HDD of the Future!?!?

When do you think we will see solid state mas storage devices!?!? I think it will be great when the day comes. I mean a storage device that will run in the nanosecond range instead of miliseconds. Because if you really think about these here machanical hard drives are the biggest bottlenecks inside our PC.

Just something to think about.

Yes i know you can make a ram drive, but all desktop motherboards only allow you to add 4GB of ram. So 60GB ram drives are out fo the question, atleast for now.

I believe they make card that go in the pci slots that holds pc100 or pc133 ram. It would probably be really expensive though.

ya they do make a pci card. it holds 4Gb of PC133. the only problem is itll run u $5000. check out the review in maximum pc January Issue

I think cost side is a major limitation atm, as just a stick of 512 RAM can cost upwards of what you would get a 80GB HDD for...

Size also, if that card above is ONE pci slot gone for 4GB, then your talking about something the size of a PSU unit in your computer for 20GB max...and thats not good

actually storing - yes its all great having this lightening fast drive which completely removes the bottleneck of ATA drives (but introduces the bottleneck of memory ) - but when you turn your pc off its all gone...now ram can be made "non-volatile" with a battery, but thats very small amounts of memory...

in time all these factors will become more negligable - and it would be great to see these emerging as a more common solution to desktop storage...

some articles:

Solid State Storage
http://www.tweak3d.net/articles/solidstate/

Holographic Storage
http://www.tweak3d.net/articles/howholo/

good old fashioned Hard Disk Drives!
http://www.tweak3d.net/articles/harddrive/

This is pretty old stuff. Quantum used to sell a solid state drive called the Rushmore. Insane performance at an equally insane price. I'll see if I can dig up some data for ya on teh drive

Of course quatum is no more after selling its HD buisness to Maxtor however.

Quantum Rushmore Ultra 5320 3.2Gig drive

$28,000

That was the price at one time.

And another find

http://www.imperialtech.com/

if I had $28,000 you wouldnt know how many godly pcs I would own...doubt I would be blowing it on some stupid rocket drive

pc 1(MHZ not bandwidth) memory in an 80 GB config wouldn't be much more than a standard 80 GB hard drive but of course people want more performance than that if they're going to pay for it so it's not feasible for companies to produce

pip said:

pc 1(MHZ not bandwidth) memory in an 80 GB config wouldn't be much more than a standard 80 GB hard drive but of course people want more performance than that if they're going to pay for it so it's not feasible for companies to produce

Click to expand...

um.. I believe the slowest ram that is practically still in existance is pc100 ram, which runs at 100mhz. HDD's have burst speeds somewhat close to that, but definately not sustained transfer. 80gigs of memory (ram) would be untouchable by any hard disk drive.

I'd expect solid-state flash-memory-based storage devices to hit the mainstream in about five years, mainly as a replacement for hard drives in laptops. They won't be as fast or as large as hard drives, but they'll use a lot less power.