EMC will start flogging flash drives
Flash Gordon Bennett
Monday, 14 January 2008, 11:47
GIANT STORAGE firm EMC will start incorporating flash memory drives in some of its mega systems later this quarter.
According to the Wall Street Journal, even though they cost 30 times the price of a traditional HDD, the time is dawning when their greater speed means they’ll start being used in large storage systems.
One anxiety about flash drives rather than HDDs is they get tired and emotional after many reads and writes.
But they don’t half swap data fast and the Journal article (sub needed) reckons EMC reckons the subsystems will only cost about 10 per cent more than the current HDD systems. µ
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I don't particularly care what replaces hard drives as we know them, just so long as something does. It's pretty sad that we have all of this computing power saddled by ancient storage technology that has all of the failings of any other mechanical device; guaranteed failure.. not a matter of if, but of when.
NAND Flash will also fail after a few thousand cycles - that is also a matter of when, not if - and at the end of the day, its a matter of how much $$ you are willing to pay up front for the guarantee that things will not fail for so and so cycles - there are parts out there that will cycle up to 1.5k, 5k and 10k cycles -take your pick.
You're missing the point: hard drives as we know them are mechanical devices that *will* fail at some point. Non-mechanical devices can be made to last far longer than any mechanical device. Take CPUs, for example. If you keep them cool and correctly powered they'll function longer than any hard drive. RAM is another example of something that will work almost forever. Flash drives aren't there yet, but there's no reason to believe they won't get there in the near future.