Re: [LUG] Bah! Disks! Bah!

[Max Siegieda <maxsiegieda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Aha, that's my cue! There are a few methods of cutting the price of larger SSDs although they are somewhat risky. Remember the manufacturing efficiency boosting method of making a high end product then lopping bits off? It's in use with SSDs too, for example there's a certain Kingston drive that uses exactly the same controlling hardware as the very nice Intel X-25M 80GB (which tend to cost about £175 iirc) however it has half the NAND chips meaning slower speeds and lower capacities. It is possible to buy these chips from places such as Digi-key and surface-mount-solder them back on giving you the high grade SSD for £125.

If that seems a bit too risky and you have the time you could always create your own controller chip using an FPGA with plenty of pins, a friend of mine was looking into it for creating a physical RAM drive and it seemed like the process was transferable, using his chip switching method where only one chip is addressed at a time it would be possible to have hugely extendable drives for the price of a cable and some flash memory which was iirc £9.50 per 8GB chip and £20 per 16GB chip, the only issue is of course that random reads/writes suffer a bit but a decent cache can solve that.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 9:08 PM, Rob Beard <rob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

george parker wrote:

I had a 300 Gb Maxtor disk fail just before Xmas after about 2 1/2 years.  Started making funny noises when searching so swapped out before full failure.

Following this thread I wonder if we're hitting the limits of the technology.  The drive (no pun intended) has been to get more and more bits per square centimetre on the platters and this has been done by improving all the stages of storage, platter material, write mechanism, read mechanism, control electronics, mechanics, motors etc. but generally not new science.

 

Well the Next Big Thing(TM) is SSD drives, I gather there is a little bit of life left in hard drives yet, I mean they're up at about 2TB now, maybe they could get a bit bigger, but now SSD prices are falling and capacities are getting bigger, maybe eventually we'll all go over to them.  I was looking at SSD prices the other day in fact.  I believe I saw a 40GB Intel one for about £93.  I'd consider something like that for my notebook when I eventually rebuild my desktop then I won't need as much portable storage (and maybe by then the prices might have come down a bit more).

Rob

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