Once your game loads, your hard drive isn't going to do shit. Money for performance is better spent on fast ram, a fast processor, and fast video card. Fast hard drive is nothing but convenience, helping your game load fast.
Not really. Solid state drives will be good for a long time. Once storage is fast enough that it isn't a bottleneck, what use is it to have storage that is faster yet? Kind of nice, perhaps, but not a big deal. It's kind of like how being able to get 2133 MHz DDR3 memory today doesn't mean that 1333 MHz DDR3 is obsolete or even insensible to buy for a new computer.
Both Samsung and Intel are working on something that is so fast it can be used both as a HD and as ram. Samsung already have a small thing for cellphones working.
Imagine that you never have to load anything. No need for zooning in MMOs then. It will happen in a few years and it will take over after SSDs. Maybe 5 years. It will increase the speed a lot for computers and make it possible for devs to make huge games with amazing graphics. And Windows could actually run fast...
Of course the whole thing in Japan might have slowed things down a bit for Samsung.
Of course the whole thing in Japan might have slowed things down a bit for Samsung.
Which would be strange when you consider that Samsung is a Korean company, not Japanese.
I don't see phase change memory or whatever being used in consumer products in a few years. NAND flash was invented in 1980, but the first good SSDs based on it didn't arrive until 2008. There's a big difference between being able to make a new product technically work, and being able to make it cheap enough that you can get 100 GB at a reasonable price.
Furthermore, games will be built around the hard drive and system memory paradigm for quite some time to come. There's also quite a bit of processor and Internet work for zoning, so it's not just storage, and even infinitely fast storage wouldn't elminate the concept of zoning.
I can see SSDs doing some radical things in the near future, but a lot of it does depend on the price and availability. Consumers, even us bleeding edge enthusiasts, just can't afford to spend huge amounts on individual components.
Realistically, I could see SSDs shifting to be PCI-bus rather than SATA bus (in fact, many of these are available now, but the price is pretty steep). We could also see something like a PCI card with battery storage that accepts memory DIMMs that could be used as a hard drive (I've seen experimental models of these, and many high end raid cards do this for cache) - DIMM prices are still a bit steep for this to be viable, but it's conceivable that in a few years time we could see 50G of system RAM come down in price and up in density to be competitive.
But with the just introduced SATA 3 standard (it's barely a year old), and only a handful of drives available today actually capable of using them to any positive effect, I don't think we'll see the current crop of SSDs become obsolete in their useful lifetime.
That, and mobile devices (which are becoming more and more prevalent) have already shifted to a "diskless' model, where the system RAM and storage space are the same memory area. With Windows 8 announced to support ARM processors (which are the bulk of what mobile devices run), we could see a shift in PC models and technologies sooner than later.
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Once your game loads, your hard drive isn't going to do shit. Money for performance is better spent on fast ram, a fast processor, and fast video card. Fast hard drive is nothing but convenience, helping your game load fast.
Both Samsung and Intel are working on something that is so fast it can be used both as a HD and as ram. Samsung already have a small thing for cellphones working.
Imagine that you never have to load anything. No need for zooning in MMOs then. It will happen in a few years and it will take over after SSDs. Maybe 5 years. It will increase the speed a lot for computers and make it possible for devs to make huge games with amazing graphics. And Windows could actually run fast...
Of course the whole thing in Japan might have slowed things down a bit for Samsung.
Which would be strange when you consider that Samsung is a Korean company, not Japanese.
I don't see phase change memory or whatever being used in consumer products in a few years. NAND flash was invented in 1980, but the first good SSDs based on it didn't arrive until 2008. There's a big difference between being able to make a new product technically work, and being able to make it cheap enough that you can get 100 GB at a reasonable price.
Furthermore, games will be built around the hard drive and system memory paradigm for quite some time to come. There's also quite a bit of processor and Internet work for zoning, so it's not just storage, and even infinitely fast storage wouldn't elminate the concept of zoning.
I can see SSDs doing some radical things in the near future, but a lot of it does depend on the price and availability. Consumers, even us bleeding edge enthusiasts, just can't afford to spend huge amounts on individual components.
Realistically, I could see SSDs shifting to be PCI-bus rather than SATA bus (in fact, many of these are available now, but the price is pretty steep). We could also see something like a PCI card with battery storage that accepts memory DIMMs that could be used as a hard drive (I've seen experimental models of these, and many high end raid cards do this for cache) - DIMM prices are still a bit steep for this to be viable, but it's conceivable that in a few years time we could see 50G of system RAM come down in price and up in density to be competitive.
But with the just introduced SATA 3 standard (it's barely a year old), and only a handful of drives available today actually capable of using them to any positive effect, I don't think we'll see the current crop of SSDs become obsolete in their useful lifetime.
That, and mobile devices (which are becoming more and more prevalent) have already shifted to a "diskless' model, where the system RAM and storage space are the same memory area. With Windows 8 announced to support ARM processors (which are the bulk of what mobile devices run), we could see a shift in PC models and technologies sooner than later.