These companies need to get smacked upside the head. Hard drives would be pretty much completely obsoleted if SSDs hit the prices that they should if we had proper competition instead of the “competition” to keep prices up that this memory cartel loves to keep up. My only hope is for another player to come in and dump cheap product onto the market like Japan did in the 80s.
Hdd wont be obsolete for awhile. They’re the best media to store large libraries cost effectively. Until there are 10+TB SSDS with reasonable prices, many people with home storage systems won’t upgrade. Not shelling out $10k for SSDS, sorry.
Lower end 4TB SSDs were around $130 a while back (summer or fall of last year). I bought an 8TB hard drive for about $100 around that time since I just wanted archival storage. Since then, prices for both SSDs and HDDs have gone up. Still, I think for most people 4TB should be more than enough and I have a feeling that prices could’ve gone even lower back then but they want to keep prices high and they also want to keep segmentation between HDDs and SSDs instead of erasing most of the market for HDDs.
Honestly I was getting scared we’d start seeing a really bad market crash with companies consolidating and going bankrupt left and right with how hard SSD prices crashed. Since that didn’t happen there’s at least still (an illusion of) competition
Maybe it’s a cartel but I don’t have my hopes up. Storage technology is only getting more complicated and the number of players is only decreasing.
In my view (and maybe I’m wrong) there’s just not that much money to be made in it, contrary to what consumers think. Why fight each other over pennies when you can both earn dollars? Maybe if China figures things out, but you can be my ass I’m not gonna trust a CCP backed storage company lol
A 3D printing revolution is what we need. Something that can print a very basic storage device. It doesn’t have to be good, just needs to be free shitty alternative to these price gougers.
Oh I know what they’re limited to now. But imagine a 3D printer that is capable of writing its own PCBs. Hell we have people with their own basic lithographers, it can’t be that far off, though probably a decade or two, granted.
Unfortunately it’s not possible to 3D print memory and the memory densities required makes it impossible for anyone other than those on expensive cutting edge hardware to achieve cheaply.
I can 3D print all the parts of an Abacus, giving me tens of bits of memory and a calculating device!
But yeah, on the serious side, nobody is going to be 3D printing any time soon, if ever, the kind of stuff small enough (and hence with sufficient memory densities for modern applications) to require advanced lythographic techniques and clean rooms to make, even if somebody went to the trouble of figuring out printeable materials for each of the kinds of layer (undoped semiconductor, various variants of doped semiconductors, conductive layer, isolating layer and others) currently present in ICs.
You can print “kiddy electronics” (really big transitors, resistors, capcitors and so on) on flexible substrates, but that’s way too big for any halfway decent memory densities (the Abacus joke is only half joking).
The magnetic read write head is going to be difficult to manufacture. The gearing will need to be 100% on point. You will either need a PCB custom made for your project or you will need to program an Arduino or pi to perform the tape backup. Your OS will need software to manage the data transfer.
You can store 30tb on tape for well under $100. It’s the magnetic tape itself that costs.
You could buy a used tape drive and cassette for less than the cost of a HDD of the same capacity.
Tape storage is slow and finicky. Retrieving is even slower due to seek time.
An admirably optimistic goal! What you’re talking about here is a post-scarcity society like Star Trek, though. And even with machines to turn energy and goo into anything, they couldn’t replicate complex machinery like a tricorder - only the individual parts, sometimes.
Good enough for me! I’m not looking for a perfect solution, I can work with incomplete products with weak parts, as long as those parts are readily replaceable
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random-access computer memory for20 years between about 1955and1975. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core. Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magnetic material (usually a semi-hard ferrite) as transformer cores, whereeach wire threaded through the core serves as a transformer winding. Two or more wires pass through each core. Magnetic hysteresis allows eachof the cores to"remember", or store a state. Each core stores one bit of information. A core can be magnetized in either the clockwise or counter-clockwise direction. The value of the bit stored in a core is zero or one according to the direction of that core's magnetization. Electric current pulses in some of the wires through a core allow the direction of the magnetization in that core to be set in either direction, thus storing a one or a zero. Another wire through each core, the sense wire, is used to detect whether the core changed state. The process of reading the core causes the core to be reset to a zero, thus erasing it. This is called destructive readout. When not being read or written, the cores maintain the last value they had, even if the power is turned off. Therefore, they are a type of non-volatile memory. Using smaller cores and wires, the memory density of core slowly increased, and by the late 1960s a density of about 32 kilobits per cubic foot (about 0.9 kilobits per litre) was typical. However, reaching this density required extremely careful manufacture, which was almost always carried out by hand in spite of repeated major efforts to automate the process. The cost declined over this period from about $1 per bit to about 1 cent per bit. The introduction of the first semiconductor memory chips in the late 1960s, which initially created static random-access memory (SRAM), began to erode the market for core memory. The first successful dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the Intel 1103, followed in 1970. Its availability in quantity at 1 cent per bit marked the beginning of the end for core memory. Improvements in semiconductor manufacturing led to rapid increases in storage capacity and decreases in price per kilobyte, while the costs and specs of core memory changed little. Core memory was driven from the market gradually between 1973 and 1978. Depending on how it was wired, core memory could be exceptionally reliable. Read-only core rope memory, for example, was used on the mission-critical Apollo Guidance Computer essential to NASA's successful Moon landings. Although core memory is obsolete, computer memory is still sometimes called "core" even though it is made of semiconductors, particularly by people who had worked with machines having actual core memory. The files that result from saving the entire contents of memory to disk for inspection, which is nowadays commonly performed automatically when a major error occurs in a computer program, are still called "core dumps".
