Solid State Hard drives

[Intelman07]

When do you think solid state drives will come down in price and become 20GB+!! This would speed up the computer alot!

 

[bluemax]

I did see a battery-backed-up PCI card that featured ~4GB worth of RAM. The thing was INSANELY fast, but as expensive as RAM + the $400 card itself.
Great for anyone who needs it for a job though.

But leaving the magnetic platter? Who knows. So far it's doing not halfway bad - at least for average Joe User.

 

[Viper GTS]

Considering the memory density that would be required to make any decent amount of HD space in any decent amount of physical space, it will probably be a while.

Consider a 1 GB PC100 DIMM costs around $250, you would need 20 of those to make your 20 GB drive - at a cost of $5,000.

20 1 GB DIMMS would take up significantly more space than a 100+ GB HD, plus you have to worry about volatility.

It would be nice, but it will be a while.

Viper GTS

 

[Woodchuck2000]

20 1 GB DIMMS would take up significantly more space than a 100+ GB HD, plus you have to worry about volatility.

But 20 1Gb compact-flash cards would be smaller than a 3.5" hard disk. The only considerations are speed and price. I've seen 10 gig solid state drives floating around, but they're still slower than a hard disk and about 50x the price.

 

[FishTankX]

I think what would be really neat is have a 256MB flash buffer (won't add more than 100$ to the price of a harddisk) where the most frequently accessed system files are cached. The most frequently hit files would be moved to flash. In that case, if you cached all of XP's boot files and most of the applications you have in your startup folder you could probably cold boot your computer in less than 20 seconds.

 

[Viper GTS]

Originally posted by: Woodchuck2000

20 1 GB DIMMS would take up significantly more space than a 100+ GB HD, plus you have to worry about volatility.

But 20 1Gb compact-flash cards would be smaller than a 3.5" hard disk. The only considerations are speed and price. I've seen 10 gig solid state drives floating around, but they're still slower than a hard disk and about 50x the price.

Compact flash cards are significantly slower than regular PC memory, they're slower than HD's.

Also, I don't know where you're getting that solid state drives are slower than regular platter based HD's, their access time is rated in NANOSECONDS, and even extremely slow memory has the ability to saturate a SCSI U320 bus.

Viper GTS