get it to 10% of the current price to be competitive at the high end. Currently, it is about $1500 or so for a 500GB SSD. It is currently about $50 for a 500GB magnetic drive. Now if you could get flash down to about 10%, well then you'd be talking 3x the price of magnetic storage. Still expensive, but due to the high speed it would be feasible in high performance desktops. As it stands, 300GB of 10k magnet
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Solid state storage scales down in terms of price a lot better. The fixed price of a hard disk is the enclosure, motors for moving the disk heads, the heads themselves, the controller, and so on. The fixed costs of an SSD are the chip housing, which costs round $0.10. Halving the size of the die more than doubles the yield, so you can make smaller SSDs for much less than you can make cheap HDDs. The cheapest hard disks you can buy have been the same price for years. The capacity has increased, but you
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Lets look at a few metrics.
1: performance: afaict SSDs are already the clear winner here.
2: density: I can put a 2TB drive in a standard 3.5 inch bay. Afaict SSDs are generally the same size as laptop hard drives and you can put two of those in a 3.5 inch bay with readilly available adaptor kits. Afaict the drives go up to 512GB so the density is about half that of HDDs. For laptops the density situation is even closer (especially if the laptop in question only has a 9.5mm high bay).
3: cost: the aforementio
Bah... (Score:1, Insightful)
Let me know when they make communication between chips using quantum entanglement.
The future is here (Score:3, Informative)
Stamp-sized chips storing the contents of multiple libraries, fully downloadable over short-range radio transfer in roughly an hour.
Listen to us complaining that we don't have flying cars yet. :P
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Listen to us complaining that we don't have flying cars yet. :P
It's because we're afraid of being diddled [imdb.com] by a german scientist with a foot fetish.
And we've reached a point where.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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The total weight of the money that you spend on end-user storage exceeds the weight of the storage device itself.
I pay for my tech stuff online, using a debit card. What's the weight of the bits needed to carry out that transaction?
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What format of money have you been using? This happened decades ago, but then again I only use pennies.
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That has been true for regular A4 paper for quite a while...
Impressive,but what is this phrase "postage stamp" (Score:4, Funny)
Seems very impressive, but what is this phrase "postage stamp". Is this also part of some newfangled technology we may never see? I for on will probably be fine with good old email for a long time to come.
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A "postage stamp" is a unit of area developed specificly for its unique marketing properties. Although many readers assume it is approximately 5 square centimeters, it can actually be anything up to 2551 square centimeters. http://www.joh-enschede.com/?page=jea.news.overview&cid=143 [joh-enschede.com]
Make them affordable instead of larger (Score:1, Interesting)
We always hear about SSD flash technology and how cool it is but we never seem to get it. SSDs are now more expensive than last year...So, what's the point of 1TB SSD when I can't even afford a 30GB one?
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We always hear about SSD flash technology and how cool it is but we never seem to get it. SSDs are now more expensive than last year...So, what's the point of 1TB SSD when I can't even afford a 30GB one?
Bigger drives will cause the smaller drives to be discounted so that the bigger ones can squeeze into the market. Intel does this all the time with their CPUs. If you don't buy them when they are initially released you can get a particular CPU for cheap after waiting a year and letting other CPUs replace it as the top tier CPU available on the market. Traditional hard drives are more expensive when they are released because they have higher capacity which means the lower capacity drives have to drop in pric
SSDs and Cost (Score:3, Insightful)
I really like the idea of a device that does not need to be constantly de-fragmented. To me, above the moving parts issue/noise/heat issues, it is paramount. However I need my data storage to be reliable and right now SSDs still don't have the track record.
I understand that there are those people who are running 2-4x SSD drives in a RAID0 that are fully happy. But mostly they are gamers who don't care if they have to do a reinstall if that array fails. And or don't really have any sort of long term data that they mind wiping at the drop of a hat.
I personally deal with end users who care a lot about their digital pictures, email, and other assorted crap. As it stands right now those ol' spinning platters still offer us all the best reliability at the lowest cost point.
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Sorry to reply to my own post but I wanted to just also say that SSDs as a rule are not unreliable. Rather that at the space/cost ratio that matters for current end users.
Most of us need these days a lot of space for all the digital media we have and SSDs don't offer that at a price point that is even near what HDs offer. (And as I said HDs, even with their own failure rates, are still preferred.)
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Of course everyone should be making backups. I've been dealing with that issue since the 80's. But really do you know how many end users do that?
Now with cheap flash drives it's gotten much better but it's still not enough. Unless I want to get an array of flash drives some end users have 50+ gigs of data that they consider valuable. (Digital video is a hungry mistress.) Hard drives still provide, and again I'm sorry because I was not very good in my OP about making this distinction, the best cost/perf
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Lots of things people do on thier computers cause a sequence of short operations on the drive at different locations (one example would be scanning a large folder full of files to generate thumbnails or otherwise assess some property of the files). HDDs are pretty constrained in how many operations they can perform per second due to the mechanics of the drive (at 7200RPM rotational latency alone is going to eat about 8ms per operation, 15000 RPM reduces that to about 4ms).
It also means backing up a HDD full
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I hate to be pedantic but you act as if cache's don't exist. Most of what you cite is solved by caches and then you add OS level cacheing and it's not an issue.
As an admin level user I prefer to keep something like Prefetch/Superfetch off but on and end user computer I load them up with a lot of RAM and let it do it's thing.
So while I'm supportive of your underlying point I'm strained to see how it effects the real world.
Still takes over an hour to fill. (Score:2)
The number one thing that I want, is the ability to read/write really fast.
And the other number one thing is: Don’t ever die (or become significantly slower) after less then ten years of usage!
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Why do you care if a 5 year old drive is getting slow? In 5 years it'll be less than half (likely less than a quarter) of the original price to replace.
More vapourware like their SAS SSD? (Score:2)
What ever happened to the THNS064GF8BEAA?
Announced Jan 2009:
And where is it now?
this'll be great for upcoming 'superphones' (Score:2)
A superphone with a 1TB SSD in it. Plug it into a dock at home with your huge screen, keyboard and mouse, and take it with you when you go. Rsync when you connect to the dock, which replicates to your off-site storage. Easy-peasy. With 1-2gHz dual-core (and quad core, according to NEC) smartphones coming out this year, the vast majority of computer users won't require anything more. Rock on.
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That's what happens when the GNAA outsources their trolling to India