http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Product/45343/?source=eshot08Mar10

I think eventually stuff like this will take over conventional disk drives with prices starting to come down and storage capacity starting to rise...

Thoughts?

Kev

My understanding from tech folk is that they do not work well for constant read/ write and have shorter life than traditional hard drives.

They might well be the future. With technology always advancing who knows whats around the corner. We keep on hearing about "Cloud computing" so if and when that comes to fruition we might not need huge hard drives.

Been having a read about these myself over the last few days.

Still a bit pricey atm.

Seems as though the newwer ones can spank a conventional drives ass no problem.

I think they'll end up the norm at some point in time

they do degrade over time - hence the requirement for TRIM support on the hardware and the OS (a sort real-time defrag)

Without it, you'll e'ventually' need to format and re-install.

personally, I'd just go with a few larger 10K raptor drives and be done with it......

Been having a read about these myself over the last few days.

Still a bit pricey atm.

Seems as though the newwer ones can spank a conventional drives ass no problem.

I think they'll end up the norm at some point in time

You try and get SLC flash drives at 1TB capacity for anything like the cost of a hard disk.

Future, in some areas maybe, but totally no. You will need a different technology to make them suitable for bulk storage at a low cost.

they do degrade over time - hence the requirement for TRIM support on the hardware and the OS (a sort real-time defrag)

Without it, you'll e'ventually' need to format and re-install.

personally, I'd just go with a few larger 10K raptor drives and be done with it......

As said, only now are they starting to get viable... ie supporting the TRIM command, and windows 7 is the only OS that supports that.

Problem is the market is getting flooded with these.. theres currently 3 generations available. the cheap ones are either first-gen models that will slow down over time or small cap second gen which are reasonable performance but not a massive step up from a modern hard drive. (also youll find that the smaller capacites are usually slower than the bigger capacities anyway!)

Unfortuantely the proper third gen stuff is only just coming onto the market.. at around 500quid lol - now these are the ones with the big 200mb + transfer speeds!

I did toy with ordering a SSD, but have decided to hold off as i rekon this will be the year the prices come tumbling!

I'd love manufacturers to start making drives which are a combination of SSD and traditional HDD.

Have a huge SSD for all the stuff that doesn't really change (music, applications, etc), and a small traditional HDD for all the rapidly changing stuff.