I wonder what the author of the article could do if he 1) got into the habit of keeping it concise 2) used 2-syllable words instead of 5-syllable words when reasonable.
With the rise of the web and a less-empty life than I once had, I don't have the patience to work through verbiage for uncertain payoff, even when the topic is a book that I'm already aware of and looking forward to reading.
Now that the news has been getting out in recent years that Elsevier is evil, you'd think they'd start to be more careful about behaving questionably in easily avoidable ways.
Well, I guess he could refuse to use the tools that he has to use to reach an audience and get this message out, and we could all fail ever to hear about it, fail to discuss it, fail to think about it, and we could shut our brains off and enjoy our dystopia.
I very much want our walled garden dystopia to wilt, wither, and die, and so I'm glad people are at least hearing for a minute that it doesn't have to be this way.
What is it, though, about being interviewed that makes someone say something like "Without the invention of the light bulb, there would be no modern computer as we know it today." as if we could've easily just happened never to think of electric light.
I had a similar feeling, and thought it was probably because I know nothing about aviation and therefore read that stuff uncritically and feel entertained.
I wonder whether that's a general principle in writing -- tell outside-your-expertise stories to entertain the reader, and then with luck (depending on your perspective), the reader reads the rest and feels entertained and informed and good emotions out of a sort of inertia the rest of the way through.
firefox is on a 6-week release schedule, and has been for a while. They increment a by whole number each time, but the for both chrome and FF they shouldn't really be thought of as .0 releases. It's a fairly minor, incremental change.
Think about the market dynamics. Not just the 3D technology they are talking about, which brings parity within range, imagine what you would do if you were an SSD maker and this was on the horizon.
You'd rush to reach parity because as soon as that happens there's no reason to buy an HD over an SSD. So you're going to want to cut prices as fast as possible so that when the market switches over-- which will be a HUGE tipping point for the industry-- you can get as much market share as you can. Even taking a loss now on a reliable drive may get you customers for life who you can profit from later.
I think the transition is going to be extremely dramatic and it's a huge opportunity in this industry. I think we'll be seeing HD makers switching over their product lines to have more and more flash, and more and more flash drives, while re-positioning hard drives to very particular environments where they have an advantage (I'm not sure where these are)
But this is going to be a tornado of a market and some people are going to be come very rich as a result.
"By packing 32 or 64 times the capacity per die, 3D NAND will allow SSDs to increase capacity well beyond hard drive sizes. SanDisk, for example, plans 8 TB drives this year, and 16 TB drives in 2016. At the same time, vendors across the flash industry are able to back off two process node levels and obtain excellent die yields."
I have no doubt that we will see devices that big. The question is will anyone buy them. So its really a question of cost. HD's will be dead next year if I can buy a 10TB SSD for $300.. If it costs $4000, i'm sure HD's will last another couple years.
It all really depends on the SSD curve. If SSDs continue their price decline and capacity increases as this article mentions, it'd be difficult for HDDs to compete. Tape costs you no power in storage, but HDDs do unless you're powering them down and spinning them back up (which causes significant wear on the motor). SSDs get you cheap storage and lower power consumption, negating both tape and HDDs simultaneously.
TL;DR SSD advancement set to deprecate HDDs and tape in near future.
SSDs need to be powered up fairly often to maintain data integrity. So, they're great for the drives in computers, but for external or backup drives--which might only be powered up occasionally, spinning magnetic disks will still be a better choice for a while, it seems.
edit: maybe not. Bringing this article up from samcheng's post below:
Note that that "proof" is not proof at all. Ignoring that it's anecdotal evidence on the sample of one, the author didn't have the checksum of the data on his SSD and didn't try to recompute it, he just tried to boot the computer with the SSD after being turned off for some time and then installed the new OS.
Note that the older the SSD (from the technology standpoint) the better retention is to be expected as the miniaturization of the data cells (which sinks the costs and increases the capacity) significantly lowers the chances for the retention. So his old SSD can behave better than the new one. And some lost bits don't mean that he can't boot, as long as it's just on the places that don't change the behavior.
Needless to say, that netbook stays shut down for months but it still works when I turn it on. It survived many summers at 30 C. I don't know which kind of SSD it contains but being from 2008 it shouldn't be anything too fancy.
As I've said, the older SSD (technologically) and the lower capacity it has the better retention is expected. My 256 MB USB stick also still works, but one I've bought much later, 16 GB, died after only one summer of being not used. And that anecdote too really doesn't prove anything. The worst events are when just a few bits are changed and you don't recognize. Then a few bits more are changed... etc
The problem has to do with the temperature you write at and the temperature you store it at. If, for some reason, you're writing in a very cold environment and storing in a very hot one the lifespan is diminished. If it's the opposite, you're golden.
The title is pure irony ("SSD Storage - Ignorance of Technology is No Excuse"). See an another link posted here. Also from personal experience I have had no problem with an SSD that wasn't powered for 7 days.
The author of that piece is actually somewhat confused about how SSDs work. Data retention is a matter of the charge store leaking. An SSD doesn't have any means of refreshing that charge on it's own, the same timer is there whether the drive is on or off. And in fact it will lose data faster if the drive is on since then the drive temperature will be higher. Luckily this sort of data loss isn't a big deal in practice for the reasons outlined elsewhere in this thread.
pmontra and Bill_Dimm (edit: and cjensen!) post contradictory blogspammish articles (through no fault of their own - what else is out there?) which both reference the same JEDEC slideshow which has popped up a few times in the last few months.
This is an important enough topic that I wish a better reference existed.
So what if they have to be brought up once in a while? Who cares? They use so little power, that's really not an issue to bring the drive online, even frequently.
I think that we'll just see magnetic disks go away, and tapes pick up the long-term storage market. Pretty much nothing happens when you drop a box of tapes.
> Likewise, DVD-type archive storage will need a magic trick or two to remain in the race. A terabyte of DVDs will cost more than a terabyte SSD and that isn’t including the DVD library unit.
The article thinks that SSDs will be used for archives.
Not entreprise grade but consummer, and totally anecdotal, but I've bought a 500 GB Samsung EVO 840 SSD for less than 200€ a month ago. Given the specs (performance and capacity) of that drive and my previous experience about a year and a half ago buying a 120 GB SSD, I expected to pay maybe twice that ?
Even if the price fall slows down a bit, we're quickly getting to a point where I don't see why you would buy a SSD at home for anything other than your consummer NAS or similar. Anyone who tried a SSD surely isn't willing to go back to HDD for anything other than their "archive/storage" drive. And if this article prediction is true, soon even that will be taken by SSD.
If they insist, all right then, I will buy a Latitude next time.