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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get why storage isn’t sexier compared to CPUs. Vast amounts of cheap and fast storage is the enabler of our current computing paradigm, every bit as much as CPU tech. And it’s just as cutting edge! NAND is working right up against the limits of physics just like every semiconductor technology. There are hugely interesting problems being solved around optimizing cost and performance and capacity and scalability.

But all the buzz seems to be about RISC-V and Apple’s chips, and Intel’s woes. All the hardware superstars are CPU people. Who’s the Jim Keller of storage?

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If you're looking for the sexy end of storage, send yourself down the rabbit hole of novel/upcoming NVM technologies. There is a wealth of interesting stuff to read and discover about MRAMs, CBRAMs, PCMs FeRAMs, FeFET, Racetrack memory. For more speculative/further away stuff you can look at DNA digital storage, quantum memory, time crystal memory, millipede rams and holographic storage.

There are some decent review papers and conference talks that cover the main contenders for flash storage replacement and their general benefits/drawbacks as well as some very dense research papers about the minutiae of each if you want to go deeper.

You're absolutely right about hard disks like this being essential to our current computing capability.

But in the personal computer space, very few people need lots of storage, so they will not "feel" any difference between 2TB and 20TB of hard disk space.

Even between SSDs, while some are undoubtedly dramatically better than others, for the average person they wouldn't necessarily notice that their notebook is ever so slightly faster to boot up or load their browser.

More advanced CPUs tend to have a much bigger effect on their day to day computing as their computer will feel faster and be able to run longer on batteries.

I think if huge amounts of storage were cheap and common, what people appear to “need” would naturally evolve to suit those capabilities. Imagine if you could click a button and make a copy of every major studio movie that’s been released in the last 50 years as easily as you copy an email.

From an end-user perspective, how is this really different than clicking a button to stream a movie on Netflix?

You may find this is illegal and thus not considered by the broad population

I don’t think it’s “very few”. NAS devices seem to be so common these days. Everyone is snapping photos and videos with their phones. Latest phones can record video in 4k. Then you have video games where modern ones eat up more than 100GB per installation. A lot of people need more storage. Not to mention professional photographers, I happen to know a few and they buy at least 2 4TB disks yearly to store everything in copies.

Noone in my family has a NAS.

I have one but I work in it.

No normal person thinks about backups.

Most normal people just pay 10$ to get cloud storage.

Even I do because it is so much better than what I want to operate. My NAS has backups of those.

I think personal space storage requirements have increased but consumers have been pushed towards cloud storage. People are drawn in by the free photo backup and when the free tier runs out, it's only $2/mo to continue making it someone else's problem. Business loves the recurring revenue stream and consumers love low/no upfront costs. As long as they don't get randomly flagged for a TOS violation and get banned with no recourse, it's fine not having local copies of their photos.

Apple's chips include storage. They put super fast storage in the SoC.

Raw capacity doesn't matter to most people. I collected up all of my personal files including all photos/vidoes/documents/etc, and it came out to about 35GB. The average person has absolutely no use for a 20TB drive so it isn't very interesting. For CCTV uses, 20TB drives sound awesome.

Fast storage is all that matters to regular users and not capacity.

Pretty sure this isn't true? They have the memory in-package, but the storage is separate AFAIK.

I believe they encrypt it with keys in the secure enclave in the SoC so it is tied to that chip, but not actually a part of it.

I just looked this up to check and you are kinda right, It is a separate chip but it sits under the same heat spreader and on the same little pcb platform so I guess on some level they are separate but once they get joined they essentially form one part for most practical purposes.

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/06/m1-mac-ram-and-ssd-upgr...

>But all the buzz seems to be about RISC-V and Apple’s chips, and Intel’s woes. All the hardware superstars are CPU people. Who’s the Jim Keller of storage?

NAND and Storage technical improvement are relatively slow. And they also happens to be commodity, which means new technology improvement aren't as attractive if it doesn't bring down cost. A lot of the improvements happens in Operation and Scale.

Western Digital is a big supporter of RISC-V because they (probably) plan to replace the Marvell MIPS chips in the HDD devices with RISC-V.

But the reason you probably don't get storage superstars is because it's a healthy market. There are only a handful of cpu manufacturers/designers (amd, intel, Nvidia, apple, Marvell, ARM, Qualcomm) and because the instruction sets are not compatible it's a huge undertaking to move to a new architecture. All applications must migrate.

But with storage the application uses POSIX and you can out any hardware behind it. Or object API. Or a db. But mostly the application doesn't care except in very precise cases where performance matters a great deal. And even if one application needs object and another is ok with a posix API, it's ok because you can use both from the same machine. So the choices aren't as dramatic.

> it's a healthy market

Isn't it just Western Digital and Seagate at this point?

IBM, Hitachi, and Toshiba storage groups merged to HSGT and was then bought by Western Digital [1] followed by SanDisk [2].

Quantum was bought by Maxtor in 2000, which was subsequently bought by Seagate in 2006. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital#Acquisitions

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxtor

Toshiba was not merged in to HGST, and is still an independent manufacturer.

Nvme prices are so low now, I have already over 2tb of them in my system.

For me honestly that just solved the 'storage problem'.

But CPU! Ha Ms teams and chrome still brings down my system.

It's indeed very advanced. I've read that platters coating are one atom thick on some layers. Quite crazy.

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