You wanna store a few hundred bytes? Print some mechanical knobs and call it a day. You wanna make some real storage devices?
Hire top PhD:
Physicists for quantum effects used (and parasitics mitigated)
Chemical engineers for CVD and other very hard and expensive clean room processes.
Electrical engineers to design analog circuitry for charge pumps and multi-level cell readout technology, as well as digital VLSI/HDL design for digital logic including storage controllers
Mechanical engineers for packaging design and automation for your expensive and dangerous production line
Civil engineers for your fab plant, which is so large that significant infrastructure needs to be built to support your fab (e.g. TSMC in Taiwan funded/built a municipal scale desalination plant of which a significant fraction is used for semiconductor processes)
Until we have replicators as the other commentor pointed out, I’m afraid we aren’t even close yet. Fingers crossed we hit type II civ sometime but I won’t be holding my breath for it.
These companies need to get smacked upside the head. Hard drives would be pretty much completely obsoleted if SSDs hit the prices that they should if we had proper competition instead of the “competition” to keep prices up that this memory cartel loves to keep up. My only hope is for another player to come in and dump cheap product onto the market like Japan did in the 80s.
Hdd wont be obsolete for awhile. They’re the best media to store large libraries cost effectively. Until there are 10+TB SSDS with reasonable prices, many people with home storage systems won’t upgrade. Not shelling out $10k for SSDS, sorry.
That’s what they said though…
yes.
Lower end 4TB SSDs were around $130 a while back (summer or fall of last year). I bought an 8TB hard drive for about $100 around that time since I just wanted archival storage. Since then, prices for both SSDs and HDDs have gone up. Still, I think for most people 4TB should be more than enough and I have a feeling that prices could’ve gone even lower back then but they want to keep prices high and they also want to keep segmentation between HDDs and SSDs instead of erasing most of the market for HDDs.
Yeah, I had 4tbs for only about a year. upgraded this summer to 4 8TB.
While I love the thought, I’m not going to hold my breath on replacing my 880 TB of spinning platters with SSDs.
Honestly I was getting scared we’d start seeing a really bad market crash with companies consolidating and going bankrupt left and right with how hard SSD prices crashed. Since that didn’t happen there’s at least still (an illusion of) competition
Maybe it’s a cartel but I don’t have my hopes up. Storage technology is only getting more complicated and the number of players is only decreasing.
In my view (and maybe I’m wrong) there’s just not that much money to be made in it, contrary to what consumers think. Why fight each other over pennies when you can both earn dollars? Maybe if China figures things out, but you can be my ass I’m not gonna trust a CCP backed storage company lol
A 3D printing revolution is what we need. Something that can print a very basic storage device. It doesn’t have to be good, just needs to be free shitty alternative to these price gougers.
I’d suggest you do some research on 3d printing, you seem sorely misinformed about it’s capabilities
Oh I know what they’re limited to now. But imagine a 3D printer that is capable of writing its own PCBs. Hell we have people with their own basic lithographers, it can’t be that far off, though probably a decade or two, granted.
Unfortunately it’s not possible to 3D print memory and the memory densities required makes it impossible for anyone other than those on expensive cutting edge hardware to achieve cheaply.
Lies!
I can 3D print all the parts of an Abacus, giving me tens of bits of memory and a calculating device!
