Anyone running one of the new solid state HD's?

[wartrace]

I have been looking into them although I will wait until the price point is more affordable. I am curious if they are that much better than the current style hard drives? They claim it gives you instant access to data.

 

[jdbennet]

my eee pc has one cos it has low power consumption and doesnt break as easy if dropped

but its only 2gb

SSD drives are quite expensive atm and they wear out easialy

 

[wartrace]

It will take some time before they are affordable and useful but I like the idea of instant access. I will wait for western digital to produce one before I start getting interested enough to think about buying one. It will go good with my new 980i motherboard with the new intel octa-core chip & my 10 gigabyte video holocard/video card!

 

[jdbennet]

its not that instant
but its faster than normal (mechanical) hard drives

the difference is wierd. You know, like when your pc is busy, it ticks and the light flashes. There is none of that. Makes a big difference if you dont have much ram as its much faster for swapping. Not as fast as ram but a lot faster than mechanical hdds

 

[Geoff]

my eee pc has one cos it has low power consumption and doesnt break as easy if dropped

but its only 2gb

SSD drives are quite expensive atm and they wear out easialy

What do you mean they wear out easily? They are non-mechanical and are said to last much longer then traditional drives.

 

[diduknowthat]

What do you mean they wear out easily? They are non-mechanical and are said to last much longer then traditional drives.

Possibly there's a limited time you can read and write off the flash memories? Not really sure.

All I've heard is that right now the cheap ones are REALLY slow and the fast ones are REALLY expensive. AKA I'm not going to touch them for a while .

 

[jdbennet]

yeah its the case with all current NAND flash memory

they have a finite number of writes and due to this a far lower MTBF (mean time between failures) than traditional hard drives

thats why if you have a vista pc with 512mb of ram, and then use a 2gb flash drive for readyboost , it will wear out in a few months. This is because its basically constantly writing data to it as part of the paging process

wiki:

Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 100,000 write-erase-cycles for block 0, and no guarantees for other blocks). This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors; this technique is called wear levelling.

There remain some aspects of flash-based SSDs that make the idea unattractive. Most importantly, the cost per gigabyte of flash memory remains significantly higher than that of platter-based hard drives. There is also some concern that the finite number of erase/write cycles of flash memory would render flash memory unable to support an operating system. This seems to be a decreasing issue as warranties on flash-based SSDs are approaching those of current hard drives