Re: You are right, it should be interesting. In a couple of years, you have to figure NAND will replace hard drives in notebooks... maybe PC's in a couple of more years. All storage? Probably sometime, solid state always beats moving parts... it's just a matter of time.
LOL !!
I don't mean to be impolite, but I've been hearing this for so long - almost 30 years.
The surprising problem with flash memory and its variations isn't just that its too expensive - it's that it's TOOooo SLOOoowww.
Check out the specs on flash vs. hard disks, it'll probably come as a surprise (it certainly is counter intuitive), but standard hard disks have far faster data rates than flash. A critical capability in a mass storage device.
1981 December
Bubble Memory Challenges Winchester Hard Drives
We've mentioned several times in this column that the expectation that bubble memory devices would replace other mass storage devices such as disks and tapes has just not been happening. Now, further clouding the future of bubble memories, National Semiconductor has announced its withdrawal from the field. This leaves Intel, now specializing in 128 kilobyte devices, as the major US supplier of bubble memories. Motorola is also still committed to the field. However, in contrast to the eight or ten manufacturers who jumped on the bubble band wagon five or six years ago, the fact that only two are still committed sheds serious doubt on the future of bubble memories as a viable and economic device. Steward Sando, marketing manager for Intel, predicted the cost for 128k bytes of bubble memory will fall below U$100 in the near future, thus making it competitive with other types of solid state memory or Winchester disks. While Intel's largest bubble memory is currently the 128 kilobyte device, the firm will introduce a 512 kilobyte device in the not too distant future according to Sando. By 1985 that device will cost about U$150. So, amid the dropouts, Intel remains. Will they be able to repeat the success of their line of microprocessors (4004, 8008, 8080, ...) or will they eventually give up on bubble devices? Only time will tell.
[Source: Item Yet Another Bubble Bursts in the regular column "Dateline: Tomorrow" by David H. Ahl, in Creative Computing magazine, December 1981, page 6.] |
