[extropy-chat] Plastic promises dense data store

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 05:16:17PM -0000, Dirk Bruere wrote:

> Seems to be true of a lot of promising memory technologies.
> However, I would certainly pay a 10x premium for an all solid state version
> of a 'hard drive'.

They're a bit pricey, and don't store much, but you can get battery-backed
DRAM solid state drives. Flash is actually very useful, as you can get a lot
of functionality in one IDE-CF adaptor, if one uses a stripped-down *nix.
CFs are getting plenty fast, too, they they don't like to be mounted
as file systems seeing lots of r/w cycles.

Solid-state no-movable-parts instant-on/constantly-running systems do have
a strong application niche at home. Noise and boot-up delays are just not
an option in home entertainment. 

> Currently mass storage prices are about $1 per GB and the nearest solid
> state contender (flash) comes in about 100x that.

The interesting watershed is MRAM. It's as fast as SRAM, but is nonvolatile.
Suddenly, booting becomes obsolete. Systems which don't need rebooting
to keep them minty-fresh become useful. Irish Railway did have a 17 year
uptime (VAX 11/750, VMS 3.0), but current systems have GUIs, and run
hypermutable code coming in from a very hostile environment. This
takes a Lisp-like OS with real GC to become feasible. *nix just can't
cut the senfgas.

The best thing, slightly souped-up MRAM cells can do logic, too,
and ns-reconfigurable, as well. You just can't do that with FPGAs.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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