@berry, Firstly, my point wasn't that we aren't close to having 2 to 1 price/storage ratio, it is that the prices don't have to be equal, SSD's can be substantially more expensive, in the case I mentioned twice as expensive, and at that point a hell of a lot more people would be on them rather than hard drives
Secondly, memory sticks, no, they can't really be used for major storage, unless you pay a lot for your larger ones, but even then you aren't getting as much as a hard drive. External hard drives though, or even internal drives in a caddy, they are absolutely a decent unit for storage of important stuff. You don't have to be moving them around all of the time. I know that in my household, I am the only one that would rather have a desktop, there are now 3 desktops in because another user wants to play games, and another wasn't going to be moved so the desktop was the better option. However, now, 2 laptops in the house, neither ever move, 1 of the desktops is hardly ever used. With the odd exception, very rarely do clients I repair computers for use the portability of their laptops. To have their hard drives outside wouldn't make a single bit of difference.
Still on the subject of storage, most users don't think about hardware failure, they will have a single copy of their important files on their hard drive in their laptop. Are you telling me a laptop, a unit that can be dropped easily, have stuff spilled on them, is more secure than external storage? I would sooner put pictures and videos on an external drive than the laptop.
No, my understanding of bottleneck is not wrong at all. The slowest component limits the speed of the system, and this component will be the cause of the bottleneck. Fair enough, if gaming or compiling code, how many users actually use that? Very, very few in the big scheme of things.
In a modern system a hard drive is required, a DVD drive is not. Of course a DVD drive is slower than a hard drive, but when do you ever use your DVD drive? To listen to music or watch a film, where it isn't at full speed, to install a program, which is done once, it isn't done all of the time. Your hard drive though, it is used to load your OS, it is used to open every program, it is used to load every feature, it is used to save everything. In certain applications, yes, the hard drive isn't so much of a big deal, but you keep jumping between the "average" user and then to gamers and other uses. So few users game on computers or compile code or do any other CPU/GPU intensive task, the majority will be using their computer for the internet, office programs, facebook etc. At that point, an old single core CPU will run it, poor integrated graphics will run it, they would be loving faster boot, load and save times.
For the hard drives speed, if my argument saying the speed increase will be negligible, and you agree with it, then what was your point in the first place? And the momentus XT drives,compared to 5400 or 7200RPM drives, are faster. We both agreed thatthe mobile market is only growing and is the biggest influence on most technology, so why would 10k+RPM drives ever become the norm? They wouldn't, they will always use more power than the 5400/7200 drives, they will always be louder, always produce more heat. If you can stick some solid state memory on there and get better performance without increasing power consumption, without producing much more heat, it is the better, more viable option.
To the final point, we again agree that the performance of solid state memory is far beyond that of conventional hard drives, but are more expensive for 2 main reasons - They are new, faster technology and solid state chips cost more, for the same capacity, to produce than conventional platters. Now the R&D that goes into the mobile sector will alleviate both of these issues - the technology will become more abundant, so it won't be seen as new or special any more, and like you say, better production efficiency. Once the price of producing solid state memory comes down, so too will the prices of the storage. That is just 1 part of it though. The speed of the chips and controllers will improve and efficiency will too, they can only pull away from hard drives performance wise because they have such better (speed wise) design than conventional hard drives.
Look at the 3 main producers of chips in the home computers (I mean the best known by the way, I know that other manufacturers produce more electrical components than 2 of them): Intel, AMD and Nvidia. For the last few years they have focussed on power efficiency rather than speed. With more efficiency comes better speed, so it is win win
@celegorm: Tell the consumer something is better, they will believe you. You can offer someone an old single core P4 @ 3.8GHz, or a quad core at 2.4GHz. If you knew nothing about computers, you would see 3.8 as a bigger number and think it is better, but people have been told quad core, it is amazing, it is always better, which isn't true. You say to someone "SSD, it is the next big thing, they are so fast!!" they will lap it up and try to get one in their system, even though they don't know the difference. You could say the same about external storage or anything else, you tell people something is better enough times, they will believe it.
For the final point you made, it is marketing, not the order they are produced. Which sounds better to a consumer:
Our first cards out from the new architecture, and they are the fastest!!
or
Our first cards out, and they work for the average user, but aren't as powerful as our last offering
?
The improvement sounds better. You think any of the main producers would say they have a new architecture, but only have single chip available for it? They have the full lot already there, or at least enough to satisfy the market until they bring out tweaks or upgrades. Take a look at Sandy Bridge, 20+ different (clocked) CPUs, but then look at Nahelem, it is ages since the first was released, but not that long ago since the hex cores were brought out. Money from the sale of chips doesn't get distributed as sales are, if 1000 low end chips were sold for every 1 high end chip, R&D budget of low end chips wouldn't be 1000 times greater than higher end ones, and time for R&D into lower end cards wouldn't be 1000 times greater than high end.
Also, look at the example you put - GTX 480 and GTX420. They are the exact same architecture, there isn't anything different between them, the GTX420 is just cut down, it has lower clock speed, less transistors, lower memory bandwidth, etc, they are, on the lowest level, identical. This is the same for every chip manufacturer, all Athlon II and Phenom II are the same, just Athlon II don't have L3 cache, but Phenom II do
