help - loading trouble on video recorder

Roderick Stewart wrote:

In article , Steve Firth
wrote:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/32321/135/

Those are SSD _not_ SD

And given a price of about £700 ish for 32Gb, and slow data transfer
rates, I suspect that there's still a lot of life left in disk drives.

The price shown on the web page is $350.

Yes, but the price shown by dealers is $1500 or so for 32GB.

http://tinyurl.com/2pgup8

And you are ignoring the fact that SATA SSD drives give around 58MB/s
read, 32MB/s write. Compare this to conventional SATA drives which give
achieve around 200MB/s read and write and have been pushed up to
320MB/s.

SSD still offers poor performance for a very high price. And magnetic
storage is just as subject to Moore's law as solid state devices.

Aren't you supposed to *divide* by 2, not multiply?

Thanks for the lesson but I have been able to do simple maths for a very
long time. I've also learned not to take press announcements on price at
face value.

That makes it only a little more than twice the cost of a mechanical hard
drive, only a couple of year's worth of progress according to Moore's Law.

Prices will fall, but there seems to be a yawning gulf between prices
ex-works and retail prices. And as noted before mechanical hard drives
also obey Moores law.

I've no doubt that solid state drives will replace magnetic disk drives
at some point, just not that soon.

Solid state drives are pretty common in home video cameras already, and
probably a million times more reliable than tape. In fact I have a still
camera that can also record about an hour of video with better quality
than some of the early camcorders that were actually sold for that
purpose, so solid state electronics is catching up fast.

Sadly flash memory isn't that reliable at present and I'd like to see
some real figures on the life of such devices.

In message , Owain
writes
Adrian A wrote:
Ivan wrote:
although personally I still haven't
been persuaded to dump my old CRT tellys
I also intend to keep my CRT TVs for several more years.

I'll probably upgrade to colour the next time I buy a telly :-)


Would that be the new-fangled 625-line colour, or are you sticking with
405?
--
Ian

In article , Steve Firth
wrote:
The price shown on the web page is $350.

Yes, but the price shown by dealers is $1500 or so for 32GB.

Good grief! How long do you think they can maintain a profit of more
than 400% before people realise? Once they've run out of gullible fools
who must be first to have the latest thing, they'll have to resort to
good old-fashioned competition to sell them to ordinary people who just
want something that works. Then the prices will become more sensible.

Rod.

Roderick Stewart wrote:

In article , Steve Firth
wrote:
The price shown on the web page is $350.

Yes, but the price shown by dealers is $1500 or so for 32GB.

Good grief! How long do you think they can maintain a profit of more
than 400% before people realise?

Umm well their *profit* isn't actually 400% the way it's normally
calculated is to state that it is a markup of 77%. And from the $1000
per drive that the reseller is taking they have to pay for "quite a bit"
before they can make a profit. People on the outside looking in always
seem to think that there's huge profit to be had and that people are
being had. If it's that easy, I wonder why they aren't doing it
themselves and undercutting the market?

A markup of 77% or more isn't terribly unusual in the electronics
industry. A few years ago when video recorders retailed for £250-£700
(ish) I employed someone with a background in manufacturing video
recorders to work on "productionising" a series of electronic
instruments.

He commented that the video recorders were sold at the factory at £50
each with very little variation in price depending on model.

In article , Steve Firth
wrote:
*
Good grief! How long do you think they can maintain a profit of more*
than 400% before people realise?*

Umm well their *profit* isn't actually 400% the way it's normally
calculated is to state that it is a markup of 77%.

Er, yes. Arithmetic overload.

But I think the principle is the same. The more of these things that are
manufactured, the cheaper they'll become, just like everything else. It's
now possible to get a flat screen TV or computer monitor for less than
the price of a CRT model a few years ago because nobody wants a CRT if
there's a choice. I'm sure the same will happen with solid-state drives,
and it may happen very quickly.

Rod.

Roderick Stewart wrote:

But I think the principle is the same. The more of these things that are
manufactured, the cheaper they'll become, just like everything else. It's
now possible to get a flat screen TV or computer monitor for less than
the price of a CRT model a few years ago because nobody wants a CRT if
there's a choice. I'm sure the same will happen with solid-state drives,
and it may happen very quickly.

I'm sure it will be rapid, indeed it already has been rapid with prices
falling in a year from £70/GB to £10 per GB for 1GB SD cards (unless of
course one shops at Tesco for such things). However hard disk prices are
falling at a similar rate with 1TB of storage now costing about £150.
That's how much I was paying for 320GB of storage a year ago.

