Of Memory and Hard Drives

[DiscoLando]

Just a fun theoretical topic - how many years will it be before hard drives and memory combine to form 'super storage?' We already have magnetic memory which won't lose data on shutdown, and if prices continue to fall, we could see machines with several gig of memory in the next few years. Anyone think this is feasible and/or practical?

[qball]

They already exist in the form of solid-state drives and RAM drives. RAM drives existed in DOS. Mainframes can do this stuff also. BTW, DASD (HD) access is a major performance hit over RAM access.

Anyway, permanent (stuff you wanna save) and temporary storage (stuff the pc is using) isn't going away, and they are not converging, by the nature of each. Static data and dynamic data will always exist. Long live static and dynamic! I diverge.

The funny thing is this:

CPU performance increases are staggering. 4Mhz - 1.7 Ghz, you do the math.
HD performance increases are pretty impressive. 1MB/sec - 160Mb/sec (SCSI U160).
Memory (RAM) performance increases BLOW! 33Mhz-133DDRMhz.

CPUs have outstripped RAM in speed from the get go, and will continue.

[DiscoLando]

But what if hard drive speeds eventually are able to match memory speeds? If that day were to ever come, then what need is there to differentiate between 'static' and 'dynamic' storage? Why not get the best of both worlds? Data that stays resident without power, but large enough capacity for mass storage. It seems like a logical step. (In the not too distant future)

[qball]

Define 'not too distant future'. 2005? 2010?

One can easily create a HD-less PC. Boot to CD (or floppy) and have a ton of RAM, thus RAM disk. OR solid state drive. Turn on, load everything, never turn off.

You can do this already. Though it is not very practical (well, for some purposes, it is practical). HDs will get faster, but so will RAM, but so will CPUs. Faster CPUs need faster RAM, the HD only slows the process down.

As long as HD technology is magnetic image on rusty platters, they'll keep bumping the density and speed, but there are limits. Optical drives are enticing, read fast write SLOW. Wish I had the answer.

[DiscoLando]

Not too distant future? Sorry, didn't mean to speculate an actual timeframe. I frankly don't know if this topic has ever been discussed seriously. Just a random thought that went through my head.

Booting to a LAN and running ASP applications only pushes the question back to the server itself. What I'm dreaming of, basically, is a HD as fast as conventional RAM. In such an environment, as radbasa has put it, you wouldn't need to seperate executable and storage. The only thing I'm wondering about is, would such an environment make any difference (other than the speed itself)? Would code be more streamlined?

[radbasa]

If hard drives and memory combine as one big uber-memory then a great paradigm shift in application programming has to take place. Essentially, PC apps should take a form similar to PalmOS apps. It would be a waste of memory and redundant for a program to have an executing memory footprint and a storage memory footprint.

An easier HD-less PC: boot over the LAN and get apps from an ASP.

[radbasa]

I believe they would. For the PalmOS this model is certainly forcing streamlined programs. Admittedly Palm proggys are simple but they are quite impressive. A fully featured, function-programmable reverse-polish notation calculator for the Palm (talking about RPN, for all the palm users) takes only 38k, that's both storage and executing, all its libraries are within (static). Window's calc.exe is 96kb on your HD (plus maybe all the dlls it needs), 386kb while running in your mem.

[Hellmund]

Well I think I know what your saying, the whole reason we have RAM is due to the slow speed of HDD's so it's only logical that if HDD's reached the speed of RAM then the RAM would be obselete. This has already happened though with solid-state drives, however they are immensly expensive and very impractible. Optical drives will probaly be the future or DNA storage devices. Of course by the time there around there'll probaly be opticall/atomic processors which will be immensly fast.

[qball]

quantum processing will make all this obsolete.

As far a solid state drives:
http://www.imperialtechnology.com/

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,309325,00.html

[DiscoLando]

Now Quantum Technology I am a little bit more familiar with... but I had read that the technology only involves direct processing - will it be used in storage as well? I had read that the next real steps in future storage were holographic and/or optical.

[DiscoLando]

I'm not very familiar with solid state drives. Would you happen to know where I can find some interesting reading on them?

[This message has been edited by DiscoLando (edited 07-21-2001).]