Lord_Majestic - 11:42 am on Aug 25, 2007 (gmt 0)

You won't win Kaled - CPU/memory/motherboard/power usage all these factors will mean that per GB cost of hosting on solid state will be much higher than using much bigger magnetic disks - we are talking here many times over rather than 20-30%.

I use a server with 16 TB of magnetic storage in it - this could host lots of sites and the price per site will be extremely low because processors, memory, motherboard and other things are all divided by a lot of gigabytes that gives very low cost per GB. In your case you won't even be able to achieve density of solid state storage anywhere near mine - this completely disregards cost that will be 5-10 times higher.

You say that in 3 years we will see 16 GB flash drives - but right now top disks are 1 TB in size, in 3 years we will see at least 2-3 TB sized ones, and new interesting developments in magnetic recording promise at least 10 times density growth - this means transfer speed will increase greatly too. Operationally it is only the seek time that is the problem, but this can be more or less solved with good caching on server side.

There will need to be a true miracle development to happen for solid state to have a chance to take over position currently enjoyed by magnetic disks - not only low price, but size comparable with the best in class magnetic disks. Not happening in the next 10 years - it's like exotic materials that can help make faster CPUs - these materials are sure better than silicon, but their cost is so high that they are not practical.

That said I, of course, welcome development of solid state stuff as it is very useful in some niche areas where magnetic disks can be replaced for good - MP3 players for example, or USB sticks replacing floppies etc :)

[edited by: Lord_Majestic at 11:44 am (utc) on Aug. 25, 2007]