Discussion on:

Seagate to enter flash storage fray in full force

What do you think the future of storage will look like?

The future of storage will be able to fit in a space that is 4x4! Climate control costs will go down. I say horraaaay!

Its about time,
Should had a product there 2 years ago

I think that the flash-based drives will be made in the same size format to prevent issues with compatibility regarding today's standards. They will come out in 3.5" and 2.5" sizes to appeal to every single user. The power consumption will obviously be smaller and the storage densities will start out small but eventually, depending on the manufacturing process we will see 40, 80 or 100 GB flash based drives in less than 3 years with even faster I/O speeds than the magnetic disk-based hard drives we use today...I think the future of main storage looks promising...I wonder what the faces of Hitachi, Western Digital and Samsung will look like when Seagate comes up with an interesting flash-based hard drive better than anything out there...

I would not for a moment believe that the competition has been resting on their laurels, and not doing similar research.

Today, competition may be ahead of the pack. We do not know that.

With flash drives, one would presume that a defragger program would be unnecessary. Moreover, it will put an end to the RIAA or other bodies from seizing a flash drive that has been scrubbed, as there will be no residual information stored, unlike magnetic media.

I can see that there will be business and mainstream PC's with a 30-50Gb flash "C" drive and a terabyte or two of storage for media or programs whatever. That will need defragging for a weekend! but should *finally* make loading of windows a bit quicker!

SSDs are becoming available, but it will still take a while before they become mainstream. Just look at the price/GB ratio for even those small 32GB drives - ridiculous!! For the forseeable future, we are still stuck with good old harddrives as the primary storage medium, and those will always require a defragmentation solution such as the excellent Diskeeper offerings.

Also remember that SSDs will have finite number of read/write cycles. How they compare in longevity and integrity of data stored, to HDDs or other backup media is still not proven.

Hi,

I expect that in the future your mobo will have two sets of memory slots, one set for RAM and for permanaent storage. No "external" (to mobo) memory.
Like with RAM you chose how many sticks you want plugged in for whatever size permanent storage you need.

Do we need a new mnemonic?

How about PRAM for Permanent Random Access Memory?

Herb

I think they're late to the party. Dell has been muttering about Solid State arrays in their EMC rebadge SAN's for a year now, and if they're not looking to Seagate (more likely Fujitsu) then Seagate will be playing catchup for a while.

The thing that I think is most interesting in this field; is the hybridised disks that have been touted as possible for a while; and yet not come into fruition.
A smallish (multi gb) flash based buffer; with a large magnetic disk behind it. Allowing the fast random access required for things in page; and yet providing rapid data throughput when reading directly from the magnetic disk. The best of both worlds.