SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak can envision the end of hard disk drives, replaced by solid-state memories.
"I'm a purist, I'd love to see hard disks go away," he said during a "fireside chat" here Wednesday (Aug. 6), during the annual Flash Memory Summit at the Santa Clara Convention Center.
Responding to colleague and interviewer Lee Caswell, vice president of storage appliances at Fusion I/O, Wozniak said he was "kind of joking" because he's an electrical engineer and hard drives are primarily the work of mechanical engineers.
"Moving those tiny almost weightless electrons around those tiny little wires is so much simpler," he said of solid-state solutions. But he acknowledged that hard disks probably won't disappear entirely because they will always be most cost effective than, say, flash memory for certain applications and/or densities. Wozniak is chief scientist at enterprise flash memory provider Fusion I/O, which SanDisk acquired earlier this year.
Future of Memories
Wozniak also sounded a note of caution for solid-state adherents:
"Flash is convincing me we might be getting to the end of Moore's Law. Storing a 1 and a 0 with 8 electrons, you get to the point where you have to add more error-correction bits than you'll save in the dimension shrinkages."
He mentioned alternative memories, such as phase-change and magneto-resistive, but said "people say 'oh, they're going to be cheaper and faster and denser, but you have to get the density factor down. It's the economies of scale: so many NAND chips are made for so many products now, it's the cheapest memory going. And it's so far along the curve you can make a chip that has upteen gigabytes. You have to equal that with other technology before they'll take over."
The man who worked as an HP calculator engineer before designing the original Apple Computer went on to say he couldn't think of types of servers that don't deserve to deploy flash.
"Even if it's just used to speed up hard disks or external solid-state disk arrays, it probably makes a lot of sense. I think servers will eventually be built with the server and flash on the same motherboard."
He said he hopes to see the day soon when software application writers start to rethink their relationship with memory:
"Do we need to write software with variables in memory and records in storage? Why not skip the storage? What if the operating system had no storage commands and the programming language had no storage commands and you kept your arrays as big bee trees in the NAND flash memory?"
As Wozniak took the audience on his usual humorous, insightful tech tour, he diverged slightly when addressing the rise of cloud computing applications.
"We know the benefits of the cloud and how cheap storage is, but I still think you own things and they're in your possession. I don't get a lot of choice about that anymore. I don't own anything I've agreed to. It's on the cloud. I made all these agreements. I hope we change that some day in the future."
Brian Fuller
Related stories:
--Flash Memory Summit: Steve Wozniak's Early Encounters With Memory
--Flash Memory Summit: What’s Driving 3D NAND Flash, What Challenges Remain