Any good solid state IDE or SATA hard drives available yet?

[wnied]

I have a 250GB 7200rpm 16mb cash drive, I'm looking to try to get a 20 - 60GB solid state hard drive that I could install my OS on for boot up, and use the 250 gigger to be a secondary drive....

Anyone try this yet? or know of anyplace to get a Simple Tech Zeus 3.5 inch IDE or SATA drive?

~wnied~

 

[erwos]

20gb-60gb? I'd imagine that's at least several thousand dollars of storage, probably closer to $10k or so. Gigabyte _did_ make a little PCI-powered card with four DDR slots that acted as a SATA drive. It got mixed reviews - actual bandwidth wasn't as impressive as it could be, but seek times were suitably impressive. 8gb is enough to store your Windows partition on, anyways.

I'd go with a Raptor. Much cheaper, and it'd do what you want just as well.

-Erwos

 

[shortylickens]

If you want to increase boot times you need to avoid the flash hard drives for at least a couple years. They're still behind the power curve.

The RAM based HD's are a little faster but very expensive for small capacities.
As flash technology gets better I suspect people will give up on that idea entirely.

 

[Zepper]

Put a couple of Hitachi 7K80 SATA-300 drives in RAID-0 - under $100. for the drives. See my review of the Hitachi here: http://www.techimo.com/reviews/ and follow the links for data on their RAID-0 performance...

.bh.

 

[ForumMaster]

i know that samsung released a solid state 32GB drive. the cost is actually only $960. not several thousand. i suggest getting a raptor instead.

 

[wnied]

I came across a company called Simple Technologies who make a 20 to 60GB IDE or SATA solid state hard drive to replace mechanical drives within industrial machinery. I'm dying to try putting an OS on it to see how quickly it boots. With no mechanical parts to wait to spin up for, why wouldnt performance be instant?

~wnied~

 

[corkyg]

Most of your boot up/load speed is not delayed by the HDD - but by the amount of stuff you load for startup. Just for comparison, what is your present Windows load speed? - start counting after POST and the start beep. Stop when all your icons are stable, including the system tray.

Until we can quantify the problem, we can't provide a cost effective assessment of the solution. I don't think it is too difficult. The current price range of the SimpleTech Zeus drives is $8000 to $50000.

"Zeus SSDs are fully ATA-5-compliant and conform to the same mounting requirements as traditional hard disk drives, making Zeus SSDs drop-in replacements for any standard IDE/ATA-compliant hard disk drive. SimpleTech?s Zeus product line is capable of sustained operation in extreme environmental conditions and complies with military standards, such as MIL-STD-810F. Zeus SSDs offer advanced security features, including secure erase and destructive purge. The security features comply with military standards, including AFSSI 5020, AR 380-19, NAVSO P-5239-26, NISPOM DoD 5220.22-M, and NSA 130-2. SimpleTech?s Zeus SSDs are currently shipping. Price range is $8,000 to $50,000."

 

[razor2025]

you best bet is to have a lean boot partition on a I-RAM. You can shove 4GB of RAM and turn it into fast boot drive.. quite expensive though.

 

[erwos]

"Solid state hard drive" is a particularly bad term at this point, as it could refer to both drives using SDRAM (eg, the SimpleTech one or the Gigabyte iRAM), or drives using flash (eg, the Samsung 32gb one). The former is going to outrun any mechanical hard drive, but is horrifically expensive. The latter should have faster seek times (lower latency) and less horrific expense, but actual transfer speed might be slower than a mechanical hard drive.

In short, solid state drives are probably not what you want. If you want to spend tons of money on a hard drive, a 15k RPM U-SCSI3 drive should fit the bill 🙂.