And as mentioned Toshiba has found a way to get 250GB on a single
platter of a 1.8in disk, that's 500GB per disk and that should cost
around £50 when it is offered for sale. That's 10p/GB and shows just how
far flash memory (of whatever form factor) prices have to fall to
compete. And by then, the magnetic disk prices will have falled even
further or storage capacity will have increased further. The Toshiba
recording strategy should lead to 1TB 2.5 inch disks costing around £75
within a year or so, for example.

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
.. .
Roderick Stewart wrote:

But I think the principle is the same. The more of these things that are
manufactured, the cheaper they'll become, just like everything else. It's
now possible to get a flat screen TV or computer monitor for less than
the price of a CRT model a few years ago because nobody wants a CRT if
there's a choice. I'm sure the same will happen with solid-state drives,
and it may happen very quickly.

I'm sure it will be rapid, indeed it has been rapid with prices
falling in a year from £70/GB to £10 per GB for 1GB SD cards (unless of
course one shops at Tesco for such things). However hard disk prices are
falling at a similar rate with 1TB of storage now costing about £150.
That's how much I was paying for 320GB of storage a year ago.

And as mentioned Toshiba has found a way to get 250GB on a single
platter of a 1.8in disk, that's 500GB per disk and that should cost
around £50 when it is offered for sasle. That's 10p/GB and shows just how
far flash memory (of whatever form factor) prices have to fall to
compete. And by then, the magnetic disk prices will have falled even
further or storage capacity will have increased further. The Toshiba
recording strategy should lead to 1TB 2.5 inch disks costing around £75
within a year or so, for example.

Searching the net reveals that 2 GB SD cards can be purchased for as little
as £9.99.
I think that where you are correct is that capacity wise unless there is
some kind of major technical breakthrough in the near future, then it's
going to be a long time before flash memory catches up with electro
mechanical devices.
However my original point was that storage cards will/should be the ideal
medium for 'transferring' and archiving recorded material and I must say
that I'm absolutely baffled why manufacturers haven't already embraced them
big time as a superior successor to the VHS cassette.
Regarding your fear about the reliability of cards, I can only say that as a
relatively early adopter of digital photography I've been using Smartmedia
(and more recently SD cards) for a number of years and the only one that has
ever failed was in the early days, when I rather foolishly attempted to
format an Olympus camera Smartmedia card in Windows.

In article , Ivan wrote:
Regarding your fear about the reliability of cards, I can only say that as a*
relatively early adopter of digital photography I've been using Smartmedia*
(and more recently SD cards) for a number of years and the only one that has*
ever failed was in the early days, when I rather foolishly attempted to*
format an Olympus camera Smartmedia card in Windows.

On the same subject, I've been using the same 1GB USB flash drive for several
years with no problems, despite inadvertently subjecting it to a 40 deg wash
and spin cycle some months ago. It still had all its files on it, and it was
very clean.

Rod.

"Roderick Stewart" wrote in message
.. .
In article , Ivan wrote:
Regarding your fear about the reliability of cards, I can only say that
as a
relatively early adopter of digital photography I've been using
Smartmedia
(and more recently SD cards) for a number of years and the only one that
has
ever failed was in the early days, when I rather foolishly attempted to
format an Olympus camera Smartmedia card in Windows.

On the same subject, I've been using the same 1GB USB flash drive for
several
years with no problems, despite inadvertently subjecting it to a 40 deg
wash
and spin cycle some months ago. It still had all its files on it, and it
was
very clean.


Bingo! ;o) I also (unthinkingly) sometimes commit the cardinal sin of
pulling the drive out of the USB socket on the front of my computer, without
going through the torturous procedure of clicking on that icon with the
arrow in it, selecting the drive on the pop up menu which then informs me
that it can safely be removed, yet touch wood have never suffered from loss
or corruption of data or even the destruction of the drive as some dire
warnings have suggested will happen.

Rod.

On Sun, 09 Sep 2007 14:02:16 +0100, Owain
wrote:

Ian Jackson wrote:
I'll probably upgrade to colour the next time I buy a telly :-)
Would that be the new-fangled 625-line colour, or are you sticking with
405?

Definately the 625-line, I want all those extra high-definitiion channels...

Owain

I'm thinking of upgrading my hi-fi now that cylinders are getting much
harder to find these days :-)

Marky P.