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Name: Zero Cool
Does anyone now if they are making non mechanical HDD yet as mechanical HDD are crippling PC's performance these days
Memory these days and CPU's are so fast the poor PC has to wait for the slow HDD's to catch up
I bet the PC speed would be 100% faster if not more if HDD were non mechanical
Anyone ???
Zero Cool
Until they get quantum computers up and running I think we are stuck with mechanical non-volatile mass storage devices.
Stuart
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You already have USB memory disks and memory cards for laptops have been around for a long time. What, you don't like the price of the small 256MB things? There have been a number of companies over the years that have made flash memory drives, but the high price did not sell many of them. If they use the IDE bus, they would only be maybe two to three times as fast as current drives. That would not make that big of a difference in system performance. So it takes a much faster interface than the current PCI bus with its 133MB/s limit.
They would have to go to FSB memory bus drives and current specifications do not allow for that type of drives.
IBM has a new mechanical technology based on integrated chip manufacturing technology. Uses holes and fingers that read the holes. Is a lot faster and stores more dense data than current disks and even flash memory. IBM sold off its small disk drive business so it could switch to the new technology. So expect it to start showing up within the next few years. What form? Who knows, but expect them to target laptops first.
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I considered myself lucky to own a 120Mb hdd less than 10 years ago and I now carry a 128Mb SD card in my pocket on a daily basis. When the per Mb price comes down, volatile storage will keep getting larger.
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Compact Flash follows the ATA architecture and is looked upon as a standard disk drive by your software.
Lexar is now shipping 40X compact flash cards up to 4-GB. The man who invented flash memory was and I believe still is intent on replacing mechanical hard drives with flash memory. You can now boot your computer up to a compact flash drive as several manufacturers are making Flash Drives that either plug in as a standard floppy drive or a USB Drive.
40X compact flash is rated to 6-MB per second as the speed rating follows the CD-Rom rating of 150KB/sec @ 1X.
As Flash memory becomes faster, cheaper and ever higher capacity, it very well may replace mechanical drives in the near future (5-10yrs)...808
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Well soon as we start getting rid of mechanical HDD then PC will be better, it's the only thing mechanical left in a PC
You could have the fastest memory and CPU in the world, but if you have a slow HDD then your just going to cripple the PC performance
IBM have revolutionized the PC industry over the years, so if they can come up with new non mechanical HDD that can store gigabytes or even terabytes of data over the next few years it would be the biggest thing since the HDD was invented
Just have to wait and see :)
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Assuming that read\write speeds of compact flash can increase at their current rate, we could have Flash drives in less than 3-years with a throughput of aprox 50MB/sec.
And, since a single FlashCard could be viewed as four smaller flash drives in a RAID Array, you could see 200MB/sec on a single card in a Raid configuration.
Now view the same card as 8-separate drives in a RAID config.
See where this is going???
808
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Predicting the future in computers is a bitch. So much happens so fast that you end up wrong 90% of the time. pci-x was supposed to take over the world. scsi was going to do away with pci. Now hypertransport is touted as the end-all. Will sata end up as a short-term fad? It never seems that way while something is emerging, but who knows.
Smarter and non-volatile disk-caching could solve a lot of problems. You could have the cheapness of a hard drive with the speed of a solid state connection for files you mark as high priority. And how about a smarter system suspend option. Why can't I shut down my machine and have everything turn completely off and have just a trickle current keep an image of my main memory alive in the hard drive cache. 64mb would do it for me. imo the problem isn't hard drive slowness, the problem is that I have to load the windows kernal at the same speed as I do my old tax returns from c:\archive\olderthanhellstuff folder.
At the end of the day, I think it will be a while before pricing becomes so cheap that we will all choose to put 100gb of data on a super-fast access solution. The need for access for most of our files doesn't warrant the cost. I'm thinking that having 98% of our files on a cheap hdd (like today's are cheap) and the other 2% on something fast is in order. That's why smart non-volatile cache hd cache sounds good. I don't mind waiting 1 second for an old archive file to load.
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FLASH....Johnoh,
Predictions are not needed when you create the future you want...
Compact Flash uses less than 1/100th the power of a hard drive and withstands a fall from any height that will destroy your hard drive.
I predict that Flash is here "NOW"
808
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No one is disputing that the technology exists, 808, the "problem" is just that most folks continue to expect a free lunch and don't want to pay for it...
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808 if you want to bet that you know the future, that's cool. But taking the other side of that bet (i.e. betting against anyone who says they know the future of computing) is a winner 9 times out of 10. The hard drive has been popular longer than any other device, and betting on its displacement is a losing game.
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What becomes the dominant technology does not depend on what is better. A lot of it has to do with which companies have the best marketing for their technology (look at MS Windows vs Apple O/S in the early 80's).
Marketing and behind-the-scenes partnerships make it even more difficult to predict.
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"What becomes the dominant technology does not depend on what is better"
And one benefit of the open architecture PC world we have here is that the cheapest solution that works adequately usually becomes dominant. In hardware that is.
0
"What becomes the dominant technology does not depend on what is better"
With Intel making new processors on effective 800MHz and above FSB and Athlon's onboard memory controllers (the best decision they ever made IMO) I bet that Rambus RAM could easily trounce DDR in a performance war, but I doubt anyone will see it making a sudden resurgence in the memory market. No one is going to pay the price of a new computer for a 5GB Flash memory drive anytime soon. I agree with johnoh in that if I could have a 2.5GB flash drive to put windows on and a good SATA drive to put everything else on, the jump would be big enough for me. But then by the time flash drives get that big, microsoft will have bloated windows up to 7GB or so per installation so its a losing battle.
There were rumors of optical drives being tested out a few years ago, what ever happened to those? I will agree with another statement though, and that is if the hard drive format changes anytime soon, it will most likely be IBM that does it.
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"But then by the time flash drives get that big, microsoft will have bloated windows up to 7GB or so per installation so its a losing battle"
ain't that the truth. Some vigilante geek really needs to steal and distribute the win98 source code.
The optical drive enthusiasm occurred right before a sharp downturn in hdd cost/$gb. At first they were going to be like 1/8th the cost at 1/3 the speed (just making the nums up) and next thing you know they were only half as cheap and still 1/3 the speed.
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I may never use compact flash for the next Big OS to come along but it has already replaced my floppy drive so that I can boot to DOS 5.0 or 6.22 to play some of the older games directly from a 256MB Boot-Card, then reboot to the hard disk when I'm done. 10-years ago I bought a 512MB western digital drive for about $500 back when that was their biggest drive. The fact that I can now boot to a 512MB card for half that price is merely an indication of how far we've come in those 10-years. You can surely wait for I.B.M.'s millipede to come along but it will be a mechanical drive. The original post was about non-mechanical drives and they are indead already here!!!!!!!
808
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True, flash drives have all but replaced the floppy which is 1960s technology. However, they still have a long way to go before they can match both the speed and the capacity of a modern disk drive.
I think mechanical drives are with us for a long time to come yet, not least of all because of the cost.
Stuart
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