The Limits To Perpendicular Recording 222
peterkern writes "Samsung has a new hard drive and says it can now store 667 GB on one disk, which comes out to be about 739 Gb/sq. in. That is more than five times the density when perpendicular recording was introduced back in 2006, and it is getting close to the generally expected soft limit of 1 Tb/sq. in. It's great that we can now store 2 TB on one hard drive and that 3-TB hard drives are already feasible. But how far can it go? It appears that the hard drive industry may start talking about heat-assisted magnetic recording again, soon."
Heat-assisted magnetic recording? (Score:5, Insightful)
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No..
When the only tool you have is a Hammer, every problem looks like a hell of a lot of fun....
Or the Murphy version (Score:2, Funny)
When the only tool you have is a hammer every problem requires a screwdriver.
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There, fixed that for you.
Re:Heat-assisted magnetic recording? (Score:4, Funny)
My laptop's hard drive already utilizes heat-assisted magnetic erasing, though it tends to work on an entire drive at a time.
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Don't you just love Apple innovation...
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oh no. I can picture the marketing now...
HAMR time! [youtube.com]
and now I can't get it out of my head...
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Let one who has understanding reckon the number of the Sony, for it is a gigabyte number, its number is six hundred and sixty seven.
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The HAMR is now diamonds.
Get Perpendicular (Score:5, Funny)
A simple video to explain perpendicular recording!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_PyKuI7II
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"I'm dancing! I'm dancing!"
I wonder if the guys who made Borderlands had seen this video.
TFA is unreadable. (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, wow, a 3-gigabyte drive! How futuristic!
Seriously, what sort of monkey messed the article up this badly?
Re:TFA is unreadable. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, wow, a 3-gigabyte drive! How futuristic!
Seriously, what sort of monkey messed the article up this badly?
This is slashdot, in the 12 years I've been wasting time here, I am more surprised when they get a story with all of the facts, spelling and concepts correct!
Re:TFA is unreadable. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the internet. Facts, spelling, and concepts are all optional.
Re:TEA is unreadable. (Score:4, Funny)
This is the internet. Facts, spelling, and concepts are all optional.
Nah. TEA is unreadable. Especially the leaves.
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Oh, wow, a 3-gigabyte drive! How futuristic!
Seriously, what sort of monkey messed the article up this badly?
Yeah, seriously. I thought we agreed on using Gibibytes from now on, right?
I actually make the TB/GB mistake regularly, and people either don't catch it, inserting TB because they know I'm talking about a low (<10) number or they just don't bother to mention it because they can reason out what I meant. That's one of the nice things about having 1000 or 1024 as a separation point in the naming hierarchy.
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To be fair, not many people are used to writing GB yet. After a decade of writing GB getting them to start using the abbreviation GB will take time.
I see what you did there,
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Georgibi Bush?
I knew this was a kdawson post... (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:5, Funny)
That what she said.
only visa versa..
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That what she said.
only visa versa
Is that when she spends exactly the same amount you saved on your credit card?
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what the SSD market does.
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I don't think we need that much faster write speeds - once your installation and setup is done, you're dealing with peanuts in size of writes, kilobytes, maybe a few megs.
SSD's do exactly what PC's need - a much faster read, at a much smaller volume, with decent enough capacity. Lifetime is something that they aim to mature with development.
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Thats what Hard drives are for!
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The biggest problem with HDDs is that while sustained read speeds have been going up a bit and capacities have been going up a lot transactions per second has been sitting pretty still. You can't get away from the fact that it takes time to physically move the heads and then wait an average of half a rotation for the data to be under them.
Increasing the rotation speed works to some extent but there are big heat problems with that.
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You can, sometimes... this is one of the central ideas that MapReduce and Hadoop are all about: removing disk seek times from the equation and getting the data streaming non stop. Things get a lot faster when the application is designed start to finish to stream as much as possible.
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Oh wait..
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:4, Funny)
Stop making it bigger! Start making it faster!
What about harder and stronger?
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Sorry, but I can't afford $6,000,000 for a hard drive..
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:5, Interesting)
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No, make it bigger! Bring back 5.25" form factor drives!
If they made them cheap enough, I would buy 6TB quantum bigfoots for archival purposes.
