Solid state drives

[xcellerate]

I see that the new apple Air has an SSD in it, I've read benchmarks and the performance benefits seem pretty cool, does anyone actually run one? How are they?

 

[VictimOfScience]

I have no clue, but I think the idea of installing your OS on a 40GB SSD and then having a 500GB HDD to accompany it is pimp. Someone correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't the OS load like lightning???

 

[Naudian]

Ooo this is news to me.

*googles*

 

[Asus]

Still pretty expensive. Just under $40 per GB for the one in the link below. They don't have as high of a burst speed but they start at near top transfer speeds with no spin up and hold that speed.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3167&p=3

RAM drives (not SSD but cards that hold regular RAM sticks) are a bit faster yet I think but they always require power to hold the data.
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/9312/4

 

[Eejit]

Will be interesting as they're developed more and price goes down/performance goes up.

At the moment they're far too expensive to be worth it for 99.999% of people.

 

[xcellerate]

yea 32gb in SATA is about $400...but I'm sure there's some hardcore people out there who would buy it. That's newegg price, btw.

 

[theotherguy]

Consumer reports says that performance is not any better on the loading of programs but that it is 40 percent faster in defrag.

They say at the moment prices are not worth the benifits.

 

[WhiteZero]

Still pretty expensive. Just under $40 per GB for the one in the link below. They don't have as high of a burst speed but they start at near top transfer speeds with no spin up and hold that speed.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3167&p=3

Dont forget they have the fastest Random Access speeds.

RAM drives (not SSD but cards that hold regular RAM sticks) are a bit faster yet I think but they always require power to hold the data.
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/9312/4

Yup, but I think any RAM Drive cards have a battery backup. See the Gigabyte i-RAM card.

 

[-Psy-]

I think I'll be getting me one of those i-Ram cards once they release a DDR2 version. It's simply amazing. :O

 

[WhiteZero]

I think I'll be getting me one of those i-Ram cards once they release a DDR2 version. It's simply amazing. :O

And expensive...
You'll be better off waiting for SSD hard drives to be more affordable.

 

[Sanada]

Aren't they're meant to be HHD (Hybrid Hard Drives) available now? I never seen one for sale so I doubt so but I'd imagine they'd be cheaper than SSD's. They're basically disc based drives with a large FLASH buffer of about 256MB+. Frequency used data, like OS files, is loaded into the buffer to reduce normal disc usage and load faster.

 

[Asus]

Aren't they're meant to be HHD (Hybrid Hard Drives) available now? I never seen one for sale so I doubt so but I'd imagine they'd be cheaper than SSD's. They're basically disc based drives with a large FLASH buffer of about 256MB+. Frequency used data, like OS files, is loaded into the buffer to reduce normal disc usage and load faster.

I think there are but they are just laptop drives. I mean the spin speed on them is slow.