
How SSDs conquered mobile devices and modern OSes - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/inside-the-ssd-revolution-mobile-devices-and-modern-oss/
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PakG1
It's interesting how this has played out exactly the way Clayton M Christensen
predicted in his Innovator's Dilemma book years ago. Back then, flash was
barely on the radar of most consumers, and yet, Christensen identified flash
as a primary candidate to make traditional harddrives obsolete the same way
desktop harddrives had made mainframe harddrives and minicomputer harddrives
obsolete. Chalk one up for the guy, his Innovator's Dilemma model is _really_
well thought out.

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ajross
Is this really so surprising? I think anyone who knows how semiconductor
manufacturing works would have looked at the scaling graphs of magnetic
storage vs. transistor density and seen that they cross. We've all been using
flash-based embedded systems for well over a decade -- it started with
cameras, then fixed-function network gadgets, then phones, then... So now it's
hitting PCs.

If anything, magnetic storage has actually scaled faster than expected
(frankly it's so cheap in bulk that it's effectively free relative to the
power required to run it).

To me, the only surprise was that consumer applications never found a need for
more than about a quarter TB of storage, so that's where the crossover happens
on PCs. We haven't actually hit the cost-per-byte point yet.

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jrabone
It's just as well that 256GB is enough for anyone. Maybe I'm pre-empting the
next part in this series, but it looks like simply scaling NAND flash geometry
might be a dead end:

 __"While the growing capacity of SSDs and high IOP rates will make them
attractive in many applications, the reduction in performance that is
necessary to increase capacity while keeping costs in check may make it dif-
ﬁcult for SSDs to scale as a viable technology for some applications." __

[http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/FAST2012BleakFla...](http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/FAST2012BleakFlash.pdf)

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freehunter
While SSDs are still scaling, like you said they won't scale forever.
Memristors have just recently been proven to exist and there are a lot of
companies showing that they have working memristors. I hope that by the time
we reach "peak silicon" on SSDs, memristors will be there to pick up the
slack. They've been a long time coming, but now that they finally exist we
should be seeing them soon. According to HP, they should have memristors on
the market in about 6 months.

[http://www.dailytech.com/HP+to+Deploy+Memristor+Powered+SSD+...](http://www.dailytech.com/HP+to+Deploy+Memristor+Powered+SSD+Replacement+Within+18+Months/article22963.htm)

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hobbyist
Here is some neat work done for using SSD's effectively in network appliances
and data cache servers. <http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~abadam/ssdalloc.html>

