SSD Question

[kevin11951]

wouldn't solid state drives basically eliminate the need for memory(ram)?

memory is just a place to dumb hdd data on for faster access during use, so ssd is just 2 in 1 right?

no more memory in the future!

[tamoneya]

RAM is still faster than SSD and it is also located a lot closer to the CPU. This results in lower latencies which is also very important to consider.

[D-EJ915]

wouldn't solid state drives basically eliminate the need for memory(ram)?

memory is just a place to dumb hdd data on for faster access during use, so ssd is just 2 in 1 right?

no more memory in the future!
not really, RAM is "internal" storage whereas drives are "external" storage so they're 2 totally different things

[LaRoza]

wouldn't solid state drives basically eliminate the need for memory(ram)?

memory is just a place to dumb hdd data on for faster access during use, so ssd is just 2 in 1 right?

no more memory in the future!

No. It is just another form of storage, it uses the same interface as a hard drive if I recall correctly.

The RAM itself may get hardware changes, perhaps using new technologies, but it will probably remain entirely distinct from storage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_Access_Memory#Recent_developments

[yatt]

wouldn't solid state drives basically eliminate the need for memory(ram)?

memory is just a place to dumb hdd data on for faster access during use, so ssd is just 2 in 1 right?

no more memory in the future!It's not just a place to copy stuff from the hard drive to, it is also used by the CPU to store data values relating to the processes it is running. So you would need a place off the file system that can be used to store arbitrary values by the CPU. So even if computers didn't have separate RAM because HDD speeds reached/exceeded RAM speeds, you would still need to seperate the HDD into a dedicated memory section and a file storage section.

[smoker]

it may be possible, that if read/write speeds come up to a certain level, that most ram could be redundant - eg, the swap partition is basically 'extra' ram, though slower.

i think there will always be a need for some uber fast temp storage though, maybe even integrated in the cpu. who knows, one day, maybe '640k will be enough!'
:-)