liz just pointed me the way to an article about terabyte-size memory cards on Slashdot and The Register. Transfer speeds of 120 Mbps and more.

Just recently I had plans to upgrade my 512Mb FlashCard to a card that has 1 Gb or more. Now I have doubts about upgrading so "soon". The same with buying a new hard disk... we just bought a LaCie 400 Gb BigDisk and we were quite happy with it. But it still is a bulky thing.

A lot has been written about what it means to have such memory cards. I am convinced it means the end of the hard disk era. And that means new possibilities and problems for programmers. The memory cards will be much faster than hard disks, moving the weak point in a system with regards to speed (transfer speed, reaction speed) from the storage device to other parts of a system. But memory cards are removable, so programs have to check more often wether the storage device is still there, or wether it is replaced by another device.

Many programs that I have been involved with, had to handle issues as free disk space (traffic logs, email system, database size etc). The problem of free disk space probably will never cease to exist, but with disk space of terabytes, such problems will be less important. I predict that new generations of programmers just never learn to check for available disk space. They will probably just never experience the "disk full" error.

Terabyte size memory cards... wow, the possibilities. Music, video, books, pictures, databases, literature. Even more than what I already have on my silly little 60Gb hard disk.

In reply to [OT] End of hard disks era, new ways of development by woolfy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.