Hard-drive-shortage-helps-power-solid-state-surge

[Clipper]

business-news.thestreet.com/uticaod/story/computers-hard-drive-shortage-helps-power-solid-state-surge/1

On Computers: Hard-drive shortage helps to power solid-state surge
Written by: Jim Hillibish 02/13/12 - 1:00 PM EST
0215.compucol.drive.jpg

• Solid-state hard drives are revolutionizing the way we compute.

Here’s what happens when you put all your apples in one vegetable crisper.

The computer industry, bless its tattered soul, decided it would be futuristic to make the PC’s most important component, the hard drive, in one place.

Thailand won the lottery and erected a massive complex of HD plants. What they neglected to note was they were building in a flood zone.

The obvious happened. July’s record monsoon season sent the plants under water, some up to their roofs. It’s was Thailand’s most destructive flood in memory. Only drive maker Seagate escaped alive, with a factory outside Thailand.

The recovery has been slow, and HD supplies at worldwide computer manufacturers are running out. Heaviest impact is on laptop drives, which outsell the old desktop units.

The electronics industry is bracing for the shortfall. It looks like it will cost them sales of 23 million computers this year. First-quarter sales are falling 11.6 percent.

What this means for consumers is if you are planning to buy a laptop computer, get busy now. The inventory decline means at best, there will be fewer models available, and at worst, there won’t be any. Shortages tend to drive up prices.

Disaster breeds creativity

All this is adding fire to a new type of storage drive. It’s the solid state drive with no moving parts, basically a powerful, permanent-memory chip. These guys are really fast as everything’s handled at microchip speed.

There’s nothing mechanical to break. The big plus is they sip power, greatly prolonging battery life and cutting power consumption.

Ultra-expensive ultrabook laptops feature solid-state drives. The cheaper ones from Acer include a solid-state hybrid drive where flash-drive chips store data in permanent memory.

Solid state drives are expensive. The top models are only 256 gigabytes, a quarter of the industry standard 1 terabyte. The price is around $400 but falling. Now we know why the new ultrabooks run $1,000 or more.

All this is coming when the trend is away from massive storage on a computer. Ultrabooks take advantage of “cloud” storage (all data is stored on massive servers elsewhere, accessible by the Internet).

I’ve been using Amazon’s cloud for nine months and am wondering why I have three hard drives on my system. I’m nowhere near its 5-gigabyte limit for free service. It’s fast and very transparent, and I can access it anywhere I go.

When Thailand gets running this summer, they’ll find a market shrinking for traditional hard drives. If solid-state drives really thrive, they may go back to making tourist souvenirs, outside of flood zones.

Contact Jim Hillibish at [e-mail].

Hope my 4 year old desk top PC and my 2 year old laptop hold together until this shortage is over and prices level out again.

[dgriffin]

Feb 14, 2012 12:16:29 GMT -5 Clipper said:

.................................... All this is adding fire to a new type of storage drive. It’s the solid state drive with no moving parts, basically a powerful, permanent-memory chip. These guys are really fast as everything’s handled at microchip speed........................

I assume this refers to Cloud computing where we trusting souls put our data on someone's server instead of our hard drive or thumb drive. And the application software, too, if the connection speed is high enough.
But we did this before in the early 1990's with network computing applications. And as hardware prices came down and users got suspicious of networks, we once cycled next to keeping everything on our own PC's except for data we wanted available to others.

Interesting about the flood. I haven't heard anything lately about the Japanese companies recovering from last year's tsunami. I wonder how that's going.

[clarencebunsen]

As you say Dave the Cloud means putting your data on someone server. Clipper's reference is a little different. It refers to putting something like a large jump drive into the computer (non-volatile RAM for old school types). It has the advantages of being faster, lower power and more rugged than hard drives. It has the disadvantages of being more expensive & lasting for fewer read/write cycles than magnetic hard drives.

Solid state drives have been the "next big thing" at least since I first got involved in magnetic storage (1977). The next generation was always the one that would make them competitive with magnetics. Hard drive engineers have always kept pace however setting the bar higher with more storage at lower cost.

Since solid state drives are lower capacity than magnetic drives, they pretty much force you to use alternate methods of storing files. Hence, the cloud. Chromebooks are an example of this.

I keep reading about the shortage but if I go online there seem to be a lot of 500 Meg and larger drives available. Local stores don't seem to have any shortage of computers to sell. One can never say that there is a good time for a flood, but loosing manufacturing capacity at a time when global demand has tanked is probably the least bad time.

[dgriffin]

Sorry, I copied the wrong reference. I meant to cite the following:
"All this is coming when the trend is away from massive storage on a computer. Ultrabooks take advantage of “cloud” storage (all data is stored on massive servers elsewhere, accessible by the Internet)."

That's interesting about the solid state drives. How do they differ from, e.g., thumb drives, which is what I thought the thumb drives were.

[clarencebunsen]

The only real difference is in packaging. A solid state drive is internal and your OS sees it as drive C or D, a thumb drive usually shows up as an external drive.

[chris]

I've noticed when Clipper copies and pastes some stuff some of the text comes out weird. Now I see it in Dave's post but it appears his is actually typed not copy and pasted. Any ideas why this is suddenly happening?.....anyone? All the words seem to have trademark attached to them.

[Clipper]

It frustrated hell out of me for a while Chris, but I simply found it more disconcerting to go back and fix it than to let it go. I am able to read most of it. It doesn't happen all the time and that is what I find strange. Ralph's posts sometimes have the same thing going on lately.

I wonder if it something that Proboards changed that has caused it. I don't know the answer.

[JGRobinson]

Sounds like font issues. Some oddball glitch that mistranslates certain symbols.

[dgriffin]

Feb 21, 2012 12:20:46 GMT -5 chris said:

I've noticed when Clipper copies and pastes some stuff some of the text comes out weird. Now I see it in Dave's post but it appears his is actually typed not copy and pasted. Any ideas why this is suddenly happening?.....anyone? All the words seem to have trademark attached to them.

Chris, I copied a line from Clipper's post. That's The characters came with it.