Flash-Based Hard Drives Cometh

[Mickey]

Source:http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/...drives_cometh/
The first fully-featured, commercially-available solid-state drive (SSD) has reached our storage test lab. While we already reviewed a $1,000 prototype from Samsung a year ago, and most memory vendors have only been announcing flash-based drives, SanDisk's SSD 5000 is the first real piece of 32-GB hardware that made it to our labs.

First, the worst thing we can say about this device is that it cannot meet the constraints of some server workloads. But in the big-picture sense, the device is overall superior to traditional hard drive technology. Indeed, storage performance is crucial, and it is about to go to the next level.
SSDs have been around for many years, and were mostly sold by storage vendors such as Bitmicro and others. However, non-volatile memory, usually flash, has been far too expensive to create storage products that can a) offer sufficient capacity for desktop or mobile use and b) be reasonably priced. Although flash-based drives now have capacities between 8 GB and 32 GB, they are still a bit away from the sweet-spot capacity points, which are 160-200 GB in the desktop space and 80-120 GB in the notebook market. A 32-GB flash drive is also three to four times more expensive than a conventional hard drive with three to four times the capacity. So should you still invest in an SSD so soon? The short answer is yes.

[gunner]

It is the future!

[TheThingIs]

be nice to use one for your windows and daily work (C drive and use a large capacity disk for data storage

[WotTheFook]

Amiga users have been doing this for a while now, via CF-IDE adaptors, you can use up to a 4Gb CF card as a hard drive on the Amiga A600 and A1200. OK, it's not 32-bit, but for the hobbyist it works.

WTF

[plug1]

I think the next move from disk will be to solid state memory for movies and all other
media like back to 2600 carts again for games .
Plug

[Mickey]

I will be getting one ASAP, looks a good deal once the prices sort them selves out

[burner1]

It's the way to go I guess.. if they can sort out wider byte addressing etc. and pricing (Supply and demand will bring that down though).. It's quite funny to think the likes of certain I.T items like cpu's, memory storage are storming ahead with things like this on size/speed/power etc.. the good old PC in it's physical entirety is not really that much smaller than 20 years ago apart from the monitor lol.

[Over Carl]

The hdd has been a bottleneck for a long time, this will be amazing when it becomes the norm. Even if it's only big enough to hold windows and program files, I'm sure we can survive with data on hd's, except for people manipulating massive videos/images/sounds who would probably happily buy another.

@ WTF: Could sort of do it without even cf adaptors on any amiga, remember the ramdisk - I remember loading stuff into there to speed repeated access, and I'm sure there was a trick that made it survive a reset, but obviously wouldn't survive a power cycle.

[WotTheFook]

@ carlover

Yep, I remember that on the Miggy, I was picking up on the solid state thing though, if you wanted a simple embedded-system type PC for an industtrial application, or one that was perhaps in an area where a hard disk would not survive very long, then the CF-IDE adaptor is a cheaper way to achieve a similar, if perhaps slower, end result. A simple Win98 install would easily fit onto a 4Gb CF card. Add to that the fact that CF cards are cheaper than hard drives and CF-IDE adaptors are all over Ebay, you could in theory create a RAID array of CF cards through IDE adaptors...wonder what the transfer rate would be like?

WTF