Solid State Drives

[Todd]

I've been reading up on Solid State Drives and I cant wait until there cost comes down a little. No more buzzing hard drives, woot! Some thing you would invest in?

[Andrew Armstrong]

Yes, for laptops primarily. Lower power usage, no moving parts (so no problems if the laptop is jerked) and longer life spans are all major points (and is why they're mainly being sold for laptops now). The (usual) speed boost is also good, since a 2.5" drive hasn't got anywhere near the speed of a desktop drive.

If they came down in price, as they might, to HDD costs £/GB, then I'd be interested in having them for everything else. Servers and Desktops, and other things - large MP3 players, and who knows what else. Every bonus above applies to servers and desktops, but they require much larger capacities and multiple drives (well, if you're going to use them at all!).

The write level wear is also very cool, makes them last in mean time much longer as long as the controller or some one off part doesn't fail.

[RedWolf]

I've been reading up on Solid State Drives and I cant wait until there cost comes down a little. No more buzzing hard drives, woot! Some thing you would invest in?

Yeah, they're amazing and exciting.  I'm going to put forth a prediction that solid state drives will replace platter-based hard drives within the next five years on most computers, desktop and laptop.

Once you get storage space into the realm of the transistor (as with flash devices), then you're putting the progression of storage capacity into the realm of Moore's Law.  So I believe that SSDs will rapidly match and then surpass hard disks in both capacity and performance before too long.  They've already made incredible strides in the past few years that SSDs have been cheap enough for consumer use.

I suspect that I'll buy my first SSD in the next few years.

[Todd]

Code: ("RedWolf")

... you're putting the progression of storage capacity into the realm of Moore's Law.

Absolutely, could not agree more.

The largest SSD I could find was a 126GB SATA drive; which with two, could run in raid. I run two 160GB 10,000 RPM Raptors. So, the SSD's are already where I want them save the price.

[silencewordsaway]

yea. i can't wait until SSD is affordable. It just makes so much sense for many applications, especially throwing it in a laptop. I mean it's meant to be portable and in unstable environments, securing the HD is super important. Plus i could see this as useful in home built media centers, as well. Make sure everything is nice and cool and quiet.

[orsty3001]

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136200/Intel_confirms_data_corruption_bug_in_new_SSDs_halts_shipments