flash replacing hard disks?

Flash splash, from iPod Nano - Technology - International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/.../ptflash01.php

It looks like certain older capacity landmarks for hard disks are
becoming the domain of flash. For example, 4GB flash would be cheaper
than 4GB HD, except for the fact that nobody makes a 4GB HD anymore.
Anyways, it looks like flash is taking over older capacity landmarks
faster than HD is leaving them behind.

Yousuf Khan

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
...
Flash splash, from iPod Nano - Technology - International Herald
Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/.../ptflash01.php

It looks like certain older capacity landmarks for hard disks are
becoming the domain of flash. For example, 4GB flash would be
cheaper
than 4GB HD, except for the fact that nobody makes a 4GB HD anymore.
Anyways, it looks like flash is taking over older capacity landmarks
faster than HD is leaving them behind.

That's interesting, because for a long time HDD price/MB was halving
every year, which means capacity/year was almost doubling (part of the
price drop was production efficiencies). Is flash price/MB dropping
_faster_ than by a factor of 2 every year, or has the long-term HDD
trend slowed so that flash can catch up? Both? ;-)

Bitstring , from the wonderful person
Yousuf Khan said
Flash splash, from iPod Nano - Technology - International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/.../ptflash01.php

It looks like certain older capacity landmarks for hard disks are
becoming the domain of flash. For example, 4GB flash would be cheaper
than 4GB HD, except for the fact that nobody makes a 4GB HD anymore.
Anyways, it looks like flash is taking over older capacity landmarks
faster than HD is leaving them behind.

But last time I looked the write speeds of Flash were pretty pathetic ..
or has it gotten way better all of a sudden? (none of them could come
close to keeping up with 'real' USB2, for instance).

--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Contact recommends the use of Firefox; SC recommends it at gunpoint.

On Sun, 02 Oct 2005 19:10:16 +0200, Felger Carbon
wrote:

Is flash price/MB dropping _faster_ than by a factor of 2 every year

looking at pen drives one can only say Yes, plus new flash speeds are great


--
the penguins are psychotic
aka just smile and wave

"GSV Three Minds in a Can" wrote in message
...

But last time I looked the write speeds of Flash were pretty
pathetic ..
or has it gotten way better all of a sudden? (none of them could
come
close to keeping up with 'real' USB2, for instance).

Write speeds are important for large files. But reading is a lot more
common than writing, and I assume that latency is a whole lot less for
flash than for 7,200RPM HDDS. ;-)

Also, if a flash drive contains, say, 16 chips then a good controller
chip should be able to achieve a 16X write (or read) speed increase
over a single flash chip, right? The teensy USB drives you're
familiar with normally have only one flash memory chip.

On Sun, 02 Oct 2005 17:10:16 GMT, "Felger Carbon"
wrote:

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
...
Flash splash, from iPod Nano - Technology - International Herald
Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/.../ptflash01.php

It looks like certain older capacity landmarks for hard disks are
becoming the domain of flash. For example, 4GB flash would be
cheaper
than 4GB HD, except for the fact that nobody makes a 4GB HD anymore.
Anyways, it looks like flash is taking over older capacity landmarks
faster than HD is leaving them behind.

That's interesting, because for a long time HDD price/MB was halving
every year, which means capacity/year was almost doubling (part of the
price drop was production efficiencies). Is flash price/MB dropping
_faster_ than by a factor of 2 every year, or has the long-term HDD
trend slowed so that flash can catch up? Both? ;-)

I think the more important issue is that many consumers are buying
more and more towards the trailing edge of hard drives. Personally I
always used to buy at about the half-size point, ie when 80GB drives
were the biggest drives around, I would buy a 40GB drive. When 160GB
drives were the biggest I would pick up an 80GB drive. Now I'm
looking at more like the 1/3rd size point, ie my next drive will
probably only be a 120GB or maybe 160GB drive while manufacturers are
now turning out 400GB drives.

In business machines I see this trend even more strongly. By far the
most common hard drive size in new business computers is 40GB, the
smallest size offered. If they could get a 20GB drive for $10 less I
suspect that a lot of businesses would go that route. I'm sure that
most hard drive manufacturers would probably LOVE to discontinue their
40GB drive production since that's only half a platter (or less) for
them, ie the "40GB" drives they are really 80GB+ drives with most of
the capacity disabled. Certainly we've seen this before with drives
to support old products (ie the hard drives sold in Microsoft's XBox
have to be the same 10GB size now as they were some MS first signed
the contract with drive manufacturers), but to see it in new,
mainstream products is something fairly new.

