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Hard Drives of the future
My thoughts revolve around the continuation of current HDD technology, I'm not taking into consideration something that doesn't involve spinning metal bits or whatever here. The bigger hard drives become, the bigger the problem of lost data becomes, because more data can be lost if a hard drive fucks up. That to me says that sooner or later the redundancy will be built into the drive. How could they do that, I wondered?
It seems to me that the best way, would be to have some sort of small bit of solid state memory that backs up the data table. That seems like the single most important piece of information on a drive. If a sector goes bad or something physical happens to the drive you're done pretty much regardless, unless you want to pay oodles of money to "professionals" to retrieve the data.
Seems to me that backing up the data tables would be more than good enough for most cases of a hard drive crashing. I know there are people on these forums that are more knowledgeable about such things than I am so... Is there any reason this wouldn't work?
(Note: I think I may have overdone it on the comma's...not sure so I'm leaving them in.)
It seems to me that the best way, would be to have some sort of small bit of solid state memory that backs up the data table. That seems like the single most important piece of information on a drive. If a sector goes bad or something physical happens to the drive you're done pretty much regardless, unless you want to pay oodles of money to "professionals" to retrieve the data.
Seems to me that backing up the data tables would be more than good enough for most cases of a hard drive crashing. I know there are people on these forums that are more knowledgeable about such things than I am so... Is there any reason this wouldn't work?
(Note: I think I may have overdone it on the comma's...not sure so I'm leaving them in.)
Comments
Flash memory has a limited number of writes. Period. Let's say you have a flash memory stick that can hold 8 bits of data. You buy the memory, and it has 8 zeros in it. You plug it in and change it to 8 1s. That's one write. You change it back to 8 zeros, that's two writes. For most commercially available flash memory, after 1000 writes, it's game over. Throw it out and buy a new one.
Granted, there are ways to make flash memory last longer. Let's say you have a flash memory that currently has 10011111 written in it, and you want to change it to be 00000111. Whereas a normal hard drive would just overwrite every single bit, algorithms for writing flash will make the data correct in as few writes as possible to extend the life of the flash memory.
With advances in flash technology and intelligent flash-handling algorithms, we can get flash memory that lasts for a very long time. So in the short term, the fact that flash memory can only sustain a finite number of writes is not a huge problem. However, if people start using flash memory in an environment in which the flash memory is being written to on a frequent basis, we will start seeing it fail all over the place. As amazing and useful as flash memory is, it does have drawbacks. There are many good reasons we haven't completely given up on hard drives just yet. For the time being, flash memory will be used in situations where it can provide an advantage. We will have to wait for technology to advance before those situations are more frequent.
http://www.alienware.com/Configurator_Pages/area-51_m9750.aspx?SysCode=PC-LT-AREA51M9750&SubCode=SKU-DEFAULT
If these really are that great, maybe there is no future for hard drives.
They would be so awesome if they didn't cost so much, hopefully large businesses will start purchasing these partsso prices will go down and in addition hard drive sizes will incresase... soon!