Hard drives are the weakest link in the computer chain, SSD's could change that.

@Dano11 (173)
United States
February 24, 2007 3:22pm CST
Almost two years ago I called a manufacturer of Solid State Disks, (SSD's) for an article I was writing for my website. He flat out told me we would never see solid state hard drives for personal computers, yet within a year of my asking him Gigabyte came out with a memory card w/battery back up solid state hard drive. Now about 3-4 months ago Transcend started selling SSD's for laptops. Before I go on, for those of you who may not know, SSD's are like hard drives but made up of RAM instead mechanical disks. The potential advantage to these are, it is possible today to build an SSD that could transfer data at a rate of 1,000 MB/second, as opposed to the sustained data speed of hard drives which is normally around 17-34 Mb/sec. Burst rates are higher, but sustained rates are slowed down due to the mechanical search times. Hard Drives are the weak link in computers now. CPU Busses, PCIX slots, everything in the computers on the solid state end of it are geared to running and passing data and crazy fast speeds whle the hard drives have been improved very nominally over the past 10 years. With todays fast processors, it would be completely feasable for a computer to install windows XP in 10 minutes, to boot up in seconds instead of sometimes minutes, to be able to operate all the sexy widgets, record movies on the fly, and still manage your work on the computer without a noticable slow down. At present the solid state hard drives for laptops are small and rather expensive, about $350 for 8 GB, and they are not designed for high speed sustained data transfer, they run around 22MB/sec. There are some that are made to transfer at 130 Mb/sec sustained, and with the price of Nand memory dropping as it has in the past year, do you see a new storage technology in the near future? one of the biggest complaints of NAND technology is the read write limit of around 10,000 read's/writes, however for the SSD's they are using improved NAND that is capable of 1,000,000+ which could outlast most computers. What are your thoughts? Would you like to see them become common place? Do you think this wil happen in the near future? Would you be willing to pay say $500 for an 80 or 100 GB SSD or even perhaps a 40-50 Gb HD, knowing it would be energy efficient, would outlast any other HD tehnology, and would be able to feed data faster than your computer could process it?
2 responses
@Debs_place (10520)
• United States
25 Feb 07
Over the past 25 years, I have learned one thing about computers and that is everything is pretty much written in sand. My first computer had a single floppy drive, then I went to 2 floppy drives and I think 64 mg of memory by then. Then I had a 10 mg hard drive, I mean who would ever need more storage then that - I think I read that in Computerworld. When Apple came out with the GUI interface, it was not in color, they said it would never be in color because no computer was powerful enough. Anyone who says something will never happen in the computer industry, such as your SSD comment above, obviously has not kept up with the changing face of computers over the years. Buy the time, a 100 GB SSD drive in put in a computer, the price will be pretty close to the current HD technology. Give it a year or 2 and you will see your wish beginning to unfold.
1 person likes this
@Dano11 (173)
• United States
25 Feb 07
Thank you for the vote of confidence in my dreams. I think I can wait two years, but it might hurt a little, LOL. I couldn't believe it when the man told me they would not make it to personal computers. I thought that was really a technoligocal eyes wide shut attitude. They do have big solid state hard drives now, but they are expensive and are generally used in military and big business server solutions with 10,000,000 write/rewrite specs, with pretty high data transfer rates. Current prices are, 4 GB $260, 8 GB $350, 16 GB $800, and about $2700 for 64 GB etc. and the speeds are not up to what they should be. Anyway, I just love to watch technology unfold, Thanks for the reponse
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
24 Feb 07
Hard drives have been the weakest link for a long time, and I have expected a new technology to appear for several years now. Each new version of Windows uses a greater volume of hard drive space, and software programs are also taking advantage of the huge drive space now available. The problem is that if you have a larger program then you will need a greater access speed to use it or the whole system will slow down accordingly. The seek time has been increased so far by increasing the revolution speed of the drive, but this cannot continue because the current level is an amazing engineering achievement. Seek time could be halved by running the disks in RAID 0, but then it is only a matter of time before the speed is insufficient. I would be reluctant to pay the kind of prices that you refer to, but I welcome the technology and look forward to larger disks at a more competitive price.
1 person likes this
@Dano11 (173)
• United States
24 Feb 07
Thanks for the response, HD's have been the weakest link, but maybe technology is finally approaching an alternative. Granted they are stil expensive now, but as production demands become higher and higher, hopefully the prices will get lower and lower. I read recently that toshiba has introduced a laptop in Thaiwan tha comes with Solid state hard drives, but they are pricey, like in the $3000 range. I remember years ago paying $2000 for a 486DX, so with the price of a fast computer today being as low as $1000 or less, and the cost of a hard drive as I mentioned, I think I would go for the hard drive. Everything would speed up tremendously as not only would programs and data launch from a fast drive, your virtual memory would be just as quick as your system memory. Doing large file graphics as i do from time to time would be very fast. There is also a company, I think it is called speed disk, which utilizes RAM and the hard drive to make a large buffer in which it reads and writes to the hard drive in the back ground whle your programs and data feed from the RAM. Somewhere in the direction the trend is going, hopefully at least some type of a compromise system can be achieved. Here's to Looking at tomorrow.. today