Solid state drives?

K.I.L.E.R

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Will there be any upcoming drives which are solid state?
I'm talking in a few months time, what cost would I be looking at?
 
Will there be any upcoming drives which are solid state?
I'm talking in a few months time, what cost would I be looking at?

You can get lots of solid state drives, I've seen up to 64gb. They seem to start at a few hundred dollars.
 
Yeah, they seem to be showing up in customized laptops already. You'll be paying a hefty premium for sure. I'd love to just use one to get an idea of how the OS and games handle the super fast read/access speeds. Installation must be butt-slow.
 
4-64GB 1.8"/2.5" drives are readily available for around 20€/GB, but the ones that have been in the news lately with >256GB might take a while to become available.

They're planning to get them down to 2€/GB after 2010, but they'll probably be around 10-15€/GB when released.
 
I guess that's the thing. With random writes it's something that would put their product into poor light. Sustained writing should be good.
 
I'm thinking of building a low power PC and a component would be a Compact Flash to IDE adapter (15 euros) and 1GB or 2GB CF card (15 or 26 euros). hopefully enough for an OS and apps without swap (something like DSL, or some ubuntu derivate or ubuntu itself?)
 
It would be good to buy a 1-2 GB solid state drive (SSD) for swap file usage, if only they had fast writes. :/
 
Writing to arbitrary and separate locations in flash requires usually requires that the entire block that each location resides on be erased.

Each write would need to be preceded by an erase of multiple other locations, and then the entire block would need to be rewritten. Depending on the data already in place, it is possible to skip some of this, so it's not allways that bad.

Sequential writes amortize a single erase for multiple writes, so the overhead goes down.
 
I suppose I should have said *DRAM but you don't see SRAM as main memory these days. (Note I'm not a hardware expert so the details may be wrong.) DRAM is organised in pages where you can only have certain number of pages open at the same time. Reading/writing from an open page is fast (i.e. random access, although sometimes you might have to perform many reads/writes to the same page at the same time) but it can take many clock cycles to close and open a new page (though that can be overlapped with other reads/writes).

Does that make sense?
 
You can potentially have a solidstate drive right now, and fairly cheaply.

Get a compact flash to 44 pin ide adapter (for laptops), buy a compact flash card (16GB cards can be found as low as $100 now) and plug it into your laptop, bingo instant ssd. The adapters are cheap too, you can find them on ebay for only a few dollars/euros/pounds. You can make them yourself too if you're so inclined.
 
So over a year later, how is the outlook on ssd suitability in a desktop?...not so much the capacities, but the whole tiny but frequent read/write accesses? Have they improved, or is it still the same problem?

Is it safe/reasonable to use mlc style drives (to take advantage of increased capacity), now, or is it best to just stick with slc drives to save the headaches?

Are there potentially any differences between installation in a Windows desktop vs. a Mac desktop? I read some customer reviews on Amazon that suggest that even the initial Win OS installation behavior could become a nightmare (due to all of the read/write operations just to "generate" the OS installation). There was also mention of drastically different disk i/o behavior between Win/ntfs and other OS/file formats which creates a considerable impact in ssd performance (or missing performance, more specifically). It is hinted that this is one of the reasons one might want to stick with an slc device (despite the increased cost and reduced capacity), as opposed to the more cost-friendly mlc device.

Is there anybody who has actually jumped-in with some experimenting on this...worked out their own smooth approach to make it work?

Has anybody
 
They're more reliable than Seagate hard drives.
 
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