DRAM-based storage has taken off as an alternative to hard drives and there’s plenty to find appealing about them. They run cooler and quieter and use less power. But as Enterprise Storage Forum points out, solid-state drives are still significantly lacking in capacity and even with all the memory being made, that problem won’t change any time soon.
It wasn’t that long ago that solid state drives (SSDs) were DRAM-based and cost a fortune. Then the proliferation of mobile devices requiring shock and vibration profiles that exceeded hard drives created a huge market for flash. Prices dropped, and with more money available for R&D, the density increased dramatically.
It’s been a period of tremendous evolution for flash, but I believe dark clouds are forming on the horizon. Let’s start with a little history to help me make my point. I first heard more than 20 years ago that tape was dead, but it took data deduplication to make disk cheap enough to hurt tape sales. So it wasn’t disk drives alone that were able to impact tape sales; it was disk drives combined with new technology.