I'm sticking with my 8 inch floppies!

nightsky

It's an excruciating thing-- to be on the cusp of the slowest avalanche in history. We've been waiting for SSDs to pick up critical momentum for what feels like years... and every time we hear about the (relatively) slow movements of manufacturers like Seagate, we're reminded that for most applications, this is tech that's so close, yet so far. When will the stuff be the standard and cost-effective? Wake me up when we get there, please.

wild homes loves you but chooses darkness!

They are getting cheap check newegg i found a 64gb patriot ssd for about 170 dollars. This is about the price i paid 8 or 9 months ago for my 74gb 10k rpm raptor so i would say its coming down and affordable now

Digitallysick

I'm happy to say I've already gotten into one via my little netbook!

Bring 'em!

strider_mt2k

@CYST!: No, I'll be right there along side you.

Jrsy is the dude, playing the dude, disguised as another dude

Once cheap 160 to 320 GB SSDs come out I'll buy one for the PS3 so I'll never have to be OC about head crashes ever again.
I got nervous once because I heard a squealing noise and it froze when I was copying a video file to the PS3 a week ago. However it still seems to be running fine now.

Nintenboy01

Don't worry, there will always be a Maxtor available in your price range...

pdok

Finally. Hopefully other big disk names will follow suit.

It's about time we stepped up the movement to phase out one of the last crucial mechanical components in a standard PC.

Cooling fans, we're coming for you next!

D0rk

At the rate SSDs are advancing in price and capacity I'll be using one for my primary drive (OS, games) in my next computer and multiple terabytes of HDDs as storage.

Chewbenator

The switch to SDD is fine and all put we need to see higher capcities and cheaper prices. I know Seagates entry into the market will faciliate cheaper prices but what about larger sizes. I needs me a terabyte in ssd for about $120

GHETTO.CHiLD

I'm gonna be the last guy using HDD's....

CYST!

And SSDs cost more. Aiming for the corporate market first is dumb, unless Seagate can match HDD's per-GB price.

At the end of the day, bosses don't care about background noise - at least not as much as the bottom line. Plus, drive noise is white noise; it's not like drives sound like klaxons or giant cathedral bells.

If I'm upgrading 100 workstations and SSD adds 40% to the cost for comparable space, I'll buy HDD instead.

OMG! Ponies!

Quick question about SSD drives, write intensive activities are no longer an issue right?
I recall flash memory used to have a limit of like 100,000 writes but these drives would distribute the ware evenly and make that issue obsolete correct? Because as power hungry, warm, and noisy those spinning platters are, as of right now that's one of the advantages in my mind. I don't think there are known limits of magnetic particle flipping.

But yes, I can't wait to upgrade my laptop to a solid state drive. I want a 160gb at... $80 drive that performs like a 7200rpm drive with the durability for me to leave it ON in my backpack between classes! :D

awdark

@D0rk:

cooling fans should go first... they suck the most power HDDs do not suck as much as fans

alin0steglinski

@GHETTO.CHiLD:

1TB SSD now is unheard of... it will probably cost a fortune... hence for us data eaters we will be HDD as only choice... same goes for servers.

alin0steglinski

@Jrsy is the dude, playing the dude, disguised as another du...:

ill be right with you... i do not like the idea of going SSD... there is no reason to throw away great techology we have... wait till we see 1 TB SSDs then i will THINK about it... but i want prices to be in line with hard drives.

to be honest... i think the hard drive will continue to live alongside the SSD and probably be the most popular in consumer computing for people who want economical reliable data storage at the cost of a little bit of battery juice... SSD is still not that much more efficient when it comes to battery life.

alin0steglinski

Watch for the next step in this direction, hybrid HDD. It'll have SSD on the front end for faster data transfer/cashing but still have disk on the backend for the most reliable storage... It'd be the best of both worlds.

