Episode 17: Rock Solid (01:02:20)
Fresh off of the President’s State of the Union speech, Will and I are encouraged that STEM degrees are a priority for the nation. We are trying to do our bit to encourage undergraduates to go into STEM related degrees, especially our major field — Computer Science! To that end, today we are discussing a technology that not a lot of people, Ben included, really know about in the hopes that the technology will interest you and excite you!
Today’s discussion centers around Solid State Drives — flash based hard disks that are a significant improvement over conventional spinning disk hard disks that are more common. Although conventional disks are becoming cheaper and higher capacity, SSDs are also riding the economy of scale and Moore’s law distribution and will be an important technology of the future.
Our discussion of Solid State Drives spun off a bit at the end when we started discussing whether or not local storage was important or not. Will and Ben finally disagreed! Ben thinks that the cloud will replace massive local storage, whereas Will thinks that the Cloud isn’t ready and that mobile applications would benefit from Solid State Storage.
This led to an even more interesting discussion about what Broadband in America means and how it should be distributed. But as always, that is another show’s topic.
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4 comments
Jacquelyn says:
January 30, 2011 at 9:20 pm (UTC -4)
I liked the disclaimers…but I still don’t know where SSDs were invented.
Paul Loree says:
February 8, 2011 at 8:15 pm (UTC -4)
Interesting show (wish I could afford SSDs for my laptops and desktop) I wanted to make a correction and an addition.
SSDs will run out of writes. However, although there is not a built in notification by the drive (as far as I know), although notification could easily be implemented by the drive &&/|| OS in my opinion, when this occurs the drive will remain read-only as long as the failure is not electrical or physical damage to the drive. Thus, when the drive stops writing you can easily put in a new drive and copy the contents bit by bit from the read-only drive without loss of data needing to reloading the operating system and all software.
And to clarify to listeners (sorry for directing this at you personally Ben)
Ben frequently mentioned drive sizes as gigabit in this episode. This is a significant difference than how drives are rated by size.
1 gigabit is 8.79609302 × 10^12 bits not bytes.
Hard drives are rated by bytes. i.e. 1 terabyte drive = 1024 gigabytes.
1 byte = 8 bits
Thus a 1024 gigabit (Gb) drive (or 1 Terabit) is actually much much smaller than Ben I think meant to say. Due to the conversion from bits to bytes a 1024 gigabit (Gb) = 0.125 gigabytes (GB) = 128 megabytes (MB) of storage space.
Hopefully, this clears up any confusion from the show as Ben was stating gigabits and Will was using gigabytes.
Will says:
February 9, 2011 at 6:08 am (UTC -4)
Now THAT’S feedback!
Ben says:
February 23, 2011 at 1:51 pm (UTC -4)
I get a lot of guff for this at work too… I mean ‘bytes’, and in my head, it looks like ‘bytes’ not ‘bits’ but then the whole y/i thing makes it sound like ‘bits’. Its rare for me to encounter a situation where I have to talk about gigabits, but I’ll try to speak more clearly now that I know I’m under the gun!