Solid State Drives (SSD)

[dedja]

The technology is rapidly evolving but they're still very expensive and problematic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_drive

Around $250 for a 64Gb SSD compared to $100 for a 1Tb HDD, but the performance improvement is very impressive. As such they are more suited to a boot or OS drive.

I'm going to wait and see for about 6 months.

Psyber, when are you going to jump in?

[Dissident]

I'll jump in within 6 - 12 months.
With W7's support of SS devices, it will FLY.

[Psyber]

I'm watching developments and pricing constantly and would be tempted as soon as I can get a 120GB or so for under $200 from one of our wholesalers.
I'm not sure how long that will take, but Diss may be about right.
I notice speeds vary, from make to make, for SSDs of the same size, too, so I'm watching that.

[dedja]

The thing that's holding me back at the moment (apart from price) is managing deterioration, which is supposed to be overcome by TRIM. Without this, the ability to reclaim used cells is greatly diminished.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_(SSD_command)

As far as I can tell, there is only one model that has TRIM as standard, while the others require firmware upgrades.

There's also the issue that at the moment there is a far amount of configuration to get them going properly ... they are definitely not at the plug in and use stage of HDDs.

That said, I have a couple of 200Gb SATA1 HDD's kicking around which set me back $250 each a while ago, so spending $250 on a 64Gb SSD now isn't as ridiculous as it sounds.

I'm not sure that they will become mainstream for quite a while (if at all) so it will be interesting as to how their development progresses.