Well Hard disks have had a good run for their money but it looks like the race to squeeze even more on a hard disk platter will start to feel the pressure from the new medium in town. The Solid State Drive.
Now Solid State Drives (SSD) have been around for a little while now. They are basically what we use in cameras and USB flash drives. Solid State means no moving parts so there is nothing to damage if they are dropped or jolted and you don’t need to worry about powering down before you move your systems.
The only real issue was that SSDs are, and still are, expensive beasts. I can buy a 500Gb HDA for much less than the cost of a 1Gb SSD. That will of course change as more people get SSDs and the volume sold goes up. Soon they will be standard in high end laptops, desktops and servers moving over to low end laptops and desktops in a few years.
One of the beauties of this media is that is can, and should be, reverse compatible with HDAs. Therefore you should be able to plug one directly into your existing system wither as a direct replacement or via an interface card if the manufactures want to create a new standard. Either way Plug and Play.
These drives are also ideal for backups. HDA media that moves around a lot tends to get damaged. SSD should remove that issue although I wonder what its weak spot is. Remember when CDs were introduced. You were shown cars running them over and they still worked but after a short time of putting music in and out of CD players, or 10minutes with kids and CDs, we discovered that they were not quite indestructible. Now it appears they only last 15 years. I still have vinyl of Black Sabbath that is well beyond that at nearly 40 years. I suspect the SSD will require refreshing every 10 years or so. Not insurmountable but not perfect.
Technology marches on. Already many home users have more storage at home for videos, music, etc. than firms use for their entire business systems. I sometimes wonder at what stage we each will all have the entire collected works of our species on personal media ready for access at any time and at the current rate of progress it can’t be far away.
Makes you wonder why people are looking at storing data on remote clouds doesn’t it? Still can’t see any tangible benefit in it especially when media costs are coming down at the rate they are. Luddite that I am.
The future champion of data storage
Well Hard disks have had a good run for their money but it looks like the race to squeeze even more on a hard disk platter will start to feel the pressure from the new medium in town. The Solid State Drive.
Now Solid State Drives (SSD) have been around for a little while now. They are basically what we use in cameras and USB flash drives. Solid State means no moving parts so there is nothing to damage if they are dropped or jolted and you don’t need to worry about powering down before you move your systems.
The only real issue was that SSDs are, and still are, expensive beasts. I can buy a 500Gb HDA for much less than the cost of a 1Gb SSD. That will of course change as more people get SSDs and the volume sold goes up. Soon they will be standard in high end laptops, desktops and servers moving over to low end laptops and desktops in a few years.
One of the beauties of this media is that is can, and should be, reverse compatible with HDAs. Therefore you should be able to plug one directly into your existing system wither as a direct replacement or via an interface card if the manufactures want to create a new standard. Either way Plug and Play.
These drives are also ideal for backups. HDA media that moves around a lot tends to get damaged. SSD should remove that issue although I wonder what its weak spot is. Remember when CDs were introduced. You were shown cars running them over and they still worked but after a short time of putting music in and out of CD players, or 10minutes with kids and CDs, we discovered that they were not quite indestructible. Now it appears they only last 15 years. I still have vinyl of Black Sabbath that is well beyond that at nearly 40 years. I suspect the SSD will require refreshing every 10 years or so. Not insurmountable but not perfect.
Technology marches on. Already many home users have more storage at home for videos, music, etc. than firms use for their entire business systems. I sometimes wonder at what stage we each will all have the entire collected works of our species on personal media ready for access at any time and at the current rate of progress it can’t be far away.
Makes you wonder why people are looking at storing data on remote clouds doesn’t it? Still can’t see any tangible benefit in it especially when media costs are coming down at the rate they are. Luddite that I am.