Originally posted by: IntelUser2000
I don't see SSD's as be-all, end-all solutions like some of you are saying. The biggest problem here is that while they are touted for performance, the performance variations act more "digital" than "analog". At one moment, the SSD performs brilliantly, in another it drops like a rock. No platter HDDs filled to full/near full drops like SSD does, no matter how good the SSD is.
It's very stupid as it makes the advertised capacity irrelevant as the practical capacity is really 70-80%, unlike platter HDDs which doesn't degrade that much when full/near full.
Plus, the cost/GB is ridiculously high. Sure, flash is subject to Moore's law or w/e. Look at magnetic HDD presentations. They scale faster than Moore's law does.
1 Terabyte is at almost the bottom of the barrel pricing.
The thing I want is a well-implemented hybrid solution with very high throughput low-capacity flash(say 8GB with 500MB/s transfer) and a regular drive. Ideally, you'll get the best of both worlds.
I can't tell if your post is restricted to representing your opinion of a static snapshot of the SSD evolution at this very moment in time, or if you are attempting to castigate the entire future lineage of SSD's in fell swoop.
Hard drive manufacturers have run into a problem, and it was no more evident to me than a month ago when I went to buy hard-drives. The problem is their drive capacity trend has outstripped the consumer needs of the vast vast majority of the market.
I don't care whether $75 gets me 500GB, 1TB, or 10TBs...for $65 I can buy all the hard-drive space I need to house my photos and emails for the next 10yrs. It was a little different a decade a go when even the top-range capacity model was barely enough for my datafiles and the top-end model cost $800...but now the price tiers have collapsed so badly that the highest capacity tier (2TB) is a mere $200 SKU but it hardly matters because I can get 1TB drives for $75 and 1TB is about 5x more than my current storage capacity needs.
Sure there are those video-file HTPC examples where 10TB is not enough, and enterprise is enterprise, but the consumer market has pretty much saturated the need for higher capacity drives regardless how cheap they are.
This happened in the digital camera memory market too (and ipod/zune music capacity)...I just bought a 4GB memory stick for $10 just for the hell of it because it was so damn cheap to replace my already more than sufficient 1GB memory stick. I never once in 2yrs came close to filling my 1GB memory stick and I take a lot of pics and videos with my camera, now for $10 I have 4x that capacity. Completely unnecessary. What are they going to sell in 2yrs time? 16GB for 2$? Maybe 1% of the digital camera market would actually need such a product, and the cost to sell it will reflect that.
So that's my view on where spindle-drives are headed. They've exceeded the bounds of the consumer market's needs when it comes to capacity, sans the videophiles, and prices have collapsed ridiculously so.
I don't care to have a 1TB SSD, at any price, all that is relevant to me (and any non-techie I interact with, like family and friends) is that the
absolute price of an SSD of the capacity that tends to address the market's needs (say ~200GB to 400GB) falls to a pricepoint that makes the purchase decision one of "who cares?". At 65$ for 1TB drives I definitely did not care to try and save another $5 by buying a 750GB model, also more capacity than I need, the pricepoint is below what I spend taking my family of four out for Friday night dinner at Red Robin. SSD's of the necessary capacity are only with 2-3yrs of reaching this pricepoint.
