32GB Solid state

option on the Precision range...........

is this the start of the end for mechanical HD drives.....I suppose so.

anyone got one yet.

 

Usually, with mechanical hard drives, you are given a warning that a
hard drive is about to fail. My mother's profile on her PC running
Windows XP was corrupted. I attempted to copy the profile over to
another partition and got a CRC error. Immediately checked the event
log and sure enough: Windows XP was logging hard disk errors starting 3
days prior.

Was able to Ghost the disk to another disk using the -FRO option
(ignore errors) without problems, but what of SSD drives? Currently a
128GB SSD drive goes for $3219.99 and supports a limited amount of
erase and write cycles. One place they do make sense is laptops since
they are subjected to vibration and stress.

Probably more likely to see hybrid designs such as those with
ReadyDrive then a complete replacement.

Adam

 

indeed the beginning of the end of mechanical disks.
however, they are quite expensive and not as fast, yet.
though they can be dropped without consequence, and are resistant to
magnetism and even water.
they are also probably lower power consuming.
announcements are popping up often these days with new advancements in ssd
technology.

 

I also wonder if it's the beginning of the end (and if so, Sandisk
SNDK might be a good investment esp. after it taking a hit).

From the press so far, there is very little advantage for the solid
state drives. Battery life on one laptop for example was only about
5-10 minutes more, because, the article said, the laptop hard drive
used in the comparison used very little power.

Also, is speed noticeable? I forgot what the article said but from
what I remember the advantage of the solid state 64GB drive at this
point wasn't great.

An analogy that is easy for me to see is the iPod Classic vs. iPod
Touch and iPhone storage size.

I could get:

- A 32 GB iPod Touch for $499 (ouch) that uses solid state storage.

Or

- A 160 GB iPod Classic for $349 that use a hard drive for storage.

User interfaces aside, what is the difference, to me, of the two
technologies.

The solid state storage is more expensive, probably uses less power
for storage, and is probably faster acessing storage.

However.

The storage-related advantages are NIL.

The iPod Classic is:

- As fast as I could want it, faster wouldn't be noticeable.

- For all practical purposes, has unlimited battery life because it
would take days of moderate use listening to music (a few hours / day)
before the battery would be even close to needing a recharge.

(I realize the comparison above isn't Apples to Apples but it's close
enough to be accurate I think)

I think mechanical hard drives still have a lot of life left to them
in the product development cycle.

When solid state drives are 128 GB, giving very little noticeable
speed increase and negligible battery life differences, a notebook's
hard drive might be 500 GB or a Terabyte.

I would have thought other factors would come into play too, such as
size of the laptop, but the MacBook Air puts that notion to rest.

I did a Google search for the article I remember reading but can't
find it, but if you enter "compair MacBook Air solid state drive" into
a Google search you'll find some articles. Here's one:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-ssd-review.ars

I could be dead wrong on a number of the points above though and may
be completely missing something, so am interested in hearing what
others think.