"Ian"  wrote in message
news:1108052033.846202.263280{at}o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
> http://www.scan.co.uk/products/productinfo.asp?WebProductID=174865
>
> Any day now someone's going to clock that they can mass these things
> together as dynamic disks to replace physical hard drives.
>
> I reckon if they took the plastic case off this thing, they could fit
> 200 of these into a 3.5 inch hard drive case.
>
> A bit of clever Parallel electronics to write 128 bytes at a time, and
> hey presto you've got a solid state hard drive, with 800 Gig, and 4
> Gigabytes a second transfer rate.
>
> Of course buying 200 of these and taking them out of the cases is going
> to cost around a hundred thousand dollars today, but since it's the
> factory that costs the money, the raw materials would be about a
> dollar, they could reduce that cost by a factor thousand if people
> started using them as real hard drives.
>
> I reckon solid state hard drives will have completely replaced disk
> based kit within five years. Maxtor, Seagate et al are all going to go
> the way of the dodo so quickly it's shocking. (I reckon 2 years before
> their shares totally collapse.) Sandisk and Bitmicro are so obviously
> going to obliterate them.  Sell your shares now lads.
>
> Hard disks are no longer doubling in capacity every two years, but
> these things are doubling in capacity every 6 months! In just two and a
> half years Sandisk have gone from producing compact flash at 1 Gig to
> 16 Gig three month ago. (www.dpreview.com)
>
> 7!, that's just seven compact flash cards can already replace the
> world's biggest 2.5 in hard drive in space, and power supply
> requirements (not that you can actually get your hands on one for love
> nor money). 2.5 years from now. (literally just 2.5 years, an
> industrial compact flash card will contain more storage space than the
> world's biggest 2.5 inch drive (which will be somewhere around 250Gig
> by then, if they haven't all given up.)
>
> Not only that but the power supply required will be negligible. They
> use no power at all when they aren't being read or written, and have
> "access times" of microseconds, not milliseconds because there's no
> head (and no advantage of keeping it spinning.)
>
> Hard disks have had it. The world's entire hard drive market will be
> owned my Sandisk in 30 months. I wonder if the board at Maxtor realise
> that they're all going to be unemployed this time next before my new
> baby can climb the stairs?
>
Interesting - but it could be that the major HD manufacturers are already on
to this but are riding out the tail of the current technology. For example
wasn't it Bell Labs that used to brag that at any one time they were about
15 years ahead of currently released technology? The idea being that
'tooling up' manufacturing plants and processes are a very heavy investment
and where innovation is outstripping the business economics of production
volumes from existing plant and processes it makes sense to 'delay'
releases. Of course I could be completely wrong in this instance and as you
indicate many employees of certain HD manufacturers could be well advised to
start looking for other options quite soon!

Phil




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