Solid State Drives...

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I was wondering if anyone had played with solid state disks at all ?

I've given up on desktops in favour of power laptops, one of the drawbacks is that drives are always slow and RAID is not normally an option.

I'm about to upgrade to a 200GB Seagate ST9200420AS Momentus 7200.2, 2.5", SATA300.

This set me thinking, I've tried the Windows Readyboost but it didn't really work and is very particular what memory cards it likes, also it seems to only work as a sort of parallel fast read cache.

I was wondering what the potential is to say get a PCMCIA solid state drive and partition it to hold the page file, maybe even create mount points for the profiles/documents and settings ?

So far I've only seen 2.5 replacement solid state drives...

Just found this :-

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b97017b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/STO008_WH06.ppt

So my next question is, where do I get a 'Hybrid Drive', are they any good ?

or this :-

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1936635,00.asp

Will it be available as an add on ?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/14/sandisk_launches_vaulter_cache/

How long till something decent get released ?

Any thanks for any input.

Dave

 

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Yep!

 

I looked at some of the SSD's and the price about made my eyes roll up in my head. From what I've read access times are very low, but when doing read/write activity they are actually slower than a decent regular old hard drive.

I don't think I'll be putting any money into them for quite some time. They will have to bring the price down a lot before I will consider one, and fix the slow read/write times. The way they are I won't even consider one. $400+ for a 32 gig drive or $3,400 for a 128 gig drive? Not in this life time. I can't think of any advantage that they offer that can justify that kind of money.

 

It depends what you want it for.

Personally I'd look at a wi-fi enabled NAS device for adding extra storage to my laptop [whilst at home]. This gives you massive storage capacity and can be configured for RAID to protect your data.

If you need the added storage to be portable then consider a 2.5" USB HDD drive, USB pen drive or if your laptop has an SD card reader you can pick 8GB cards up for next to nothing.

I'm with Gary, no way I'd pay that price for one of these.

 

I recently deployed a SSD array for a client
a unit with 14ish 128GB SSDs and two controllers cost over 100k USD
They do have significant gains over standard hard disks in terms of I/O, power, noise, no moving parts etc but the cost and capacity makes them prohibitive at the moment for most uses

I've heard the new Macbook Pro 13 incher (if it comes) will have one, a good place to put one if you ask me

and yes, if you need more storage on the go, WD just released a 320GB WD Passport (2.5") and for round the house a decent raid array on a linux box or windows home server will serve you well

I am moving away from mass local storage so I can consolidate my systems into smaller packages, and make my laptops less power hungry, my file server has over 4TB now, I have 802.11n on my laptop and GBE around the house, cant really complain with that, also when I'm on the move I have no less than 1TB of storage being lugged around (scary isn't it?)

if you need massive drive I/O a laptop is not the way, and a single SSD will not give you a massive boost either, for massive I/O you need multiple spindles (or whatever you call them in the SSD world) tied together in RAID or JBOD

unless you can find a laptop with an eSATA port, plug that into a decent 4 disk desktop system via eSATA