A New Era in Storage

[Abysmal Craig]

Hi all, Just a quick up to date

As you all know Solid State Drives (SSD's) are out there and they are growing in size almost everyday. There has been reports of a 35TB Raid set up all in one PCI-E card. Its almost scary what you can get now, but SSD's are served with a fatal flaw, the fact that they are SSD. This may seem strange to some people as its markets as an advantage but in actual fact its a disadvantage. Due to the fact that an SSD is just several memory chips together there is a limit on how much storage you can get out of one unit before the unit itself melts. OCZ said they can get a 50TB raid up and running but both the power consumption and heat generated meant it wasn't economically viable as a form of storage as it would cost too much to run.

This isn't a problem to most of us who use a small SSD to store their operating system on and in this case the pro's vastly out weigh the cons.

Now for the good o'l fashioned HDD's. Most people have forgotten about them but they have advanced hugely in the past 4 years in terms of IO speed and storage capacity. Today you can buy a 4 TB drive off the Internet from any leading supplier but to those who have connections you can get them as large as 8TB. I have personally held an experimental 10TB drive that was designed by a small electronics firm out of Essex and assembled in Japan. We currently have a 60TB server on test in our workshop in real life conditions and it seems to be a success so far.

You can hope to see larger sized HDD's and SSD'd apearing on the public market within the next year or so as they are out there!!!

[Ian]

Great stuff, thanks for sharing

Ian.

[Andy Horn]

Over the past 2-3 weeks I have got emails from Ebuyer.com with some very tasty offer's on SSD's, today's is a SanDisk 120GB SATA 11 SSD for £65.00 with free Saturday delivery, just a little short on cash or it would have been a great upgrade for my MacBook.

Andy