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How low can it go?

S

strollin

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 16, 2008
Messages
344
Location
N. California, USA
I don't know about how others feel but I am completely blown away by how cheap disk storage is now and wonder how much cheaper it will be in the future.

In 1977 I went to work for IBM as a technician on the 3350 disk drive. It was the size of a chest freezer, had 2 300MB HDAs (Head/Disk Assembly), required 220VAC to operate and cost big $$$$$.

I bought my first personal disk drive in 1985. Paid $500 for a 20M drive for a cost of $25 per Megabyte. Today's drives are down to around $0.17 per Gigabyte!

I realize the future is SSDs (or some other technology) but in the meantime, disk storage keeps getting less and less expensive.
 
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I really hope SST gets cheaper soon.
Click to expand...

Be careful what you wish for, though. On flash memory, same as most other things, you tend to get what you pay for. SSDs have come way down in price over the last couple years, and are continuing to fall little by little, but thanks to new MLC (multi-level cell) technology used to make the chips, the cheap SSDs are also nowhere near as reliable as the expensive SLC ones.
 
In my experience they peaked in quality around 1998-99 when they were just hitting the 200GB mark on the newest drives.. Anything much newer than that I've had trouble with, and I've had far more SATA drives die than I ever did IDE... in fact I've never lost a single IDE disk (post-2k ones have dumped all of their data spontaneously, ending up blank once and a while, though)..
 
I've had two fail now, both 500GB WD drives - one was in an external enclosure over USB, the other was in use in a standard business environment desktop machine - different drive models.
 
Spinning disks will do it for me for a very long time (took me ages to even get an LCD monitor). Solid State disks will take a while to get decent density AND long term reliability, especially when they cost more to make and the race to the lowest cost hits in and quality goes out the window.

Most people do not care about speed, they want space to dump their junk into. I can see some day where the OS is on a solid state drive so computers instantly boot, but all your video, audio, and work files are still on spinning disks because of the TB of space needed. Its kind of like super fast cache is used in CPU's still, but all your programs are still running out of much slower RAM. Speed has a cost, and people need space more then speed most of the time.
 
You know, the way most folks use those TB drives, they might as well be write-once stores; what proportion of the terabyte changes once written? It would seem that most people just want a data warehouse.
 
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