Messages in this thread | | | 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 |
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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.
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