SSD drives

[Jerry Feldman]

Hard drives of the day were either fixed HDs or disk packs. DECTapes
were serial media, so it was naturally much slower. The tapes were
formatted using an indexed-sequential technique where the home position
was the middle of the tape. Was fun to watch. Unfortunately, when I was
at Emory we had a fixed disk. If we screwed up the disk, we had to
restore from PPT. That meant entering the binary RIM loader. The RIM
loader was a paper tape reader that was inefficient, but easy to enter
the binary. It's sole function was to read in the paper tape reader.
Once the paper tape reader was installed, then you could rebuild the OS.
One used the disk for temporary storage. At the time, most installations
stored their information on 9 track magnetic tape, and used disks for
somewhat temporary storage, but with the introduction of higher density
disk packs, businesses were starting to store persistent data on disk
packs. Burroughs had a very fast head-per-track disk, but their support
for disk packs at the time was lacking. While tape was very much cheaper
on a cost-per-byte basis, it was not a good medium for the online
systems that were emerging. In the 1980s, when PCs finally started to
emerge in the business workplace, small hard drives were brand new and
expensive. In the 70s and 80s IBM and others were working on SSD
technologies, such as bubble memory, but these technologies didn't
really pan out, and mechanical HD technologies continued to improve
reliability, density and cost. Today, we have more storage capacity on
our laptops than large commercial data centers had for online storage
back in the early 80s. Many times we have all heard dire predictions
that we have reached the max capacities of HDs. well, now we have 2TB
drives for under $100 retail.

The iPhone/iPad/iTouch and netbook markets are providing the impetus to
develop low cost storage solutions. IMHO, hard drives are not going away
any time soon, but they will start to disappear from the portable market
over the next decade, but I don't think SSD storage will be cost
effective for large data centers for quite a while, but we may see some
innovation.


On 03/23/2010 04:21 PM, Anthony Gabrielson wrote:
> I would go with the iPhone/iTouch as the pull.  Apple is signing long
> term deals to bring the price down on large SSDs.=20
>
> Was DECTape faster than hard drives of the day?
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jerry Feldman" <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
> To: "Boston Linux and Unix" <discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 4:14:21 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: SSD drives
>
> A while back we had a discussion about SSD drives. Today there is an
> article in Slashdot:
> http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/03/23/1647239/SSD-Price-Drops-Sig=
naling-End-of-Spinning-Media?art_pos=3D4
> This references an article in Gadgetopolis:
> http://www.gadgetopolis.com/posts/7567/all/1 "The Death Watch for Hard
> Disk Drive Technology Begins Now (Finally!)" I can't remember how many
> times (going back at least to the 1970s) where I've believed that the
> magnetic spinning media was dead. Those were the days of the DECTape
> (randomly accessible tape) and, of course PPT and 026/029 cards (Well
> Hollerith predates most of us :-) I think the notebook, netbook,
> smartphone markets might be providing the pull right now, as costs
> come down, we might see these making their way into the data centers.

--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846