[speedgibson] Speed Gibson: Sand Vs Rust

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Posted by Speed Gibson:
Sand Vs Rust
http://speedgibson.powerblogs.com/posts/1232430184.shtml


   It's taken much longer than I thought it would, but "solid state disk"
   (SSD) is finally arriving. New PC laptops are sporting 32, 64, and now
   128 GB SSD hard drives, for a few hundred dollars more. Having no
   moving parts, like a motor having to spin platters at 5400 rpm or
   more, they draw much less power, meaning much more battery life. Plus,
   they're faster.
   It's been a race for some time now, silicon (sand) memory chips vs
   iron oxide (rust) disc platters. The trouble has been that sand has
   typically cost an order of magnitude more expensive per GB than rust.
   Once again, mass production - capitalism in action - has brought down
   the cost to where most Americans can afford this technology that
   nobody on Earth could buy a generation ago at any price.
   Twenty five years ago, I was buying mainframe memory for over $30,000
   a megabyte. I bought a 256 MB USB memory stick for $40 in 2006. I
   could put dozens of them in my pockes. And now this, a single laptop
   drive that runs on a small battery for hours and holds more data than
   many data centers did 20 years ago. Wow.