static memory vs HD price crossover?

In article , snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com mentioned...

I have an Adtron adapter. It's just a PC board with the connectors. I think there's a jumper to switch from master/slave. But it's really simple. Stick the PCMCIA card with the CF card in it into the adapter and it's an IDE HD.

It doesn't have to do with when it will be cheaper, it has to do with when the public will be willing to pay the extra to buy this feature. And then soon after, the industry will gain enough volume to reduce prices further, until it will be like flat panel displays, the prices will become even more competitive. There may never be a point where the price per MB gets below that of rotating memory, maybe because the HD makers will continue to lower prices and increase drive capacity. After all, their business depends on it. ;-)

And there are similar alternative devices. They have ramdisks, basically RAM with a battery backup, aka UPS. And there are other markets, such as larger, more energy efficient non-volatile memory for PDAs, etc.

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On 6 Nov 2003 00:57:07 -0800, snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com (SpamLover) Gave us:

Laptop drives are pretty rugged little critters.

However, the military is implementing a PDA that will likely have SS mass storage in it. Regardless of the price. :-]

This sort of thing has been said for twenty years.

Back then, it was RAM drives to replace floppy drives. It was expensive, and didn't make much inroads.

Then, the price of RAM became cheap enough, but the need for storage space had increased, so it was still just as costly.

The price of RAM, and the price of hard drives keep dropping, but everyone always wants more of both.

People don't want to stop and consolidate, they want more RAM and they want that bigger drive, and they buy programs that require more and more of each.

So there's no time to balance it, and say "we can replace that 1gig hard drive with a memory-based drive", because by the time it becomes feasible, everyone has moved on.

Michael

The Psion Series 3 had them years ago

Thomas

Mostly a niche market for RAM drives which are many, many times faster than a regular HD. Used a lot for online systems where large databases have to be quickly available.

Relative to mechanical drives.

Because the Microsloth software keeps hogging both. :-P

Hey, DOS still works. Would you believe that there are Millions of computers out there that still using it. Must be a conspiracy between software authors and the hardware industry. :-O

Must be all those MP3 files they are downloading. :-?

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The algorithm used by the firmware rewrites to different spots in the memory space so that the number of writes is evenly distributed. They give specs that are just as good, if not better, than hard disks, which wear out, too.

With an adapter, they have the same interface.

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My email address is whitelisted. *All* email sent to it goes directly to the trash unless you add NOSPAM in the Subject: line with other stuff. alondra101 hotmail.com Don't be ripped off by the big book dealers. Go to the URL that will give you a choice and save you money(up to half). You'll be glad you did! Just when you thought you had all this figured out, the gov't changed it:

How true.

Embarrassing as it it, I admit to having cut corners on one HD upgrade some 12 years ago, as I had somehow become convinced price crossover was 6 mo. away.

:-0

and flash is getting better

while magnetic chips seems close to hatch

OTOH mag suspension and better power electronics improve survivability of HDs

and holographic is coming out of sci-fi

{iterate}

this will never end plenty of opportunity for ever worse bloatware

... and for those like me who always ride in the wake, and enjoy sedate OSs on weak machines

Filippo Piii/866/384/20+20 K6ii/333/96/20 Pii/233/32/4.2 Libranet/Vector/Debian/Lycoris GNU-Linux, W 98FE/98SE/ME, maybe QNX & NetBSD soon

Never. With that, people will have a larger HDD "Home Server", serving files and applications to diskless desktop workstations, set-top boxes, and personal computing devices. Eventually, perhaps even offsite servers to hold personal data and media, before SS drives become cheaper than magnetic HDDs.

On Fri, 07 Nov 2003 09:22:59 -0500, Gary Tait Gave us:

People are not going to be running diskless workstations in the home, hooking into mondo servers.

I have 4 machine running here, and they are all independent.

Some people are already kind of doing that, albeit not so much at home. (storing stuff on some central server). But in either case, the majority of ordinary citizen users probably wouldn't see the difference, or much care.

I just recently installed Earthlink Total Access, and it's actually pretty cool - it's kind of like this app is distributed between locally and the server. (BTW, if you decide to sign up for Earthlink, tell them rgrise sent you ;-) )

Cheers! Rich

DarkMatter wrote:

On Sun, 09 Nov 2003 04:48:23 GMT, Rich Grise Gave us:

There are always going to be hard drives in home PCs.

There is always going to be data that the consumer wants to store, and that locally and privately.

Learn how not to be a top posting Usenet retard.

------------ Nope, bullshit. Solid-state semi-permanent memory of several kinds some using new principles, and fast static memory is rapidly overtaking it in practicality.

-------------- Of course, but that does NOT require harddrives, per se, you can already do without one for turn-key, using CD-ROM.

--------- Agreed.

-Steve

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PC World (UK) 12/03 has an interesting article on Flash Cards as IDE disks.

Main points:

- a 4GB flash costs UKP1000 vs UKP200 for a 160GB HD, so the unit cost of flash is 200x higher

- write-cycle wear IS an issue, so better avoid any OS that writes a lot to HD due to virtual memory: old DOS ok, specialist embedded OSs OK, Windows not good

- by and large Flash Cards can be used as HDs

The conclusion was: OK for retrocomputing (as an example they built an arcade simulator and said a 486 would have been enough), and for specialist prepackaged embedded use, but definitely not for mainstream.