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With the surface area of a 5.25" drive and today's densities you could probably fit 10-20TB in them. I'd definitely buy several if they had an attractive price of around 30-50% of 3.5" price/GB. Speed isn't much of an issue and if it were I'd go with striped SSD's or simply more RAM anyway, but sheer storage capacity is never enough, and if it ever becomes enough, I can certainly use up even more by expanding redundancy.
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You say slow, but at that density the throughput will still be quick.
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Why not do both in separate product lines? Kinda like what they're already going right this very moment. If I want a lot of stuff in one place, I buy hard drives. If I want a small amount of stuff accessed very quickly, I buy SSDs. One division increasing capacity doesn't stop an entirely different division from increasing performance. And those SSDs are increasing in size pretty quickly. The Vertex 2 Pro is up to 240 gigs for under $700. Wasn't long ago that the tiniest, crappiest-performing SSD cos
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The Vertex 2 Pro is up to 240 gigs for under $700. Wasn't long ago that the tiniest, crappiest-performing SSD cost that much. Now that's the price of the biggest and fastest.
I can't comment on fastest but it's far from the biggest. You can get 512GB and 1TB SSDs (though the 1TB ones are desktop form factor) now but the price is insane.
In another year, the $/gig ratio will be even better along with performance.
I sure hope so
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No, keep making it bigger. When we had floppy disks, it easy to fill up your floppy disks with documents. With hard drives, that became much harder so hard drives made document storage nearly infinite. As computers got faster, we started listening to mp3s and taking pictures. But it was still possible to fill up your hard drive with mp3s or pictures. The drives kept getting bigger and now at about 2TB, I'd think it would be pretty hard for most people to fill that up with mp3s or pictures, so now for music,
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There should be factors of human proportions that limit the need for exponentially increasing growth at some point.
Human perception in audio has already been passed both in frequency and dynamic domains. Static images are reaching that threshold, and we do already have lossless encodings that pass it. Motion pictures will be the next threshold, and then I suppose holography. So there goes my argument that we can limit the need for exponential growth, oh well.
I think it's funny that you can probably store
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Static images are reaching that threshold, and we do already have lossless encodings that pass it.
I'm not going to comment on resolution, but in terms of dynamic range, I don't think we're anywhere near limits of human perception. Certainly not in anything that approaches a consumer-level device.
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Forget both those, how about more reliable?
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Actually, I think they should concentrate on making hard drives even bigger, for example, returning to 5.25" size with modern technologies (perpendicular recording etc). A hard drive with 8-16 5.25" platters would have quite high capacity (probably 10-20TB). Also, linear speed would still be pretty fast (the edge of a 5.25" platter spinning at 5400RPM travels about as fast as the edge of a 3.5" platter spinning at 8000RPM)
Oh, and I would buy a smaller, faster drive (say 146GB-300GB, 15000RPM) for stuff like
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Theoretically, for many applications, zipping up the 1000 files into 1 compressed file and decompressing it on-the-fly really is faster, and has been for quite some time. Disk speeds haven't changed that much in the past 10-15 years, but CPUs and memory buses have become far, far faster. Since disk seek time and latency is so long, compared to the amount of work a modern (esp. multicore) CPU can do in that amount of time, it frequently makes more sense to compress data and archive disparate files into sin
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Theoretically, for many applications, zipping up the 1000 files into 1 compressed file and decompressing it on-the-fly really is faster, and has been for quite some time. Disk speeds haven't changed that much in the past 10-15 years, but CPUs and memory buses have become far, far faster. Since disk seek time and latency is so long, compared to the amount of work a modern (esp. multicore) CPU can do in that amount of time, it frequently makes more sense to compress data and archive disparate files into single larger ones.
You'd be surprised.
I've recently had to optimise a compression step in a large system, and I was appalled at how slow most compression libraries and programs are, especially the ones in common use.
Typical (zip) style compression libraries rarely exceeds 10MB/s compression rates, and 20-30MB/s in decompression. That's substantially slower than what most mechanical hard-drives can do, let alone SSDs. In practice, reading or writing a 'zip' file, which includes all MS Office 2007 formats, XPS, etc... will be C
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...zipping up the 1000 files into 1 compressed file...
Yeah, that way you can corrupt a thousand files for the price of one.
SQUID's next? (Score:3, Interesting)
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"Near room temperature" superconductors typically still need to be well below zero to operate. Until we get one that can operate at 100C, this idea is a nonstarter for all but maybe some kind of industrial or scientific application.
