ok so dell and apple among others are now offering solid state HD's in laptops
its supposted to be 10 times faster, last 20times longer, and is virtually crash free

has anyone seen one in action?

8/17/2007 10:38:04 AM

i've read mostly great reviews about them

here's some comments from http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000927.html that cover most of the talking points

Quote :

"Perhaps the most striking thing about the machine is the 32 gigabyte solid-state hard drive. It's blazingly fast and completely silent. I have gotten so used to the low, metronomic rumbling of hard drives when my computers are working that the complete absence of sound in normal operation is rather strange. All you can hear is a bit of very quiet high pitched electronic buzzing, and only if you put your ear very close to the machine. The downside, of course, is that it's only 32 GB in size. It's definitely a little tight. I wasn't too worried, because when I priced this option-- and it's not a cheap option at $500-- I was already using less than 32 GB of disk space on my current ASUS W3J laptop, which has a fairly typical 80 GB laptop hard drive. I tend to run a minimalistic laptop configuration; with Vista Ultimate, Visual Studio 2005, Office 2007, Streets and Trips, Photoshop Elements, and a few other things installed, I have almost 12 GB of disk space free on the 32 GB solid state drive. It's not quite as bad as it sounds; I carry a 100 GB external USB 2.5" hard drive in my bag as a matter of course, for virtual machines and other large items... 2 GB of space is enough to get by as a primary hard drive, but it definitely makes you realize how spoiled we've all become with our standard ginormous physical hard drives. Hard drive space is one of those things we stopped worrying about years ago; 500 GB desktop drives and 100 GB laptop drives are dirt cheap. But with a smallish SSD drive, you have to start caring about disk space again. On a machine with 2 GB of memory, that mandatory 2 GB hibernate file on disk, plus the 1.5+ GB swap file, start to sting a bit. You can imagine what this would be like on a 64-bit operating system with 4 GB of memory-- you'd be dropping almost a sixth of your disk space on pure overhead! Size (and, well, price) is the only thing keeping solid state hard drives from being a no-brainer on laptops. It'll be a lot easier to stomach the size restriction when 64 gigabyte solid state hard drives are more widely available. And they're even faster: Samsung claims the respective read and write performance on the SSD drive have been increased by 20 and 60 percent: the 64 GB unit can read 64 MB/S, write 45 MB/s, and consumes just half a watt when operating -- and merely one tenth of a watt when idle. In comparison, a mechanical 80 GB 1.8-inch hard drive reads at 15 MB/s, writes at 7 MB/s, and eats 1.5 watts either operating or when idle. After using a machine with a solid-state hard drive for a few days, it's clear to me that solid-state hard drives are absolutely the future for all laptops, and possibly even for desktops in some scenarios. You boot up faster, you shut down faster, and launching applications feels instantaneous. On top of all that, it uses almost no power and produces virtually zero noise or heat. They just need to get the prices down and the sizes up, which will come naturally enough in time. As William Gibson said, the future is already here-- it's just unequally distributed. "

[Edited on August 17, 2007 at 10:52 AM. Reason : .]

8/17/2007 10:51:21 AM

Quote :

"last 20times longer, and is virtually crash free"

I doubt those claims...any sources?

8/17/2007 10:58:00 AM

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/13/flash_based_hard_drives_cometh/

Quote :

"The read performance of this product is somewhere between impressive and plain awesome. No other drive in a 2.5" form factor offers higher transfer rates, better minimum transfer rates or quicker access time. In addition, flash-based drives will contribute to extending battery run times on notebooks, as their power requirements are 30-400% below the energy consumption of traditional 2.5" hard drives. The time saved when launching applications such as Windows is reason enough for me to purchase one of these drives for my notebook soon. Indeed, real enthusiasts have no option but to invest in a SSD, because the performance is noticeably better than with any other hardware upgrade. For everyone else, I recommend waiting until these products become more affordable, because $400 for a 32-GB SDD is pretty much the cost of a 1-TB hard drive."

Really expensive though.

[Edited on August 17, 2007 at 11:23 AM. Reason : .]

8/17/2007 11:21:06 AM

Quote :

"t's clear to me that solid-state hard drives are absolutely the future for all laptops, and possibly even for desktops in some scenarios"

some scenarios? why can't we get these things for desktops yet? not that I'd pay $500 for a drive, but desktop users want the performance too. i'm sure you can hack something together using a laptop drive but thats not preferred.

and i'm wondering how long these drives will last. i thought a downside of SSHDs was that they had a small number of read/writes that could be done and after that they were toast. i guess they've made them last longer?

but yeah, recognizing that a [mechanical] hard drive is BY FAR the largest bottleneck in a computer, I can't wait to get my hands on a SSD for my pc

8/17/2007 11:24:25 AM

^ So how much longer until we will be able to get these at a reasonable price?

8/17/2007 11:28:00 AM

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147015

Some people have already put them in desktop builds. 599$ is a bit much for 32gb though.

^^^they're sata. So i imagine it wouldn't be too hard. Can you just stick a 2.5 drive in a desktop if its got sata?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609234

[Edited on August 17, 2007 at 11:37 AM. Reason : .]

8/17/2007 11:32:41 AM

if it was 64GB i may get one... i can see myself getting one for my desktop in 1 year once prices drop.

8/17/2007 11:50:31 AM

i could easily see a 32gb drive in a two-drive setup maybe. put your documents/movies/mp3s on a mechanical drive and all your programs and your OS on the SSD.

[Edited on August 17, 2007 at 1:08 PM. Reason : maybe that would defeat the purpose?]

8/17/2007 1:07:54 PM

Whoa, I had no idea these were on the market yet.

So does anyone know how much capacity these drives will have down the road?

8/17/2007 2:09:36 PM

^^^^ yea you can

8/17/2007 3:20:22 PM

^^ some flavor of 2^x bytes mayhaps

8/17/2007 4:38:12 PM