But yeah, on the serious side, nobody is going to be 3D printing any time soon, if ever, the kind of stuff small enough (and hence with sufficient memory densities for modern applications) to require advanced lythographic techniques and clean rooms to make, even if somebody went to the trouble of figuring out printeable materials for each of the kinds of layer (undoped semiconductor, various variants of doped semiconductors, conductive layer, isolating layer and others) currently present in ICs.
You can print “kiddy electronics” (really big transitors, resistors, capcitors and so on) on flexible substrates, but that’s way too big for any halfway decent memory densities (the Abacus joke is only half joking).
Actually, DIY lithography is a thing and in the uprise.
Is it not possible to print a plastic tape storage device?
The magnetic read write head is going to be difficult to manufacture. The gearing will need to be 100% on point. You will either need a PCB custom made for your project or you will need to program an Arduino or pi to perform the tape backup. Your OS will need software to manage the data transfer.
You can store 30tb on tape for well under $100. It’s the magnetic tape itself that costs.
You could buy a used tape drive and cassette for less than the cost of a HDD of the same capacity.
Tape storage is slow and finicky. Retrieving is even slower due to seek time.
An admirably optimistic goal! What you’re talking about here is a post-scarcity society like Star Trek, though. And even with machines to turn energy and goo into anything, they couldn’t replicate complex machinery like a tricorder - only the individual parts, sometimes.
Good enough for me! I’m not looking for a perfect solution, I can work with incomplete products with weak parts, as long as those parts are readily replaceable
Fuck it, let’s all just start winding our own magnetic core memory arrays.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random-access computer memory for 20 years between about 1955 and 1975. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core. Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magnetic material (usually a semi-hard ferrite) as transformer cores, where each wire threaded through the core serves as a transformer winding. Two or more wires pass through each core. Magnetic hysteresis allows each of the cores to "remember", or store a state. Each core stores one bit of information. A core can be magnetized in either the clockwise or counter-clockwise direction. The value of the bit stored in a core is zero or one according to the direction of that core's magnetization. Electric current pulses in some of the wires through a core allow the direction of the magnetization in that core to be set in either direction, thus storing a one or a zero. Another wire through each core, the sense wire, is used to detect whether the core changed state. The process of reading the core causes the core to be reset to a zero, thus erasing it. This is called destructive readout. When not being read or written, the cores maintain the last value they had, even if the power is turned off. Therefore, they are a type of non-volatile memory. Using smaller cores and wires, the memory density of core slowly increased, and by the late 1960s a density of about 32 kilobits per cubic foot (about 0.9 kilobits per litre) was typical. However, reaching this density required extremely careful manufacture, which was almost always carried out by hand in spite of repeated major efforts to automate the process. The cost declined over this period from about $1 per bit to about 1 cent per bit. The introduction of the first semiconductor memory chips in the late 1960s, which initially created static random-access memory (SRAM), began to erode the market for core memory. The first successful dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the Intel 1103, followed in 1970. Its availability in quantity at 1 cent per bit marked the beginning of the end for core memory. Improvements in semiconductor manufacturing led to rapid increases in storage capacity and decreases in price per kilobyte, while the costs and specs of core memory changed little. Core memory was driven from the market gradually between 1973 and 1978. Depending on how it was wired, core memory could be exceptionally reliable. Read-only core rope memory, for example, was used on the mission-critical Apollo Guidance Computer essential to NASA's successful Moon landings. Although core memory is obsolete, computer memory is still sometimes called "core" even though it is made of semiconductors, particularly by people who had worked with machines having actual core memory. The files that result from saving the entire contents of memory to disk for inspection, which is nowadays commonly performed automatically when a major error occurs in a computer program, are still called "core dumps".article | about
You wanna store a few hundred bytes? Print some mechanical knobs and call it a day. You wanna make some real storage devices?
Hire top PhD:
Physicists for quantum effects used (and parasitics mitigated)
Chemical engineers for CVD and other very hard and expensive clean room processes.
Electrical engineers to design analog circuitry for charge pumps and multi-level cell readout technology, as well as digital VLSI/HDL design for digital logic including storage controllers
Mechanical engineers for packaging design and automation for your expensive and dangerous production line
Civil engineers for your fab plant, which is so large that significant infrastructure needs to be built to support your fab (e.g. TSMC in Taiwan funded/built a municipal scale desalination plant of which a significant fraction is used for semiconductor processes)
Until we have replicators as the other commentor pointed out, I’m afraid we aren’t even close yet. Fingers crossed we hit type II civ sometime but I won’t be holding my breath for it.
deleted by creator
I think that would just be a normal printer. Printing pages of data lol Edit: use the scanner with OCR to get the data back into the computer
Step one: invent replicators