solid state drives

[Radaghast]

when are these things going to come down in price?

Their performance gain over any optical drive is like comparing a snail to a cheetah :)

[Vadokri]

Already there is a great price on one in comparison to others

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820183203

There are a few others within the same price range.

[Radaghast]

yeah but you could get a terabyte or more for that much.

If they were $100 or so I would probably get one to host my operating system and the programs I use the most.

[Drakhon]

They have come down by a lot in recent months. The simple fact is that producing SSDs with the performance and lifespans needed to compete with HDDs is expensive. Like any emergent technology, they will lower the prices as their production costs decrease due to improved production capability.

[Taldren]

Just make sure you get a SLC instead of a MLC drive and you don't have to worry at all about lifespan ... or write times (except for really small files).

[Radaghast]

Interesting article: http://www.bmighty.com/blog/main/archives/2008/07/for_servers_the.html

Quotes:

A Sun executive was quoted as saying that a 32 GB flash drive enabled about 5,000 write and 30,000 read operations per second, as opposed to about 180 write and 320 read operations per second on a mechanical drive spinning at 15,000 RPM -- an improvement factor of 28 and 94 respectively.


the cost of flash storage per byte has been falling at 50% to 70% yearly. The end result is that pundits are predicting that magnetic and optical storage will begin to fade away even in the desktop market, to be replaced by flash memory.

Most of us have 7200 rpm drives........