
Samsung: Solid state will match hard drive price - dmoney
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10196422-64.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
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markessien
Anyone who still believes that CD, DVD or Blue-Ray still have a future is
deluding themselves. There is no market for spinning media, it's just that
there is currently no better alternative. Flash Memory will replace all
spinning media as soon as it becomes viable from a cost perspective.

~~~
Retric
FYI: Blue ray is up to 400GB/disk (As in you can make 400GB disks that a PS3
will read) and it costs a tiny fraction of what that what flash memory costs.
In ~20 years they might cost the same per GB, but that's still a long way from
now and plenty of time for the next optical disk format to show up.

PS: I am assuming blue ray disks will cost around 10c per disk in 20 years. So
flash needs to drop to 1/10,000th of it's current price to be competitive in
that time scale.

~~~
lsb
The point is not how much you can store and how fast you can access
consecutive sectors. The problem is that spinning platters have been stuck at
100 random seeks / second for the past 20 years, and most database struggles
have been based on that. The new Intel SSDs can do 100,000 "disk seeks" per
second, which means that you suddenly have the speed of a thousand-disk raid
on one SSD. That's why SSDs are interesting. Not the storage per disk, the
random-access IO. People still use tape (not just .tar formats) because it's
really cheap for dumping big backups.

~~~
smanek
But I don't care about random-access speed when I'm just using it for media
(music, photos, video).

I think within a few years most people will end up with a small (a few hundred
GB) SSD for their OS and programs, and a very large traditional HD (a few TB)
for archiving data that doesn't need random access.

That's the system I'm using now. Two 73GB 15K drives in Raid-1 for my OS, with
3 1TB drives in Raid-z for media.

~~~
lsb
Yeah, the same separation between small assets available quickly and big
assets available slowly is how Amazon recommends you separate data between
SimpleDB and S3.

I'm quite fascinated by all the ways we'll be able to persist data.

~~~
smanek
Yep, it isn't a new idea. The premise of Von Neumann machines is that you work
around the cpu/data bottleneck with increasingly faster (and larger) caches.
You have a tiny bit of ludicrously fast on chip memory (registers), a few megs
of successively larger and slower L1/L2/L3 cache, a few gigs of kind of slow
memory, and hundreds of gigs of unbelievably slow hard disk. This would just
split the unbelievably slow disk into two separate layers - kind of slow SSD
and really slow disk.

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spolsky
For what it's worth, chipmakers been saying that flash drives will catch up
with hard drives in price for about 17 years now. I first read an article
about solid state drives catching up with rotating drives in 1992.

Right now a terabyte hard drive costs $81, and a terabyte of SSD costs $2684,
I'm not going to hold my breath.

~~~
10ren
They're not really saying that SSD will match HDD price per GB, but that it
will reach parity for a specific demanded GB capacity (64-256GB) in a few
years.

But by then, as you imply, the demanded capacity also will have increased...

So it seems to be a question of the rate differential. So far, SSD's are
getting cheaper at a much faster rate than demanded capacities are increasing,
and (assuming nothing changes the rates, like Blu-ray-sized 400GB movie
downloads), it will catch up soon. Firstly just nipping at the heels of the
low end, then biting a chunk out of the mainstream, and eventually consuming
all but niche applications.

It has already caught up for lower capacities e.g., a 1 GB flash drive is
cheaper than a 1 GB HDD (fixed costs: $2 vs $40-50), and disrupted hard drives
from iPods and netbooks.

Meanwhile, desktops PCs themselves are being disrupted by laptops, which are
being disrupted by netbooks.

~~~
pchristensen
_SSD's are getting cheaper at a much faster rate than demanded capacities are
increasing ... Firstly just nipping at the heels of the low end, then biting a
chunk out of the mainstream, and eventually consuming all but niche
applications_

This is a classic Innovator's Dilemma/Innovator's Solution situation. People
were buying for capacity, soon they'll be buying for convenience (speed, power
consumption, etc). Tape drives are cheaper than HDD but no one is buying
those.

~~~
electromagnetic
The SSD taking over the HDD is based on the preposition that everything stays
the same, but the game is going to change and we all know that. Digital
distribution is beginning to hit big, I mean look at NetFlix on Xbox 360 and
iTunes.

I haven't bought a CD in over a year and when I did it was because it was one
of my favorite bands. How long is it before I'm saying the same thing with
DVD?

SSD might pick up some niche uses, but there's a reason people have wanted
mass storage, which is that programs are progressively getting bigger and so
are all the files we store. I remember thinking a 400x300 pixel image was big,
now I think a photo smaller than like 2000x1500 as small. In 5-10 years I'm
going to think anything smaller than like 10,000x7,500 as pathetically small.
Equally, I'm going to think any video that's not at least 720p isn't worth
having, because by 2015 companies want UHDV to be released displaying at
4320p. When my video is taking up 32MB _per frame_ I don't want, I'll _need_
maximum capacity still.

~~~
pchristensen
_10,000x7,500 as pathetically small_

Ok, that's 75 megapixels. Ken Rockwell estimates that 35mm film is about 175
mp (<http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/film-resolution.htm>), so that is a
technically realistic number. But you need an outstanding camera and
photographer to make all those megapixels matter, and most people won't pay
for and _won't even notice_ the extra detail. Resolution bigger than the
biggest computer doesn't matter much for mainstream users, and even a 6.1mp
image from my DSLR looks good printed out at 8x10".

Now a hard drive full of HD movies would take up tons of space, but do you
want to carry that around with you? Not to mention that movie studios will do
whatever than can to prevent persistent files from being the digital format of
choice. They would much rather stream on demand and charge per viewing or per
rental.

We've always wanted more space, but computers are getting to the point where
they're fast enough and big enough to satisfy common users. The fact that
you're here on HN means that you're by definition not a common user.

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snprbob86
Samsung has a funny and impressive "viral" ad video showing 24 SSD drives in a
RAID array. Sign me up for one of these:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs>

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chmike
What I find most attractive in SSD is the IO performance. The fusion-io PCI
express SSD storage is the most attractive. The IO speed difference and
reduced latency would make a significant difference for my application.

I'm not so sure about long term storage reliability. I would currently prefer
to combine both type of storage.

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wallflower
Fusion io is about $30/GB - which makes it more competitive with gobs of
server ram and SAN than HDD arrays (RAID).

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utku_karatas
I couldn't resist the hype and bought the cheapest no-name (A-Data, anyone?)
32GB second-hand SSD. I haven't seen a noticable performance improvement since
but FWIW the silence - getting rid of the disk thrashing - is worth alone the
price of this thing.

~~~
listic
I think A-Data is more than "no" name: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-data>

I too bought a 32GB SSD from SanDisk a year ago to replace hard drive in my
IBM ThinkPad X60s to get silence and shock resistance (I guess I'm paranoid on
those issues, but it made me happy) Sequential write perfomance is noticeably
less than even in 5400 rpm drives, but I didn't care much; it's okay for me.

Yet I would call people who use SSD in their computers early adopters; the
outlook for SSDs is optimistic but I guess it will be a few years at best till
SSDs will be able to become mainstream.

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ph0rque
What would be really informative is a graph of the historical price per memory
size for both spinning and solid-state harddrives... anyone come across
anything like that?