Truth Bringer :D

@nightsky: Ha! I have one hanging on the wall at work, people think it's a novelty "enlarged" 5.25"

spaceman37

@alin0steglinski:

I'm with you on that.

GHETTO.CHiLD

@Chewbenator:
You know I said the same thing but when I thought about my computer usuage I realized I would never do that. That was my intention with the last computer I built (to have a fast hdd and secondary storage) but then I barely ever used the storage. This time around I decided to put my 2 750gb hdd's into a raid 0 and just have all of the space reflected in one drive letter.

GHETTO.CHiLD

@Truth Bringer :D:

hydbrid drives sounds good to me :D

alin0steglinski

@OMG! Ponies!:

i honestly will miss the sound of my drives when we move to SSD :(

but HAH! i still have my server.. which is NOT going SSD>..

servers will stay HDD for quite a while... i mean there are millions of servers in the country, with 10's of millions of drives, aint no way servers are gonna go to SSD and move all that data to them. they will wait till the last minute to do that.

alin0steglinski

@Digitallysick:

64 GB is expensive for 200 bucks... multiply tha by 10 and you get a 600 GB for 2000 bucks... forget it... imagine a 1TB for 4000 dollars... i need 1TBs in the 200 dollar range before i touch SSSD

alin0steglinski

@wild homes loves you but chooses darkness!: never. The mechanisms in a HDD will always be cheaper than a SSD. SSDs will get cheaper yes, but HHDs will always be bigger, and cheaper because of the nature of the product.

OletheaEurystheus

@alin0steglinski: Was going to say other than speed there is absolutely NOTHING to justify the costs of SSD over HDD tech. The supposed power savings are non-existent in most testing and for most consumers there is little need for the speed, and for most corporate/education settings, there is a massive push back toward mainframe/terminal infrastructure because its a hell of a lot cheaper to support and most office workers have no need for the independence of their own computer.

OletheaEurystheus

@OMG! Ponies!:

I hear what you are saying but it isn't necasserly about noise and workstations, it's about heat and speed. If you are running a server farm that is hosting tons of data you want speed and you want everything to be cool. Cooling a server farm is expensive. If you talk to other network and system admins I think they would agree that they would trade in hdd's if they could have managable, reliable ssd server farms.

GHETTO.CHiLD

@OMG! Ponies!:

I don't know where you work but where I do I can assure you that our focus is on the ability for the client to access their data at a moments notice. Maybe in other orginizations that is not the case but where I work the main focus of our servers is data access and physical space needed. Our data center(s) are some of the largest in the country so size, heat and speed are our concerns. But it differs for everyone. If you're cheap you can always stay hdd.

GHETTO.CHiLD

@GHETTO.CHiLD: seconded

scarbrtj

@GHETTO.CHiLD: Excellent point.

Can SSD servers be run for a comparable price point as an HDD server? This includes scalability and reliability. Do they fail more or less often that HDD? How do they stack up across brands? Is a Seagate SSD more reliable than a Western Digital or Hitachi HDD? Can it handle the load better? Will they run "greener" and if so, is the energy savings enough for a press release to aid in PR?

The CIO and CTO don't really care what the server is running under the hood as long as it's best for the bottom line. Convince the Board and the IT department will follow.

OMG! Ponies!

@alin0steglinski:

I'm not looking at it from a electricity standpoint.

I'd rather a fan in my case fail mechanically than a hard drive.

D0rk

@GHETTO.CHiLD: have fun seeing ur data crash and burn....

since u said u dont need that much storage... backup!!

taking_this_easy

@Truth Bringer :D:

i am soooo there for this. ssd for prefetch will keep xp alive FOREVER!!!!!!!

godwhacker

@D0rk:

noooooo!!!! not my pretty blue led cooling fans!!!!
never!!!!!!

godwhacker

SSD's in my mind are the future, there's no doubt about that. However aren't we jumping the gun? I mean look at the news about HD's, were still innovating. Now these days I see 1TB consumer hard drives! WOW! