SSDs have a 'bleak' future, researchers say

lehnerus2000 said:

Night Hawk said:

The one advantage of the SSD to add here however would be the lack of need for opening up the casing in order to access data from one that suddenly went out of commission. There are no drive platters to hook up under special conditions in order to rescue data.

Sure SSDs have no platters.

How do you access the memory chips if the controller has c****** itself?
Surely it will have to be opened up to allow access to (or removal of) the old controller.

Night Hawk said:

Now for the actual disadvantages of data retrieval from SSDs they actually have more vulnerabilities then people are even aware of. One page seen at a data recovery service outlines just what those are. Solid State Drive Recovery | SSD Data Recovery

I do agree with this though. :)

I read an article about "data deduplication" on SSDs, which indicated that your data is actually more vulnerable!
Obviously that doesn't just apply to SSDs though.

No but SSDs have their closest relative or little buddy connecting through the USB bus namely flash drives or memory cards as another technology based on basically the same principles in general but different type of connection.

The NAND chips inside a flash drive of course are much smaller in size naturally but work on the same hardware platform in that sense. What happens to data you might place on a flash drive if that foobars on you?

The only safe medium that would uneffected by electromagnetism would be optical or tape. Who wants an 80s tape drive? Not many! (some pc museum for display maybe!)

Regardless of whichever technology appears or one already present(ATA or SSD) there will always be some type of drawback along with the Pros and Cons dept. as a new technology is further developed.

One thing is for certain regarding the opening up of the casing for any hard drive is there are no "user friendly fixable" components on the inside! Mechanical requires perfect isolation from everything as far as one speck of dust or one drop of moisture. SSDs are surface mounted ICs or often referred to as NAND chips.

Night Hawk said:

Regardless of whichever technology appears or one already present(ATA or SSD) there will always be some type of drawback along with the Pros and Cons dept. as a new technology is further developed.

Indeed.

Night Hawk said:

One thing is for certain regarding the opening up of the casing for any hard drive is there are no "user friendly fixable" components on the inside! Mechanical requires perfect isolation from everything as far as one speck of dust or one drop of moisture. SSDs are surface mounted ICs or often referred to as NAND chips.

OK I see what you were alluding to now.
The reference to opening up the case confused me.

Recovering data from HDD platters requires special environmental conditions/considerations (as you say).
Obviously that means that it "is going to cost you". :)

That's why there are professional data recovery services where you bring in any drive(s) along with blank dvds or another drive or two to receive any data recovered "For A Price"! Businesses are the usual customers as you can imagine being part of the "cosr effective" alternative.

The environment does have to sterile and totally particle free when opening up any mechanicaldrive since all parts are precision ground within thousandths of an inch where one dust particle, piece of debris, or moisture would trash a drive! The moving parts are snug inside a drive to begin with. Oxidation is the worst enemy as well as any dirt!

With the SSD on the other hand you would most likely 'have to" send the drive into the manufacturer if not finding one of the few recovery services adequately equipped to recover data for you again for a service charge.

And we all know what can happen to any optical media if that option is used for data storage and a disk gets scratched or bent where it splits, finger marked, etc..

UPDATE: I just caught another "bleak future" report with the title Are SSDs doomed? Researchers say "yes" -- by 2024

That goes into discussion on the throwing a monkey wrench into the works regarding the shrinking of chips used for the flash based storage in order to increase capacity at the cost of performance.

The really dumb thing about the articles are the "SSDs are doomed" title when "SSD" merely stands for "Solid State Drive". The articles should really say "NAND Flash Based SSDs are doomed" (And even then that's doubtful) THe original papers are probably more specific and call out a need to develop better NVRAM chip tech, but the stupid tech rag wags... Ugh.

Don't people ever seem to get tired of being gloom and doom predictors and always geting it wrong?

10 years fro now we will have EXSANDMX chips (or something) :P

The doom and gloom comes from hard drive manufacturers loosing market share. Computer technology will move forward not backwards; it always has. A lot of the market will not be moving or staying in the old hard drive era. It took a while to get to 64 bit but we made it and I predict 128 as soon as hardware and programing can catch up. I would be very surprised if that is not being worked on by Intel and IBM. They will make SSD's bigger and better and the price will get better for the consumer. Darn folks look what you can do with a phone today. I think cell phones have caught on. My grand father started off life in the horse and buggy days and lived to see a man landing on the moon. He never though cars and airplanes would really catch on until he bought his first car and put his mules to pasture. He would of liked the hearse pulled by a matched set of mules instead he got a stretch black Caddy hearse. Progress moves forward not backwards.

A voice for the other side.

SanDisk daddy sees bright future for flash ? The Register

Jim

You're going to find blog pages filled with rederick from both sides of the coin. I just ran into another SSD article seen on the other thread that pointed back to this one.

NAND chips being replaced by some other chip design? Inevitable! would be the answer for that one! When one chip design is no longer found viable and limted a new one will be worked on. That's part of competition for developers seen there.

As for marketing the other drive manufacturers who are not expanding into the SSD area will eventually face the ATA limitations. The old market formula of "expand or die" could well be what some may face as market shares go to some other technology.

The one thing I had waiting to see is when the better brands of memory manufacturers would develop and start marketing SSDs and finally saw a review on a new Kingston model. OCZ, Crucial, Corsair, and others may follow trend if not already seeing their own.

What I don't understand is how they wear out by writes and rewrites I mean nothing actually moves except the charge on a few million caps?

I am beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea to move over, and if upping the CPU and RAM speed might have done just as well

There's no comparison. I'd drop my overclock to stock and give up half my RAM before I'd trade in my SSD.

As for longevity, when was the last time you bought any hard drive with the expectation of still using it ten years later?