Planetfurry BBS

[Skazwolf]

Bleh, still too expensive.

$690 for 64gb: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147054
vs.
$150 for 1tb: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152102&Tpk

[Sigurd Volsung]

They'll get cheaper, I remember when a 512 Mb flash drive cost over $100 now you can get a 2Gb for less then $30. The price will decrease. Also they're designed with laptops in mind where you want to save weight and power usage. Give it a couple of years and they'll be comparable prices and HDD will go the way of the dodo.

[Skazwolf]

[Trekkie]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_drive#Disadvantages

[anthony]

I wonder who wrote that list of disadvantages...

Also, the availablility section is incorrect.

I have computers from 1989 using SSDs, and earlier computers also had them.(Then they were often known as 'Flash-cards')
The big difference is that the earlier SSDs didn't allow erasing only parts of the disk, so whenever you updater a file, it would use a new area for the file/updated section of it, and when the SSD 'ran out' of free areas, you had to reformat it.
(Not a big problem as a 512KB/1MB SSD would last months or even a year between reformats if one was careful not to put 'often changed' files on it, or if writing a story, was careful only to add to it, and not edit until the the entire story was written )

[Tygon]

Let's not forget that a solid state drive is also significantly faster than a normal hard disc drive. It might take a year or two but they are the future in data storage.

Unless something else comes along, of course.

[Trekkie]

[Shadu]

Me, I just hope i live to see something like those data crystals of the si-fi series. i jut want to see a storage system that can be considered almost without limitations.

[Tygon]

[Kelvin]

*drools*

[Asalis]

OOOh, Technology.

If I had the money i'd so buy that. Is it out for PC or laptops only? if its out for PC I hope they have one for an old IDE setup.

[[Crash]]

I've never used more than 50 GB for my Windows installation (including system files and programs) anyways. It'd be ideal for using as a system partition and then moving my user account to a TB drive or sth. It's fairly impossible to mess up your Windows install via drive failure in such a way and the speed would be out of this world.

[ScottyDM]

There are two different Flash storage cell architectures in use today. One is cheap, the other fast. Some brands of SSD drives use one, some the other. So some SSD drives are slower than HDDs, then again...

There's more than one kind of performance for disk drives. The three most important are: capacity, speed, power (low). Also ruggedness, cost, size and weight, and reliability figure in--but capacity, speed, and power are the big ones.


The following three basic markets are separate, with separate design teams and production lines for the HDDs targeted to those markets.

Notebooks care most about power. As long as you get adequate capacity your drive selection is good to go. Note that (high) speed and (low) power are diametrically opposed. Given that speed is dominated by how fast you can sling a moving mass about, throwing more power at the problem definitely helps. But that's not really an option in a notebook. Disk drives in notebooks generally run 4500 rpm up through 7200 rpm for machines meant as desktop replacements. typical size is 2.5" but there are smaller drives typically used in ultra portables. The interface is usually ATA or SATA.

Desktops care most about capacity because that seems to be an easy sell to the consumer. It's really easy to understand the difference between 500 and 750 GB of storage. Also they are cost sensitive so the lowest cost solution is deemed best. This leaves the vast majority of desktops with 7200 rpm 3.5" drives. This is a bit like selling a car strictly on how many seats it has. The interface is almost always ATA or SATA.

Servers typically care more about speed, but there are cost sensitive and capacity segments of that market too. Common interfaces are SATA, SCSI, SAS (serial attached SCSI) and fibre channel. High capacity 7200 rpm SATA drives are used in cost sensitive applications or where a lot of storage is wanted in a small footprint. SCSI holds the same position that ATA does--that is to say it's on the way out, replaced by SAS. SCSI, SAS, and fibre channel all use the same command set and SCSI family drives are lower capacity, higher speed (10,000 and 15,000 rpm), higher power (comes with the speed) and higher cost than ATA family drives. Drive size is 3.5" and 2.5" with the smaller drives designed for raw speed and somewhat lower power (at the expense of capacity). It's quicker to move a smaller mass than a larger one. Overall, drive speed scales linearly with rpm.

SSDs have the ability to bust these markets open as the three types of performance increase and costs decrease for this technology.


In that Samsung vid they don't mention the speed of the HDD. Perhaps they compare their SSD to a 4500 rpm drive, which will let the SSD look like it has radically better performance, but not such a great power advantage.

In the near term SSDs will be most valuable in notebooks where you get both a speed boost and lower power than HDDs. Apple already offers a SSD as an option in their Mac Book Air. I suspect it's the secret to their longer battery life. As the price of the SSDs come down, and speed and capacity performance goes up, I suspect they will become more valuable all around. I also suspect HDDs will hang in there for some time to come.

Scotty