It's interesting, now that I've been catching up on just how fast the new M.2 ssd specification allows ssd's to be, at least in the transfer speeds, though I know they've already made big strides in the actual read, and write speeds (where the lookup, and fetch, circuitry is involved) as well. Not only are you getting the fundamental benefit of "not mechanical" to start with, you're getting the data throughput you've come to expect from the video card world. It's hard not to see why this may well spell the final doom of the spinning platter.
Someone like me, naturally, gets a very visceral kick out of seeing someone hold out a, say 1 terabyte, M.2 PCI-E card. I can say that because at my very first software job, working for Boeing (doing COBOL coding for their Online, Wire Bundling, design system) for a year, I had the chance to take a tour of their IBM mainframe setup, at was 1980's version of the Kent Space Center. The Boeing people called it the Troica as it was actually three big IBM systems working together. And you better believe that those bad boys took up a lot of space. Even more impressive, however, in the consumption of space, was the nearly aircraft hangar sized room that they used to house what had to be a mother load of the old, nearly washing machine sized, disk drives; hundreds of them as I recall. And I have to think, even with those numbers, and all of the motorized racket to go with it, they couldn't have had more than a few tens of gigabytes in the entire facility.
And now even petabytes are becoming no big deal.
It is clear. It is absolutely clear to me now. I am not, in fact, getting better. I am, in fact, getting older.
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