In short, the thing that really changed is the rate at which us
consumers require more hard drive space. Both flash and hard drives
are increasing in size faster than our requirements are. The trick
here is that both flash and hard drives have a bottom end price point.
Bellow a certain size there is just no real price advantage. For hard
drive manufacturers the cost savings bellow 1 platter (ie 80 to 133GB
right now) is rather negligible. For flash the minimum price point is
the cost for a single chip at the lowest cost/MB, which right now is
probably around 256 or 512MB, and this cost is much lower than the
minimum cost for hard drives.

As the articles notes, the crossover point between where flash becomes
cheaper than hard drives is increasing every year, and it's doing so
faster than the annual increase in drive size that consumers want.
Eventually that means that flash will become cheaper than hard disks
for the drive size that many people are buying. That being said
though, I see the timeframe for this cross-over as being roughly 10
years down the road. They at least have to get to the point where a
40GB flash drive is cheaper than a 40GB hard drive, and that will take
time.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Sun, 02 Oct 2005 20:24:32 -0400, Tony Hill
wrote:
[snipped]
As the articles notes, the crossover point between where flash becomes
cheaper than hard drives is increasing every year, and it's doing so
faster than the annual increase in drive size that consumers want.
Eventually that means that flash will become cheaper than hard disks
for the drive size that many people are buying. That being said
though, I see the timeframe for this cross-over as being roughly 10
years down the road. They at least have to get to the point where a
40GB flash drive is cheaper than a 40GB hard drive, and that will take
time.

Lessee....in college in the late 60's, we were told the drive cost/capacity
crossover point from magnetics to solid state was projected to be "5 years
away". And for as long as I can remember since that time, it's always been "5
years away".

Until tonite...

/daytripper (progress? ;-)

On Sun, 02 Oct 2005 20:33:24 +0200, GSV Three Minds in a Can
wrote:

But last time I looked the write speeds of Flash were pretty pathetic ..
or has it gotten way better all of a sudden? (none of them could come
close to keeping up with 'real' USB2, for instance).

PQI CoolDrive Pro (U339 Pro) 1 GB
read/write: 26.6 MB/s i 20.3 MB/s

looks more than decent to me

--
the penguins are psychotic
aka just smile and wave

GSV Three Minds in a Can wrote:
But last time I looked the write speeds of Flash were pretty pathetic ..
or has it gotten way better all of a sudden? (none of them could come
close to keeping up with 'real' USB2, for instance).

I think these things will become important, but so far not yet. The
advantage of flash are lightweight, and vibration resistence. These are
important in MP3 players, or other mobile devices. But if flash becomes
much larger, and starts to encroach into PC territory, then performance
will become more important. I can see a time when flash will be big
enough and cheap enough to accomodate even the whole Windows OS. It
could become a default boot device, with HD's becoming "just" data
devices.

Yousuf Khan

On Sun, 02 Oct 2005 21:32:15 -0400, daytripper
wrote:

On Sun, 02 Oct 2005 20:24:32 -0400, Tony Hill
wrote:
[snipped]
As the articles notes, the crossover point between where flash becomes
cheaper than hard drives is increasing every year, and it's doing so
faster than the annual increase in drive size that consumers want.
Eventually that means that flash will become cheaper than hard disks
for the drive size that many people are buying. That being said
though, I see the timeframe for this cross-over as being roughly 10
years down the road. They at least have to get to the point where a
40GB flash drive is cheaper than a 40GB hard drive, and that will take
time.

Lessee....in college in the late 60's, we were told the drive cost/capacity
crossover point from magnetics to solid state was projected to be "5 years
away". And for as long as I can remember since that time, it's always been "5
years away".

Until tonite...

/daytripper (progress? ;-)

LOL! "It's the technology for the future. Always has been, always
will be" :

You are quite right that the timeframe for this sort of cross-over
always seems to get pushed back, solid state vs. magnetic's is only
one of many examples. When I saw "roughly 10 years" I should perhaps
have put more of an emphasis on the 'roughly' part.

Still, that being said, I just don't see too many people buying the
latest and greatest 500GB drives. In fact, the largest drives I see
that are at all common are 250GB drives which made their debut a full
two and a half years ago (as a bit of a sidenote to go along with
that, it's taken us 2 1/2 years to get from 250GB drives to 500GB
drives, 6 months longer than one extended Moore period).

Anyway, I guess we'll see it when it arrives. Personally I expect to
see the first solid state hard drives seeing widespread use in non-PC
applications, in particularly gaming consoles. Actually, to be fair,
we've already seen solid state storage in gaming consoles, but I
expect it to continue and become more standard fair and in larger
sizes.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca