Re: Blockbusting news, this is important (Re: Why are bad disk se ctors numbered strangely, and what happens to them?)

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

Followup to:  <3F940C42.7080308@nortelnetworks.com>
By author:    Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com>
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
-- 
<hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> 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