Terabyte drives $94.00us

[jpanhalt]

My dual 160 GB drive (30 GB used) took about 4 hours to rebuild with its first and hopefully last corruption. It's an older Dell 8400. Anyway, I was only kidding about the time. Nevertheless, maybe there will remain a market for smaller drives.

John

 

[Sceadwian]

Not likley, Nand flash technology has become so advanced and cheap with a bit more time and proper backup with high speed buffer memory that it will eventually supplant smaller drives, and magnetic drives will be relegated to 'low speed' high volume storage. If you look at the price per megabyte of disk space larger drivers are so much more cost effective, and flash drives are so cheap and their performance improving every day that eventually they'll start being used for primary system files, especially with modern journaling file systems which make flash drives practical from a repeat use perspective. It's already happening for some netbooks, and there are no cellphones I know of that use hard drives. Although I'm sure someone could dig one up that does. Probably a very unreliable one.

Personally I think more hybrid solutions should be developed. Silicon is cheap nowadays, a bigger cache memory can be a major boon to the performance of many applications, flash memory could be used as a sort of large cheap but fast L2 style cache, holding larger chunks of frequently accessed data, and modern processors and journaling file systems are becoming so advanced that merging them all into a seamless device from the appearance of the host device is practical. Linux 'livecds' already use hybrid static storage (like a CD) and merge it with a ramdisk and/or flashdisk to allow for dynamic changes to the file system due to a journaling file systems abilities.

Because of the advances in technology, I personally hope that the market follows up on these kinds of ideas, mind you I sure hope someone smarter than me is already working on practical systems along these lines. For far too long the storage industry has simply looked at data density OR access speed as a measure of their products, rather than how they function under real work conditions, and in real world devices, and there have honestly been almost no major advances in how these storage mediums are actually used under a mass scale since the advent of the original high speed leaps in storage.

 

[davidbball13]

Sounds like a whole bunch of legal music to me

Psh of course! And the movies are just legal "backups" of them. you know in case the house gets burnt down.....

 

[Mikebits]

Psh of course! And the movies are just legal "backups" of them. you know in case the house gets burnt down.....

I assume he meant illegal music. In the case of a movie theater I do know a few things as I worked in Digital cinema for a time. Theaters pay roughly 90% of the revenue back to the film producing company, the theater barely makes much profit on a new movie, now you know why popcorn cost so much at the movies.

As time goes on and a movie loses popularity the theater percentage goes up, eg. ten year old movie might cost theater 20%.

Pirating videos and music effects many industries and jobs. In the end, this form of media could diminish due to pirating. I like new movies and music, let's not destroy this industry.

 

[davidbball13]

I assume he meant illegal music. In the case of a movie theater I do know a few things as I worked in Digital cinema for a time. Theaters pay roughly 90% of the revenue back to the film producing company, the theater barely makes much profit on a new movie, now you know why popcorn cost so much at the movies.

As time goes on and a movie loses popularity the theater percentage goes up, eg. ten year old movie might cost theater 20%.

Pirating videos and music effects many industries and jobs. In the end, this form of media could diminish due to pirating. I like new movies and music, let's not destroy this industry.

No, no I don't mean that. I am a HUGE supporter of the music and movie industry. I went to a concert last week and spent 20 bucks for a ticket, 2 T shirts and a Bag (totaling over 70 bucks and you know what? it was totally worth it). A very very large chunk of that is going straight to the band. And to tell you the truth. Its not going to change, people will always get it for free than paying 99 cents. It is a very sad fact that bands these days have to work twice as hard to make the same amount of money. Oh did I say money? Yes. Real bands do it for the love of music and their fans rather than the fame and cash. Real musicians would rather be homeless and playing on the street than living the "high life". One of the bands at this concert (Broadway Calls) did not even have a place to sleep the night of the concert and asked the fans if they could crash at their house.

 

[davidbball13]

Pirating videos and music effects many industries and jobs. In the end, this form of media could diminish due to pirating. I like new movies and music, let's not destroy this industry.

Have you ever been to Vietnam? There is not one a single original film or CD there. EVERYTHING is pirated. America's pirating problem is nothing compared to the rest of the world.
Now I am not saying pirating is the Bee's Knee's or the Ducks Guts. Its a fact of life. There is no way around it.
Its why many many people use open source software. They make those products because they like doing it and they want people to have a free alternative that can be even better than the one they paid for.