SSD-HDD Price Gap Won't Go Away Anytime Soon

storagedude (1517243) writes "Flash storage costs have been dropping rapidly for years, but those gains are about to slow, and a number of issues will keep flash from closing the cost gap with HDDs for some time, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. As SSD density increases, reliability and performance decrease, creating a dilemma for manufacturers who must balance density, cost, reliability and performance. '[F]lash technology and SSDs cannot yet replace HDDs as primary storage for enterprise and HPC applications due to continued high prices for capacity, bandwidth and power, as well as issues with reliability that can only be addressed by increasing overall costs. At least for the foreseeable future, the cost of flash compared to hard drive storage is not going to change.'"

Re:We live like kings and queens already

[The MAZZTer]

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:Comments Being Truncated

[Roxoff]

No, it's not asinine, but a nod to the intellect of the reader. It demonstrates that the writer has confidence that the reader understands what they're saying. It demonstrates humour and it ...

Re:We live like kings and queens already

[MatthewCCNA]

Well, 256GB SSD ought to be enough for anybody, and is relatively affordable.

enough is never enough.

Re:RAID?

[MightyYar]

> I was recently perusing the /dev directory on a next
> when I came upon the entry /dev/drum. This seemed a bit odd, I thought
> that drum memory went out of fashion long, long ago. The man pages
> didn't have anything to say about drum. Does any have any insight
> on this odd device entry?

This actually has nothing to do with drum memory. It's a part of the
UUCP system.

Long, long ago, even before version 6, somebody wanted to implement a
program to copy files between two machines running Unix. At the time
there were no modems becuase there weren't even any telephones. A
Bell Labs researcher who had just visited Africa seized upon the idea
of communicating by beating on drums, as the native Africans did. He
added a drum interface to his PDP-11 and the device driver was called,
of course, /dev/drum. Uucp would call a lower level program called
`bang' to activate this device driver. Messages could also be sent
manually by typing `bang drum' at your shell prompt. People soon
devised shell scripts that would take a mail message, convert it
appropriately, and call bang to send it. Soon they were sending
multi-hop messages though several sites this way, which is how the
`bang path' got its name.

With the advancements in communications technology (semaphores in
particular), /dev/drum was removed from UNIX around version 6 or 7, I
believe. The NeXT developers reinstated it on the NeXT because they
felt that a true multimedia machine should have as many options as
possible.

I hope this explanation helped.

cjs

[e-mail] | "The unconscious self is the real genius.
[e-mail] | Your breathing goes wrong the minute your
{uunet|ubc-cs}!van-bc!cynic!curt | conscious self meddles with it." --GBS

Re:RAID?

[Luckyo]

Hilariously, that is the first actually valid reason to switch from 7 that I've ever heard.