This is a disruptive innovation
By glazou on Tuesday 25 April 2006, 10:59 - Computing - Permalink
If you've read Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, you know that the hard disk industry is a perfect example of a long sequence of disruptive innovations. Today appeared on one of my favourite online stores the last element in that chain of disruptive innovations : the flash-based IDE drive...
It's slow. It's expensive. It has a very limited capacity. But it's totally silent. It does not suck the battery. It will succeed. It's not a question of "if", it's only a question of "when".
Comments
Problem is... flash only supports a finite (and quite small) amount of writes.
You're right, 'when' - mais la, c'est encore trop tot...
Glandium: because a regular hard-disk lives forever ? I can't count how many HD I trashed after a year of activity.
A flash drive used as a regular hard drive (here, think OS & data) will die much quicker than a regular hard drive.
PS: I never trashed a hard drive. I just try not to buy crap. My only hard drive crash was due to an overheated IDE controller, and the disk is still alive, and I am still using it. It's at least 4 years old.
Glandium: modern Flash memory supports more than 100k writes, up to 300k. If you add to that a memory controller that does "wear leveling" (i.e. spreading the writes accross the whole range, to avoir hammering the same location), you can have a quite robust Flash hard drive. Some filesystems also try to spread the writes across the memory. Of course, you probably don't want to run a database on a Flash drive.