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100C is awful hot.
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Given that HDDs in underventilated cases sometimes reach 60 or so and you want some safety margin it sounds like you'd want one that would work up to 80 or so.
So while I think 100 is higher than needed it's not completely out of whack.
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I didn't realize it got that hot in there. I figured they were at most no more than 10 degrees above room.
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I've had a drive burn me when I tried to remove it. Yes, it actually burned me.
I then proceeded to slap the idiot who built that server into the stone age.
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That's pretty hot.
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ah.
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You can use small, localized cooling systems to keep the temperature down, such as Peltier coolers.
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You could but it would create a couple of serious complications.
1: You'd probably want the whole platter at the same temperature as a thread
2: moisture would be a menace so you would have to have the platters running in dry air. That would mean you would have to either come up with some system for drying air that went through the equalisation vent or completely seal the drive case (hard drives are not sealed because of they were air pressure changes would put huge stress on the case).
I doubt you coudl easil
Maybe other technologies as well (Score:3, Interesting)
There are other technologies that I'm sure HDD makers have waiting in the wings. If areal density doesn't go up fast enough, I'm sure that HDD makers will go back to stacking platters, and we will start seeing fatter 2.5" drives. Perhaps even a return of Bigfoot drives, or double-height 2.5" drives as a new form factor. Of course, these drives will have to have some engineering done to keep performance.
I can see a full height 5.25", a monstrosity these days, but inside it would have a bunch of tiered storage with the controller doing the work and multiple caches using not just DRAM, but flash RAM, and wise positioning of data (more commonly accessed stuff closer to the spindle for example.)
This is the last resort of drive makers, but I'm sure if nothing else pans out to keep capacities growing, they will start adding platters.
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Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see why they've been moving to smaller 2.5" drives anyway (except for the notebook market, where obviously small size is important), instead of sticking with larger 5.25" drives. There's a lot more area on a 5.25" platter, plus if you spin it at the same speed, the tracks at the outer edge are traveling faster and thus can be read/written faster, resulting in higher bandwidth.
The main disadvantages I can see are 1) higher materials cost, since you need a bigger chun
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Two disadvantages: The time it takes to move the head from the inside to the outside, and the time it takes for the drive to physically rotate the data to the head. Computers work in nanoseconds and faster. Drives have millisecond access time which is millions of times slower if one doesn't factor in caching. This is why seek algorithms and finding the best path for a drive head to pick data up from tracks is so important on a HDD.
With advances in hierarchical storage, I can see a half height 5.25" driv
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The problem is the forces involved with a spinning disc get much worse with diameter.
The moment of inertia of a cylinder (of constant thickness and density) is proportional to the fourth power of the diameter. Afaict (read: i'm trying to do calculus in my head here) the centripetal force required to hold the cylinder together is proportional to the cube of the diameter and proportional to the square of the angular velocity (spin speed).
SSDs are the future (Score:3, Interesting)
I think a more realistic assessment is that the rate of growth in hard disk densities will decline.
We've had a recent article on the shortcomings of SSDs, but I think the maturity of hard disk technology and the minimum cost posed by the complicated mechanical design will make hard disks obsolete for most applications in a few more years. Hey, people thought 3.5" disks would be here forever, too.
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Oh there's no doubt that they'll be obsolete eventually, the question is really just when. Will there be a big breakthrough in the next 5 years? Or will it take 20, 30, 50?
When you look at investing in things like backups - or how to keep up with competitive standards - a timeline is good to know. You might get the cheap hard drive option knowing that SSD's will have matured in the next few years - or if it's going to take a long time for them to overcome hard drives, you might invest in something you know
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Let me know when you can no longer buy a 3.5" disk at fry's. Look forward to hearing from you.
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Except that no one ever uses them any more, except perhaps for weird old equipment which has built-in 3.5" drives (such as many 10-20 year-old oscilloscopes). Except for cases like that, no one uses them on PCs any more as they are completely obsoleted by 1) networks, 2) USB drives, and 3) other Flash media like xD/SD.
3.5" disks were obsolete long before people finally gave them up in favor of CD-RWs, networks and USB drives, but the industry never standardized on a replacement, and instead had a bunch of
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but I think the maturity of hard disk technology and the minimum cost posed by the complicated mechanical design will make hard disks obsolete for most applications in a few more years.
