Aydan <hes### [at] hendrik-sachsenet> wrote:
> The engineers didn't know how to either.
> They had to spend decades to perfect the processes.

  To be fair, they could build a 64TB USB drive. It's just that nobody
would buy it because it would probably cost more than your year's salary.
Hence it makes no sense to make one until the technology becomes
significantly cheaper.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On 08/03/2012 01:08 PM, Warp wrote:

>    To be fair, they could build a 64TB USB drive. It's just that nobody
> would buy it because it would probably cost more than your year's salary.
> Hence it makes no sense to make one until the technology becomes
> significantly cheaper.

Right. /That/ at least makes some sense. Nobody would buy such a 
product, so there's no point trying to make it.

If there was a 64TB HD, I'm fairly certain that somebody would want to 
buy it. The only reason it wouldn't sell is if it was too expensive. 
Obviously everything starts off expensive - there are design costs to 
recoup. But would it be prohibitively expensive?

Post a reply to this message

Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Aydan <hes### [at] hendrik-sachsenet> wrote:
> > The engineers didn't know how to either.
> > They had to spend decades to perfect the processes.
>
>   To be fair, they could build a 64TB USB drive. It's just that nobody
> would buy it because it would probably cost more than your year's salary.
> Hence it makes no sense to make one until the technology becomes
> significantly cheaper.
>
> --
>                                                           - Warp

A 64GigaByte (Note: You wrote TeraByte) flash drive 12 years ago (wikipedia
claims the first ones were sold in 2000) would not only have been extremely
expensive but extremely bulky as well. I'd say it would have been as big as a
whole computer case. As I said, storage density was low in those times. And I'd
suspect they wouldn't have had a controller capable of adressing that much
memory either.

And terabytes have only become possible since the advent of 64bit addressing I
think.

Post a reply to this message

Aydan <hes### [at] hendrik-sachsenet> wrote:
> And terabytes have only become possible since the advent of 64bit addressing I
> think.

  64-bit CPUs were first developed in the early 90's.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On 03/08/2012 08:13 AM, Invisible wrote:
> On 08/03/2012 01:08 PM, Warp wrote:
>
>> To be fair, they could build a 64TB USB drive. It's just that nobody
>> would buy it because it would probably cost more than your year's salary.
>> Hence it makes no sense to make one until the technology becomes
>> significantly cheaper.
>
> Right. /That/ at least makes some sense. Nobody would buy such a
> product, so there's no point trying to make it.
>
> If there was a 64TB HD, I'm fairly certain that somebody would want to
> buy it. The only reason it wouldn't sell is if it was too expensive.
> Obviously everything starts off expensive - there are design costs to
> recoup. But would it be prohibitively expensive?

I wouldn't be able to cite and articles on the subject, but it seems to 
me that the mechanical HD is headed the way for the dodo bird

Post a reply to this message

On 03/08/2012 08:35 AM, James Holsenback wrote:
> On 03/08/2012 08:13 AM, Invisible wrote:
>> On 08/03/2012 01:08 PM, Warp wrote:
>>
>>> To be fair, they could build a 64TB USB drive. It's just that nobody
>>> would buy it because it would probably cost more than your year's
>>> salary.
>>> Hence it makes no sense to make one until the technology becomes
>>> significantly cheaper.
>>
>> Right. /That/ at least makes some sense. Nobody would buy such a
>> product, so there's no point trying to make it.
>>
>> If there was a 64TB HD, I'm fairly certain that somebody would want to
>> buy it. The only reason it wouldn't sell is if it was too expensive.
>> Obviously everything starts off expensive - there are design costs to
>> recoup. But would it be prohibitively expensive?
>
> I wouldn't be able to cite and articles on the subject, but it seems to
> me that the mechanical HD is headed the way for the dodo bird

LOL ... finger don't fail me now ... of the dodo bird

Post a reply to this message

Am 08.03.2012 10:31, schrieb Invisible:

> So... why didn't they just make the 4GB drives to start with? Why did
> they have to start by making 64MB drives, and then starting to make
> 128MB drives, and then moving on to 256MB drives, and so forth? Why
> couldn't they just go directly to 4GB? What enables them to make those
> today but prevented them from making them back then?
>
> Why do you have to design, test, manufacture and sell a 64MB drive
> before you can attempt to make a 128MB one? How does the former help you
> do the latter? Why can't you just jump straight to 4GB? (Or perhaps even
> more than that?)
>
> I can't think of any /technical/ reason. (Besides "that's how it's
> done".) The only rational reason I can think of is that if you keep
> putting out slightly better devices year after year, people are going to
> keep upgrading their stuff, and that gives you income. If you just went
> straight out and sold the best possible device, then once everyone has
> got one, you'd have nothing new to sell to them, and you'd have no money.

Oh, Andy... *Sigh*

How about... sheer device size? You know, last time I heard, you need 
transistors for flash memory cells, and you need silicon real estate for 
transistors. I guess you /did/ hear about Moore's Law some time?

Post a reply to this message

On 08/03/2012 01:35 PM, James Holsenback wrote:

> I wouldn't be able to cite and articles on the subject, but it seems to
> me that the mechanical HD is headed the way for the dodo bird

What, forced to extinction by loss of habitat and alien predator 
species? ;-)

Post a reply to this message

On 03/08/2012 08:56 AM, Invisible wrote:
> On 08/03/2012 01:35 PM, James Holsenback wrote:
>
>> I wouldn't be able to cite and articles on the subject, but it seems to
>> me that the mechanical HD is headed the way for the dodo bird
>
> What, forced to extinction by loss of habitat and alien predator
> species? ;-)
>

It was just a metaphor ... I supposed the alien predator would be the 
solid state drive, and now that I think of it the loss of habitat would 
be the new ultra-books ... oh and the MacBook Air

Post a reply to this message

>>> I wouldn't be able to cite and articles on the subject, but it seems to
>>> me that the mechanical HD is headed the way for the dodo bird
>>
>> What, forced to extinction by loss of habitat and alien predator
>> species? ;-)
>>
>
> It was just a metaphor ... I supposed the alien predator would be the
> solid state drive, and now that I think of it the loss of habitat would
> be the new ultra-books ... oh and the MacBook Air

So... oddly apt then? ;-)

I don't know, man. SSD is still too expensive for anyone except 
performance freaks. More bafflingly, even though the performance of SSD 
should be orders of magnitude superior to HD, apparently some of the 
best HDs can actually surpass SSD. That shouldn't be possible, but 
somehow it is. I find that utterly bizarre, but those are apparently the 
numbers.

Whether SSD will /become/ cheap enough remains to be seen. It's now 
available in capacities large enough to actually be useful, so now we 
just need the prices to come down far enough.

Post a reply to this message