SSD's - The wave of the future?

[Frank616]

The Winchester hard disk has been around for a long time, and people keep predicting the death of it. Weren't MO optical drives supposed to the death knell? Well, we all know what happened to that. And data density on these devices keeps going up. As soon as someone predicts a 'wall' into which storage density will eventually run up against, someone else comes up with a way around that 'wall' (ie, the IBM magneto resistive heads in the 9345 drive).

However, the mechanical drive may be meeting its eventual end at the hands of solid state storage. Here is an article that not only announces a new line of products from Intel, but also briefly reviews how the pricing has gone down.

Do you see the SSD replacing the venerable Winchester hard drive eventually?

Frank.

[james147]

The key work here is 'eventually'... but not for along time.

They are slowly becoming more popular as program/OS storage, caches and laptop hdd, but they cannot match the capacity needed for true data storage. Until they do they will not replace normal hdd fully and even then it will be awhile, I mean look at floppies, how long did it take for them to fully die after cd where invented. Only within the last few years have I seen shops finally stop selling them.

[Frank616]

james147:

They are slowly becoming more popular as program/OS storage, caches and laptop hdd, but they cannot match the capacity needed for true data storage.

In my Dell M6600 laptop, which is now my principal machine, I installed a second 245 GB Vertex SSD. It is the single most impressive improvement I have ever made to ANY machine in the 30+ years that I have been using computers. This thing goes from a cold start to a full KDE desktop in just a few seconds.

However, as you state, data storage, as in archiving, is going to be a hard disk affair for a long time yet. I have a second (the original) 750 GB hard drive in this machine, and I do use it for data storage. It is where I keep most of my files. The only things I keep on the SSD are video files that have yet to be edited / rendered, and the OS. These are things that need i/o speed. Whether I get a Libre Office file off the disk in a fraction of a second, or a tenth of a fraction of second makes little difference to me, as I can't move as fast as my machine anyway.

The performance gains, however, coupled with lower prices will likely move the mechanical HD to strictly archival purposes as time goes on, don't you agree?

Frank.

[james147]

In the desktop/laptop area they will quite quickly become the main drive... Though normal hdd will not be dedicated to just backups for along time as they still valuable in storing "slow" data (Like pictures and movies which don't need super fast access time but do need the space) not just archives. But tape is still used for backups in the server world and ssd's are not going to take ground there for many many many years.

Edit: That is, it will be like that for a few years yet... but yes, as time goes on, data in home computers will move to ssds, but I don't see this happening in the server world any time soon, except for maby databases.

[Frank616]

james147:

but I don't see this happening in the server world any time soon, except for maby databases.

Agreed.

My original post had more to do with the small end user, like myself, than with servers. I sure love the SSD in my machine!

Frank.