Such has been the claim for easily more than a decade and yet HDDs are still around.
Hey, people thought 3.5" disks would be here forever, too.
Since when did they leave? Floppy drives [newegg.com] and floppy disks [frys.com].
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SSDs are great for certain applications and less great for others. Unfortunately for the SSD makers, the main application many users have is "I need lots of cheap storage", which current SSDs are ho
Superstition? (Score:2)
I remember when processor MHz ratings went from 566 to 600 to 633 to 667. On this disk when they achieved the 666th Gb, it wasn't good enough to report until the 667th was reached, barely squeaking over the bar.
More than feasible (Score:4, Informative)
From the summary:
It's great that we can now store 2 TB on one hard drive and that 3-TB hard drives are already feasible.
3TB drives are already well past "feasible". Seagate has one for sale in the form of the STAC3000100 FreeAgent GoFlex Desk. Its an enclosure with a single SATA 3TB hard drive. The reason its currently only available as an external drive is because most motherboards will not support a boot drive that large, hence not a lot of reason to offer it as an internal yet.
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most motherboards will not support a boot drive that large
Do you mean it won't boot if the main partition is 3TB or if the whole drive is 3TB? Because if it's the first, then no sane person has just one partition on a hard drive that big so it's a non-problem.
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So you're saying 2 TB aught to be enough for anybody?
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Its my understanding, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, the whole drive will not work with most current hardware. It has to do with LBA, 64-bit addressing, yadda yadda yadda.
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It's not that motherboards won't support it, it's that Windows (even 7) won't support it. You CANNOT boot Windows from a disk with GPT. You also CANNOT boot Windows (7) on most EFI systems.
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Ooooh. Can of worms time.
The problem is that a drive of two real terabytes (not marketing terabytes) is one 512byte sector too large for a normal MBR partition table. So you have to switch over to something else; Windows uses a GPT style partition table.
Unfortunately the committee who designed GPT were dumb (Some of the members must have been smart though, you can easily work around every dumb choice I've seen). A current BIOS doesn't know anything about partition tables and it has no problem with driv
739 Gb/sq.in. (Score:2, Funny)
106416 Gb/sq.ft.
957744 GB/sq.yd
2966707814400 Gb/sq.mile
It also equals
1.145452290904 GB/sq.mm
114.5452290904 GB/sq.cm
1145452.290904 GB/sq.m
1145452290904 GB/sq.km
Where do you back it up? (Score:2)
"Where do you back it up?" is what I ask my customers. If you buy a terabyte sized hard drive, what's your solution if it fails? Presumably you bought it so you could store zillions of pictures, MP3s and movies on the thing... how badly will your day be ruined if it fails?
Drives that big, you buy them in pairs, one mirrored to the other.
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Drives that big, you buy them in pairs, one mirrored to the other.
If my "mirrored" you mean "RAID 1", I would say that barely counts as a backup. There are essentially three or four substantial threats for why you need a backup, and RAID 1 protects you against just one of them. (If you're counting, the four threats are (1) drive failure, (2) your power supply committing murder-suicide and taking out your drives, (3) your house burning down or computer being destroyed (you can combine 2&3 if you want), (
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I don't think the GP meant RAID when saying "mirroring", he actually meant "make 2 copies of your data, one on each disk".
I agree this does not protect against a disaster that affects both drives because they are in the same box.
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Except, it can take quite a while to sync two drives of this size. So you will probably find that the second drive spends at least half it's time sitting next to the primary drive.
You actually need THREE drives so one of they is always a safe backup.
The actual rules:
eg: offsite
eg: THE backup must stay offsite, it only comes back when it's not THE backup.
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1) Do you need to back up absolutely everything? Are many of your giant files just ripped from your DVD collection, or re-downloadable? I've got a 1TB data drive and use my "old" 500GB for backup, and it's got plenty of room for the portion that actually needs backing up.
