From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263278AbTJUTNN (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Oct 2003 15:13:13 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263280AbTJUTNN (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Oct 2003 15:13:13 -0400 Received: from neon-gw-l3.transmeta.com ([63.209.4.196]:40198 "EHLO neon-gw.transmeta.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263278AbTJUTNK (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Oct 2003 15:13:10 -0400 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org From: "H. Peter Anvin" Subject: Re: Blockbusting news, this is important (Re: Why are bad disk se ctors numbered strangely, and what happens to them?) Date: 21 Oct 2003 12:13:01 -0700 Organization: Transmeta Corporation, Santa Clara CA Message-ID: References: <3F940C42.7080308@nortelnetworks.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Disclaimer: Not speaking for Transmeta in any way, shape, or form. Copyright: Copyright 2003 H. Peter Anvin - All Rights Reserved Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Followup to: <3F940C42.7080308@nortelnetworks.com> By author: Chris Friesen In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > > Richard B. Johnson wrote: > > > Battery-backed SRAM "drives" in the gigabyte sizes already exist. > > Terabytes should not be too far off. > > > > Soon those "drives" will be as cheap as their mechanical emulations > > and you won't need those metal boxes with the rotating mass anymore. > > The batteries last about 10 years. Better than most mechanical > > drives. > > I'm dubious. Ram costs about 150-200X as much as hard drives. I don't > see that changing. > Not without a completely disruptive technology change, which is always possible; MRAM is one possibility. Having nonvolatile storage with access times near current DRAM speeds and cost/densities near current disk would change the computer industry in a very fundamental way, not the least because current operating systems make the memory/disk dichotomy very visible. -hpa -- at work, in private! If you send me mail in HTML format I will assume it's spam. "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot." Architectures needed: ia64 m68k mips64 ppc ppc64 s390 s390x sh v850 x86-64