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Comment by kbob | Hacker News Reader

They're just another product on the Moore's Law trajectory. Treat them the same as you do computers and phones -- plan to buy a new one every 2-3 years, and plan on only having the latest and greatest for about 12 minutes after you get it.

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Wrong. HD speed improvements have been pretty flat, and has been far outpaced by HD capacity which is closer to Moore's Law. SSD offers a nice boost in speed. Don't just throw around Moore's Law as if you know something.

I think you might have misread kbob’s comment. I think he was talking about upgrading from one SSD to another newer SSD — not from HDD to SSD.

It would be stunning for SSDs to take off with exponential speed improvements. Sure, I expect them to get faster and faster, but I have no doubt that there's no Moore's Law at work in this case. I stand by my original comment.

It has nothing to do with speed, it has to do with transistor counts, which should increase disk size or lower cost.

I totally agree. Moore's Law is completely inapplicable when it comes to disk performance.

Which is a strawman of your own invention that you are being an arse about, kbob didn't mention SSD performance.

kbob was replying to a post about a "performance boost" and then claimed without qualification that HDs were "on the Moore's Law trajectory"... I didn't invent anything here.

Moore's law is about transistor counts, not speed, and is directly applicable to SSDs.

It really depends. Taking a hard black&white stance on other side is just silly.

Say you have an SSD that consists of 8x16GB chips. Internally it's implemented in something like a RAID0 array, which is why they're so fast. If the capacity doubles / size shrinks by a factor of 2 and someone decides to stick 16x16GB chips in the next gen SSD then you will see a speed increase. On the other hand if they go for 8x32GB you won't.

Moore's Law, as originally stated, is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. Flash memory is definitely on that trajectory, and SSD controllers look like they can make good use of increased transistor counts for a few generations.

My comment was directed to Matt_Cutts' complaint that he didn't know when to buy an SSD. I don't think it matters exactly when you buy one. (Though I personally am waiting to see how Intel's 25nm SSDs compare to those based on the SandForce SF-2000 controller around Jan/Feb 2011. Maybe I should practice what I preach.)

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