Breaking the storage barrier

[John Turco]

'think' again. That last bit that the other John commented on
didnt even mention that, just speed compared with the cpu.

<edited, for brevity>


Hello, Rod:

Wait a second, man -- there are three "John's" in this thread, myself
included.


Cordially,
John Turco <[email protected]>

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

Well, that's why I chose my words carefully: "ultimate goal,"
"reasonably-priced," "it appears," "I fear" and "eventually."

You did however mangle considerably the completely different
considerations of close to cpu speed and longer term storage.

The familiar electro-mechanical hard disk shall remain
overwhelmingly dominant, indefinitely (in the PC/Mac world,
at least), I must concur; I didn't mean to imply differently, sorry.

Yeah, hard to beat the very low price per GB.

Conversely, solid-state storage holds enormous potential,
in other areas. Just imagine, if public libraries started
archiving newspapers and magazines (and books, perhaps?)
on CompactFlash cards, instead of using crummy microfilm.

No one uses microfilm much anymore. And its more likely
that online distribution will dominate rather than cards too.

CF has every advantage over the
latter, and virtually no drawbacks.

Main one is that it still has to be physically moved
around whereas online distribution doesnt involve that.

We're getting close to that with music now, tho thats mostly
an end run around what the publishers would like to see.

(Okay, I guess it would be easier to steal, being so tiny. <g>)

True. Tho it wouldnt be hard to include antitheft protection.

Actually, I'm baffled as to why CD and DVD haven't
been utilized in this particular type of application, yet.

They have, most obviously with
Britannica and National Geographic.

In spades with manuals now.

Not that I bother with either anymore, much prefer online instead.

Virtually all datasheets are online in pdf format now.

It seems such a waste, employing them largely for
entertainment purposes (e.g., music and movies).

And for the storage of personal photos and videos etc now.

I agree tho, if it was up to me, physical
printed books would all be binned.

 

[Rod Speed]

<edited, for brevity>


Hello, Rod:

Wait a second, man -- there are three "John's" in this thread, myself
included.

Yeah, I've always maintained that you buggers should be
forcibly renamed. At the point of the sword if necessary.

You are welcome to call yourself Engelbert WeaselStrangler any time you like.

 

[chrisv]

Virtually all datasheets are online in pdf format now.

It's kind of sad, though, to see my collection of data books grow old
and obsolete, never to be replaced... I used to take so much pride in
them. The National Semi analog books were/are especially fun to
flip-through, checking-out all the novel circuits that they came up
with...

 

[Rod Speed]

It's kind of sad, though, to see my collection of
data books grow old and obsolete, never to be
replaced... I used to take so much pride in them.

I've never cried over obsoleted technology myself.

The National Semi analog books were/are
especially fun to flip-through, checking-out
all the novel circuits that they came up with...

a collection of pdfs can be all of that, and much more with
convenient crosslinks so you can just click on the link with
a circuit and go to the individual ic datasheet, or to a technical
article on various ways of doing position sensing etc too.

In fact while its not quite that convenient with all the
documentation on the web, it gets pretty close to that.

I do almost everything with full broadband online access
now. Leaves the old databook approach for dead.

In fact when I wanted to deliberately kill a hard drive
with an intermittent fault that would likely just get
returned unfixed, it was completely trivial to zoom
around the web using the ic markings to find a
good candidate to kill and find its pinouts etc.

Blew the side right out of it |-)

 

[John H.]

Fully aware of those points you mentioned, too. Regardless, CompactFlash
(and its various counterparts) are becoming more affordable, all the
time. (Still a long way to go, though.)

Taking a quick look on buy.com, a 2GB 40X (6 MB/S transfer rate) CF card
cost $563. So there is indeed a very long way to go before we'll see
affordable PCI-bus solid-state hard drives that are fast enough for a
boot partition. And by the time 2-4 GB is affordable we'll need 16 GB.

I own a number of CF cards, first intended for my Kodak DC3200 digital
camera. Ranging from 16MB to 128MB, I've found them very convenient in
transferring data - via a SanDisk ImageMate SDDR-31 external "reader"
(USB) - between my two computers, as well.

They certainly beat the hell out of floppy diskettes! <g>

But not hard drives.

 

[John Turco]

Taking a quick look on buy.com, a 2GB 40X (6 MB/S transfer rate) CF card
cost $563. So there is indeed a very long way to go before we'll see
affordable PCI-bus solid-state hard drives that are fast enough for a
boot partition. And by the time 2-4 GB is affordable we'll need 16 GB.

But not hard drives.

Hello, John:

Oh, I employ a Micro Solutions "backpack" 30GB external HDD
(USB/parallel port), to keep my main PC backed up. It's also useful for
moving around larger amounts of data, than will fit on any of my CF
cards.


Cordially,
John Turco <[email protected]>