--- In Firebird-Architect@yahoogroups.com, Geoff Worboys <geoff@...>
wrote:

>
> > The idea that solid state storage will overtake disk storage
> > with five years has been around since the late 80's. It may
> > be so this time, but personally, I am not holding my breath.
>
> I got to agree with this one. I've been waiting for a useful
> SSD (that I could actually afford) for longer than I care to
> remember. If anything they seemed closer several years ago
> than they do now (some of the larger companies were offering
> products that they appear to have dumped since).

Hi Paul / Geoff,

You are both right that this argument has been going on forever and a
day. Someone said that data will always expand to fill the available
space.

>
> Mind you, it may happen quickly once it starts. But like Paul
> I am not holding my breath as there is no sign of anything that
> can really compete with the capacities of HDDs. When it does
> arrive it is likely to arrive with two or more competing
> standards that will take years to resolve into commercial
> product. (Or am I being overly cynical?)

You are right that it can not compete with hard disks for capacity.
But is that important for the average office PC? Most PCs in our
office are 100GB+ not because we have that much data, but because they
don't sell 20GB drives for any less.

Windows XP Embedded, Firebird and our largest production database can
fit on about US$20 worth of flash memory at todays prices. There is
already one manufacturer putting up a 32GB laptop with no hard drive
(but with a huge price premium).

> At this point in time, if you were going to go for isolation
> from HDD limitations, you would be better following the path
> of some other products that use more memory - its cheap, 64bit
> OS make more of it available to you, and it is here now!

RAM is faster than SSD. RAM is volatile and not really suitable for
storing data long term. Sure solutions like iRAM are useful, but once
the backup battery is gone, so is your data.

Adam