2) They're cheap. A 1TB drive is like $60 nowadays. Getting a drive smaller than that will probably be higher bytes-per-dollar, so might as well get two of the same if you don't have an older one handy. And like the others have said, m
Seagate is already selling a 3TB drive (Score:2)
Seagate is already selling a 3TB drive.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/200031/big_seagate_3tb_drive_ups_storage_ante.html [pcworld.com]
bleh (Score:2)
Re:Hard drive are gone, floppy style (Score:5, Insightful)
The fastest RAM available today operates at roughly a thousand times faster than flash (SSDs are only fast because they tend to have many channels (Intel uses 10) in order to improve performance), and RAM speeds continue to increase by moore's law. It's unlikely that flash will ever catch up, and the limitations of flash (wear) would make it completely unsuitable, even with large improvements in number of usable cycles.
What it could be useful for is as a shadow to RAM for fast hibernation support. Imagine a computer with 4GB of RAM and 4GB of flash (with a suitable degree of parallelism for speed purposes). If you do a decent job of keeping that flash relatively up to date with the contents of system RAM such that there is a relatively minor difference between system RAM and flash at any given time, hibernations could be done in under a second, and restoring from hibernation could be done at better than SSD speeds even if the computer is using a cheaper magnetic disk.
If you were smart about it, you could even resume execution almost immediately after you copied a bare minimum of data, and allow the user to interact with the system while the rest of memory is copied from flash to RAM, handling any uncopied data the user requests on the fly.
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Back in the day, machines used to run straight from a ROM, with some RAM available as well. Some embedded systems still do this. In a sense we have taken a step backwards, having to copy stuff onto RAM in order to use it.
Of course, right now the only affordable choices are to use hard drives or flash with DRAM. It's not like we have to live with their limitations forever. Flash, in particular, was never really meant for frequent writing; it is a form of EEPROM. Even getting back its role as a ROM, where
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The fastest RAM available today operates at roughly a thousand times faster than flash (SSDs are only fast because they tend to have many channels (Intel uses 10) in order to improve performance), and RAM speeds continue to increase by moore's law. It's unlikely that flash will ever catch up, and the limitations of flash (wear) would make it completely unsuitable, even with large improvements in number of usable cycles.
I wonder how the new PCM (Phase-Change Memory) from Numonyx will fare here.
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not as fast as typical RAM but with 10^8 R/W cycle estimate (low-ball) I'd be quite happy to have one. I've bene screaming about the tech for a while on slashdot.
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"So you're not going to see a system with a 1:1 ratio of RAM and flash."
Sir, I have 4GB RAM and 4GB SD Flash in my system.
What's this nonsense you speak of?
Re:Hard drive are gone, floppy style (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually we can even see now that ram is obsolete, once SSD catch up in speed (you don't even need current ram speed) why would anyone care about transfering data to ram, work on it then store it back? Just work straight on your data, gone are the days of saving, now will be the days of deleting, temporary working directory...
This is the dumbest thing I've ever read.
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Actually we can even see now that ram is obsolete, once SSD catch up in speed (you don't even need current ram speed) why would anyone care about transfering data to ram, work on it then store it back? Just work straight on your data, gone are the days of saving, now will be the days of deleting, temporary working directory...
This is the dumbest thing I've ever read.
You must be new to teh internets.
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Hi, welcome to Slashdot!
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Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
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For something this retarded, you have to go further than that: I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. [youtube.com]
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If non-volatile memory speed ever catches up to volatile memory speed, a "working area" (i.e. what people commonly know as RAM) will no longer be necessary. This is not a dumb idea. It's a possibility.
Your post is the Unfunniest Score:5 Funny that I've ever read.
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Intuition tells me that no matter how fast non-volatile memory gets, it will always be outstripped by volatile memory because you don't have to concern yourself with permanently storing it.
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If the hard disk is the main bottleneck in your desktop OS, then you need to get a new OS.
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Which unfortunately would require a complete re-design of the CPU hardware ;)
Hell, your cpu doesnt even work directly on "system ram", it all goes through various buffers (L1-L3 cache etc).
For a very nice article on how the architecture works: http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/ [lwn.net]
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Now tell me exactly how I can do that with a few SSD's
Well you can get 1TB SSDs, you should be able to get 8 of them in one machine relatively easilly if you buy the right case and maybe add one extra controller. The cost is indeed pretty insane though (I make it about $25K for 8x1TB drives)
Personally for desktops and servers I think a mixture is the way to go. SSD for things that get heavy random access (e.g. the OS and apps) and HDD for everything else. Even with a fairly heavy app load system drives don'
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Grandmas vacation video in AVCHD will quickly dwarf all of that.