Hard drives are going away
We've been hearing about the eventual shift to solid state storage for years, but now it really seems to be happening. Soon we won't have hard drives in our lap tops; we'll use chips like the ones we use in our cameras for storage. The math is pretty clear: Flash memory like the kind need to create solid state storage devices (SSD's) is coming down in price (because of Moores's Law) at a rate of 60% per year. A Gigabyte of SSD costs between $2 and $3.50 today. A Gigabyte of hard drive costs 38ยข today. In two or three years the cost of the SSD will be less than the hard drive of the same capacity. The fun is that SSD's will deliver speed improvements of that could immediately double or even triple the speed of internal data storage; this will change a lot of things. You lap top will be lighter, faster, and much more rugged... it will also get thinner. It's all good!
As solid-state disk (SSD) technology closes in on hard disk drive (HDD) capacity and price, experts say it may not be long before spinning disks are a thing of the past and a computer's storage resides in flash memory on the motherboard.By making the drive part of a system's core architecture -- instead of a peripheral device -- data I/O performance could initially double, quadruple or more, according to Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at market research firm In-Stat.
"Instead of using a SATA interface, let's break that and instead of making it look like a disk drive, let's make it look like part of the memory hierarchy," McGregor said. "Obviously, if you break down that interface, you get more performance."
