News Sandisk shows off 2.5'' 32GB SSD

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/03/15/sandisk_shows_of_2_5_32gb_ssd/

 

I, for one, can't wait for these to get popular. It'll drive (pun unintended) down costs pretty quickly. And considering it wasn't that long ago that a 40Gb 2.5" HDD would set you back $300, and the price of flash is halving every 6 months (or so), this can only be a good thing.

 

Actually £200 isn't that expensive considering an 8Gb usb drive is around £60/70...

Bit-Tech needs to do some benchmarks with one of these, please!

 

I agree, £200 isn't that bad...and the price will no doubt fall very quickly as they become cheaper to manufacture.

This is exactly the type of revolutionary hardware the PC industry needs - we've been using magnetic/mechanical storage for far too long.

 

I know I've been using a few of my SS drives daily for more than three years, now, but I still can't help but be nervous about sudden death caused by excessive read/write... because I've not been booting an OS or running a swapfile off them...

I mean, sure; an external HDD of the normal variety would make sure you wouldn't lose too much data as long as you made a backup every evening, but there are gonna be times when the loss of even a few hours work is going to be a headache of enormous proportions...

Eh, I probably worry too much.

Still, it's good news. Might drive prices down all around when this becomes more mainstream.

 

the article would benefit from some figures to compare that with. e.g. standard 7200rpm HDDs, etc.

 

Generally, running any file system that doesn't perform wear-levelling on a paritcular partition, will weed out any potential weakness in re-write cycles (by giving no thought towards constantly re-writing over the same sectors).

As far as I know though, SSD drives obtain uber-MTBF's due to the fact that they perform wear-levelling in firmware, eliminating the worry.

I don't think I'd be trusting my valuable data on one still, but I'd be quite happy to run my OS from one! I'd love to see how they bench, too.

Your mission, Mr. Smalley, should you choose to accept it...

 

Awesome - £200 is almost is the affordable range.

And I will seriously considering buying one for my laptop if there is a good performance benefit - not to mention battery life advantage.

 

Definitely the future of data storage. Can't wait until these drop some more in price so I can get one. 65MB/sec already beats the average transfer rates on just about every 7,200RPM drive out there, and of course the nonexistent seek times and cool, quiet operation are both big pluses.

 

definitely a step in the right direction. For those of you don't want to wait for a 3.5" version for your computer, there is always this:

 

If this drive reads @ 65 mb/per second, how does a 7200 rpm 2.5 incher measure up?

 

Wouldnt it be more relevant to compare with a 5400rpm as thats what most laptops would have normally?

It certainly is what I would be replacing.

 

I'd say if these drives hit 128-256GB and cost around £500 a few enthusiasts would use them as their primary system hard drive. For this reason it is important to see how the current crop and onwards perform against desktop hard drives. Hopefully in the not too distant future it won't be unreasonable to compare a 150GB WD Raptor and a 128GB SSD.

 

Tis the most common the 5400, but a trend of desktop like preformance is coveted to us enthusiasts.

I read some more about this thing and it touted a 30 second Vista load compared to a 45 second load using 5400rpm drive.

 

can anyone provide some real numbers?

 

If these come out in 64gb flavours at the same or lower storage per pound, the I will definitely be replacing my laptop hard drive. Even if it offers more or less the same performance, but will increase the battery life.