Hard drive's days are numbered

I've been expecting this might happen.

SOURCE

Bravo!!!!!!

I saw a story about the move to flash-based storage a few months ago. One of the questions is the design capacity of the amount of transactions the flash modules can handle.

As a contrast, your mp3 player grabs a file and plays it. Very little stress on the memory device.

In ordinary use, your computer has to grab all kinds of info constantly. You know that over time your hard drive gets bad sectors that require re-formatting to bring them back (if your lucky). There's no telling how the flash system will deal with those issues in terms of life span from the electronic side.

No moving parts is nice, but if the lost sectors start piling up what happens, and what is the recovery potential in extreme data loss crises?

It will be interesting to see how it develops - what fails, what are the fixes? Will the lifespan prove to be adequate compared to the CPU and other components?

Originally posted by Ryst Bravo!!!!!!

Might want to wait until a better company than Samsung starts making it, though.

Terry D.

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I assume if it got too bad, you'd just replace it. Suppose the RAM last only 2 years. What's the life of a laptop...4, 5 years? So you would have to pay $200 - $400 to "maintain" it over that time. Not too terrible considering all the advantages of not having to use a hard drive.

I'll bet the price falls even farther -- or it won't get market share.

Yes! Death to spinning disks!

I'm actually quite a fan of Samsung these days, and they make a lot of stuff you use (or components inside) than you know. There will be competitors, for sure.

This can't happen soon enough. I want a truely silent PC or hardware recorder.

I've got HDD's that are 5+ yrs old that work fine. In the past 5 yrs, I've had one problem that required replacing a 120gb HDD that cost me less than $70. This is over the course of about 3-4TB of drive space.

Not that I wouldn't be happy to have quieter machines, HDD's are pretty darned quiet these days, and extremely reliable. Not to mention that they have been in use for a long time, I doubt you'll see the format go away too quickly. I'd guess 5-7 years minimum, the lifespan of the average in use daily HDD.

It's about friggin' time! Re: hard drive life. I've had great luck with most desktop drives, but laptop hard drives are a whole other story. Your lucky to get 3 years out of a laptop hard drive. I just had a batch of HP notebooks that had drives die only after a few months. Thankfully it was only a handful of systems that had these bad drives. I probably send in at least 3 laptop HD's to Ontrack each year to get recovered for the company that I work for. It's not cheap either. Most recoveries cost about $2000!

So then are we going to arguing over whether you set these drives in raid 0 or not??

Hmmm that is the question of the day...

But ya I'd like her to be the 120 gig systems first!

They had better up the capacity by the time it becomes available, because 32 gig is nothing, and it will be even less in 2008. Normal, spinning harddrives are at 500 gigs now, and they're getting cheaper all of the time. Regular harddrives are pretty quiet today also and much more reliable, compared to a few years ago. I can barely hear the drive in my laptop. Drives are not the main source of noise in computers anymore, fans are. A fanless computer with a new, quiet drive = pretty damn quiet.

A friend who specializes in laptop repair told me the reason the laptop drives fail more than desktops is because of the power up/down cycles the laptops get, far more than desktops.

My laptop drive is over 4 yrs old, and no issues, but I rarely power it down. I cannot hear it except when it's working really hard. The fan it an entirely different story, and is very loud, but since I don't use it for audio(except for remote recording where it's not an issue) it's moot.

The desktop is super quiet. I never hear the HDD's, and barely hear the (replaced for quiet running) fans either.

Originally posted by MrKnobs Might want to wait until a better company than Samsung starts making it, though. Terry D.

Samsung makes great stuff.

A 32 GB solid state memory module might be enough to convince me to try it as a recording medium. My reason for holding out on the current crop of solid state memory recorders is that the cost of enough memory to record for a full weekend is still prohibitive, and I don't want the burden of having to dump memory once or twice a day when I'm busy with other things.

Now if they can oly get the cost down to about $10 a pop . . . which is what I paid (after the rebate checks come in) for a brand new 80 GB hard drive. By the way, that deal is still good until Saturday (in the US and Puerto Rico, Friday in Utah, one rebate to a customer) at CompUSA.

Your experience must be different than mine.

Plus, I have a personal grudge against Samsung. There is a plant a couple miles up the road from me and I can tell you Samsung is no friend of the environment. Their 3AM releases of various chemicals into the atmosphere are legendary here in Austin.

Recently, one of my neighbors who works for the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (the organization in charge of water and air quality) snuck into the Samsung grounds on his day off and took water samples. He said he had to bring a piece of carpet to climb over their 8 ft. tall fence with barbed wire on top.

Sure enough, he got pictures and water samples showing massive, intentional illegal discharges of chemicals into the creek behind their property. I'm told Samsung received a huge fine and they promised to correct the situation. The guy was a big hero in our neighborhood for a while, since we've all been breathing their releases for some time.

However, what I see they've done (I drive by their plant every day) is they've switched from barbed wire to concertina wire, and they have a new sign warning that the grounds are patrolled by dogs and armed guards.

I will never intentionally buy anything with the Samsung brand on it. They're not only an enemy of the environment, but their products are {censored}ty and substandard, IN MY OPINION.

Terry D.

Guess you've never been by an Intel plant, huh?

Armed guards, dogs, patrols constantly, and God only know what they are pumping into the environment. Whenever someone grumbles, they toss a couple million to the town(Hudson, MA), and that's the end of that.

You think Samsung is the only unfriendly tech company, you need to think again.

Thanks, Terry. I vote with my $$$, and if Samsung is as bad as you say, they won't get any more from me. I do doubt that any of their competitors are any better, don't you?

Their products have seemed innovative and have been very reliable for me.

I know that's true, but Samsung is the wolf at my door and I can't fight all the battles at once.

Terry D.

Great company -- former forumite, buddy, and sometimes contract consultant jdwinger used to work for them

definitely spells out the concern for backup! (esp mobile applications where you may have only periodic connections to backup batch jobs)

It might be OK for laptops (don't know, I don't use them)...

But the price would have to be below that of hard drives (around 40 cents/ GB) and capacity up to at least 60 GB before I'd consider 'em.

We may very well see (I guess as we currently do) a hybrid implementation with non-volitile storage

and how that is carbureted? could depend on the application requirementss spec

Hard drives work pretty well for me. Of course I'll welcome anything faster, etc.

What I really want is something besides CD and DVD drives. They are a pain. Examples:

1. auto-load. Keeps coming back on my system even 'tho I tell the stupid Windoz to "do NOTHING every time".

2. when I pop my CD drive, the system thinks I want to access a different webpage on the internet, and asks me "are you sure you want to close this window?" stooooopid

3. my CD drives hangs during multi-CD loading procedures on a regular basis.

Windoz still can't figure out that it needs to look at both CD drives in sequence to find things.

And so many burned CDs that won't work here or there or somewhere....

Will this technology kill the CD and the DVD? That would be NICE.

nat whilk ii

You certainly gave plenty of examples of the former, but none of the latter. What Samsung hardware have you had fail or perform poorly? I have a Samsung rice cooker that's worked fine for about 8 years, and two Samsung disk drives that are working fine for over a year. But considering that I've had only one actual hard drive failure in about 100 drive-years (and that wasn't one of the Samsungs) it's really hard for me to have an opinion about their reliability yet.

I see your point about the pollution. But they make some of the best flat panels around. They make the panels for many companies that just slap their name on it. They also make fantastic HDTV's.