Thanks for your replies everyone.
Yes I agree at the moment the size of drives are only big enough for parts of the VSL library, and they are not cheap .... but they are not exhorbitant either. I think if we apply Moore's law, we could have 256 Gb disks in two more years, for the same price a 64Gb disk costs now.
2 x 256Gb might just be big enough for most of my VSL library, though 3 x 256Gbwould be great.
The limited write cycles of these drives is not a problem, since we are talking READing samples, not writing / recording to the drives. And perhaps two years down the line the MTBF will have improved. I could see the MTDF a READ only SSD well exceeding a conventional hard drive.
Polar, I have read that power consumption is much less, but you sound pretty informed on this ......
Christian, can you convert the improvements in bandwidth and seek time into "instrument efficiencies" ?
e.g.
- if the preload buffer could be reduced by 8, then eight times more samples could be loaded into a given size of memory, right?
(or to put it another, you wouldn't need 8 times as much memory - a 2 Gig allocation for samples would be the sames as a 16 Gig system)
- but could the bandwidth of the new drives be able to keep up with this ?
Are you also saying the software would have to be tweaked ?
Has anyone else got view the timelines involved? Is Moore's Law the correct assumption about improvements for memory storage?
Thanks andrew