Future of storage media

My dad and I have this arguement:

I say that before long, cell phones will encompass nearly all handheld devices into one device, and use a hard drive to store everything in. (A mini hard drive, ala iPod.)

He argues that before cell phones become that advanced, flash memory will also advance to the point where hard drives just aren't needed as a storage medium. He says that flash memory will grow to several gigabytes in size, and since flash memory has no moving parts and is faster, THere will be no reason to include hard drives.

Which situation is more likely to happen?

HDs will still be cheaper.

Strictly speaking, 8gb flash memory devices are available, just not for the consumer market, since they cost a hella of a lot to make, and cost even more to sell...but when you look at HDs, the maximum is what, 200gb? And it's not that expensive...so i'm guessing flash devices will always play 'catch up', unless something can be done to make production cheaper, or something.

Actually, there's one science project in the loop where a couple of researchers are trying to develop this new plastic digital storage media harddrive thingie. The technology is already existing, but not marketed due to obvious financial and price reasons, and it's suppored so store a pretty lot of thousands of gigs in a small box.

Maybe it won't be this technology that will revolutionize the world, but I do think that scientists will stop working on the old standards and develop new ways of storing ones and zeroes with. That's how it was done hiterto anyways, no one talks about five gigs 8-tracks, eh?

Thought i'd drop this tidbit in, I read on our favourite slashdot that there was a company who created a HD that was over 1TB in capacity. Granted, the actual dimensions of the physical unit were about 2 times larger in width, length and height. But hey, it's out there and it's expensive.

Keep in mind, flash memory needs to be changed so the maximum write capcity (ie how many times it can be written to) has to be increased in order for it to be feasible for anyone to use flash memory for everything.

Right now, you'd be insane to put a swap file on a flash card. Sure it would be pretty damn fast, but your card would be killed pretty damn fast also.

Well i dont think Hd's nor flash devices are fit for the future, unless you make some drastic changes to them.
Now Hd's have the problem of age.
Todays hd's dosnt last very long, maybe around 7-20 years (not really a problem for those ho can afford to buy new stuff every five years or so, but for the average computer user, it's peritty important), depending on manufacture and how you use it.

Other factors also play an important role is if you move it around allot.
And, since Hd's are storing data by writing (and reading) via magnets, you always have the risk of data destruction, becuse that speaker you have near your computer have a decently strong magnet.

And flash cards, as afreak just wrote they need to increse the times they can be written to, or they are usless as mass storage drives.

3d layered data-storage (holographic) ibm r+d
hp has some crazy organic project

we wont see these things for 20yers, if ever, in mass production

your dad is right, solid state is where its always been at... costs need to come down for it to catch significantly

At one time there was a device that would use SDRAM as an extra drive. It would be powered by an external DC adapter so to keep the data intact while the machine was powered off. It was sort of like a RAM disk that was dedicated only to that job.

I am not too sure whatever happened to the device, but it was a neat concept if you wanted a place to throw a swap file.

You're all wrong, in (at the most) 100 years, we will not use 1's and 0's, instead we will use a different form of computing. This was shown in Scientific American not that long ago, and it appears that it isnt that far fetched, but you could be able to have a mass of plasma and inject particles letting them bond with others and some how calculating the output and somehow program with it, I'm a little sketchy on the details, but the good thing about the internet is that there is someone out there who knows what i am talking about better than I.

Virtual Korean, you're talking about programming through matter manipulation. In a gross oversimplification, fission is a form of computing. You write a program by making a customized cube of matter, make it fission, and you get information back out in the form of radiation.

There's a similar idea being tossed around that uses black holes and Hawking radiation, but that's besides the point.

A fission personal-computer is at least a century off. I expect we'll see fission super-computers in the next fifty years. Matter manipulation needs to come a long way before the average user is running Microsoft Sunshine on their AMD Fissionputer.

>I expect we'll see fission super-computers in the next fifty years.

wow that would be something.. but the tools to accomplish such a thing are barely researched properly, let alone even close to operational

without the proper tools and some massive einstien-level breakthroughs on the conceptual side, 'making' that customized cube of matter in quanitites/speed necessary to actually use them for computing... seems very far off to me, centur_ies

we can barely work at the subatomic level well enough to shuttle an electron back and forth as a switch, or simply cascade a bomb
actually arranging custom structures, at that scale, with such precision... is nowhere near our current capabilities

let alone collating the information returned, and building the architecture to use it properly... the task is ridiculously complex

but once something can be feasibly concieved, and the basic elements of the technology assemelbed.... its just a matter of time

"cell phones will encompass nearly all handheld devices into one device" no, they will not. there is a very good reason why 'all-in-one' devices have not sold well in the past. when you incorporate more than one function into a device, you compromise each function to facilitate another. most people just want something to do one thing very well. as for the answer to your question, my answer is "moving parts = no" solid state memory is where its at

>>13
 battery life is really the issue there

n-Qubit Quantum computing, diamond film processors and optical processors. Whoo!

I wonder how useful optical computers will become. Generally, there seems to be an inverse relationship between distances and the usefulness of light. Ie, compare fibre optics vs all other technologies to DVD vs all other technologies. The smaller you go, the more trouble and less use it becomes.

Maybe in a very long time...

There was an article in SciAm a couple of months back about just that, >>16 . The idea was that computers could be spread out over greater areas to help with heat dissipation and to improve reliabilty through redundancy (since having parts far away from one-another wouldn't be as big an issue, you could have more parts that do that same job).

Mr. Fusion> sounds like something us americans would think of. not a bad idea, but for personal computers that'd be a hassle. i mean, a server rack is huge as it is... something as large as the ENIAC that does the same would be silly. and probobly really cheap to make.... yaknow what? i think you have a convert.

>>17
Interesting idea. Probably will remain niche though.

Offtopic rant: Scientific American has gone to the sewers. 15 years ago it was a respectable publication, now it's just Popular Science II.

>>18
Senseless national wankery. gb2/pol/

Holografic memory, crystals and the like.

Aborn!

>>19
I would rather say Discover II.  It's not *quite* as bad as Popular Science.

its gonna be a while before flash catches up to hard drives, but its so much cooler! SD cards are so small its amazing. My understanding was that people kept running into all kinds of crazy problems with optical computers, and silicon is working pretty well. i think we still have quite a while to go on silicon before we need some radically new processer technology.

On a side note, i saw an interesting artical in scientific american recently about carbon nanotube memory. aparently it will be really fast and quite dense and also non volitile, so maybe we will be seeing that used instead of flash memory or something sometime in the future. its still quite expensive to make though, i think they were useing it for processor caches.

>>1
fag got owned by daddy. thats fucking embarassing.

>>1
how did i miss this fail?! damn op. you dumb.

yo