Solid state hard drives

[Intelman07]

How soon will we see them in Gigabytes and at a good price?

 

[Wolfsraider]

3 things that should never be in the same sentance:

solid state,gigabyte,good priced

even if these become available what would stop them from pricing them higher than scsi?

and i have never heard (except in special marketing promotions) scsi refered to as good priced.

when computers are in the 8 ghz to 10 ghz then maybe these will become available at a resonable cost for the majority.

seriously the average computer user is still trying to make do with a p-3 or less or a thunderbird or less
if and when the average consumer is willing to shell out the money for the newer technology,and the market for these drives increase i doubt you will see a price drop within the next year.

that doesn't mean they won't come down in price as eventually everything does but only that good priced to you may be very different to someone else.
as usual this is my humble opinion
mike

 

[Intelman07]

How many years till this takes off? 1,2,3,4,5 or more?

 

[zephyrprime]

About as soon as they figure out a cure for cancer, aids, and invent the flying car.

Seriously, currently a solid state hard drive is nothing more than a whole lot of ordinary flash ram stuck together. It costs even more than an equal amount of flash ram.

We should put this question in the faq because it frequently asked.

 

[Howard]

Why not "solid state" and "gigabyte" together in the same sentence? Pretty soon 155GB drives will hit the market, and with arrays, you can have as much as you like.

 

[LH]

Pretty soon 155GB drives will hit the market,

Uh where have you been? Seagate and other manufactures have had 180GB HDDs for quite awhile now. Maxtor and Western Digital have 200GB drives as well, Im sure theres others equal are larger as well.

 

[thomsbrain]

i wouldn't mind having a solid state ATA drive that i could put windows on though. mmm, bootups would be nice and quick.

 

[Bovinicus]

It will probably be quite a while before anything like that happens. I would estimate 10 years. The technology is still in it's infancy right now. It might be viable in 5-8 years for super high-end computers. It will probably be more like 10 years before it enters the mainstream. Of course, that is just a rough estimate with very little information to go on. It's really hard to predict.

 

[ed21x]

i'd say the technology is here right now, as you can find in your compactflash, SD, and Smart Media cards out there. Just the price for a 1 gb CF card will cost you an arm and a leg. With CF advanceing so fast, i really wouldn't be surprised to see a very expensive model coming out sometime in the next 2-3 years

 

[Pariah]

"Uh where have you been? Seagate and other manufactures have had 180GB HDDs for quite awhile now. Maxtor and Western Digital have 200GB drives as well, Im sure theres others equal are larger as well."

He's talking about a 155GB solid state drive. Some company announced one, but I couldn't find any of their products anywhere. Looked like the Bitboys of storage.

"i'd say the technology is here right now, as you can find in your compactflash, SD, and Smart Media cards out there."

You wouldn't want to use any of these for main storage. The fastest compactflash cards read data at around 4MB/s with writes even slower. Smartmedia is in the same vicinity.

By the time SSD drives as we know them become viable consumer products, something better will probably already be available.

 

[Howard]

Er, LH, what's the title of the thread?

These Bitboys Oy wannabes already have 75GB versions on the market. Specs aren't too bad either (worlds ahead of mechanical-based storage).

BiTmicro

 

[Howard]

It will probably be quite a while before anything like that happens. I would estimate 10 years. The technology is still in it's infancy right now. It might be viable in 5-8 years for super high-end computers. It will probably be more like 10 years before it enters the mainstream. Of course, that is just a rough estimate with very little information to go on. It's really hard to predict.

I'll bet the US military already has a bunch of these. Shock resistance, if nothing else (and there are a lot of other things going for them, too).

 

[ai42]

Sure the technology exists today to do it. But two things.

There is really no R&D into solid state drives right now. So you won't see it anytime soon.

Two there is extremely high costs involved, and who's to say IBM's holographic platters or whatever the heck they are doing won't exceed current solid state drive speeds? Honestly just a few years ago data buses couldn't push 1Gb a second and now we are up to 8-12+ gb/s. Who's to say mechanical hard drives will not get so fast it solid state drives will not justify the cost?

 

[Toxic]

I don't think we'll ever see them used except in special circumstances. By the time that technology matures, other technologies will be equal or surpassing them. In other words 10-15 years.

 

[Howard]

There is really no R&D into solid state drives right now.

Can you provide proof that this statement is true?

 

[Toolman]

BitMicro stated that prices drop approximately 50% every year. By my calculations it'll be 5 to 6 years before they are priced comparably with todays top notch 10K SCSI drives.

 

[CZroe]

http://www.platypus-technology.com/

 

[Pariah]

10K SCSI drives have dropped to under $100 at Newegg. It is highly unlikely at best that we will see large capacity solid state HD's for $100 in 5 years. And that completely ignores the advances that will be made in mechanical drives. Using SCSI's past to predict the future (double capacity every year, higher spin rate every 3-4 years), in 5 years we'll have drives 2 spin rate generations past 15k (25k?), and "old school" 15k drives with 2.5 terabytes of capacity.

 

[Dug]

but I couldn't find any of their products anywhere

That's because they are only selling to specific partners

 

[Toolman]

BitMicro stated that prices drop approximately 50% every year. By my calculations it'll be 5 to 6 years before they are priced comparably with todays top notch 10K SCSI drives.

Todays top notch SCSI drives in the 36 gig size range, like Seagate's 3rd version of their 15K Cheetah are in the $350.00+ range (give or take $50.00), or they will be when they are more available. Quantum/Maxtor have a new 15k model in the works as well as a new Atlas 10K4 that will also be in that price range. So, in 5
or 6 six years a 36 gig solid state harddrive should be in the $350 to $400 dollar range.

 

[bluemax]

15k RPM SCSI drives must generate a TON of noise and heat... If money weren't so tight, 8GB on a PCI card would be very, very nice. Even 2GB for that matter.... main Windows drive.