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It's interesting how this has played out exactly the way Clayton M Christensen predicted in his Innovator's Dilemma book years ago. Back then, flash was barely
by PakG1 14y ago
It's interesting how this has played out exactly the way Clayton M Christensen predicted in his Innovator's Dilemma book years ago. Back then, flash was barely on the radar of most consumers, and yet, Christensen identified flash as a primary candidate to make traditional harddrives obsolete the same way desktop harddrives had made mainframe harddrives and minicomputer harddrives obsolete. Chalk one up for the guy, his Innovator's Dilemma model is really well thought out.
- ajross 14y agoIs this really so surprising? I think anyone who knows how semiconductor manufacturing works would have looked at the scaling graphs of magnetic storage vs. transistor density and seen that they cross. We've all been using flash-based embedded systems for well over a decade -- it started with cameras, then fixed-function network gadgets, then phones, then... So now it's hitting PCs. If anything, magnetic storage has actually scaled faster than expected (frankly it's so cheap in bulk that it's effectively free relative to the power required to run it). To me, the only surprise was that consumer applications never found a need for more than about a quarter TB of storage, so that's where the crossover happens on PCs. We haven't actually hit the cost-per-byte point yet.
- edge17 14y agojust a datapoint about 'obsolete,' tape is still used for backups and remains attractive in terms of cost and storage density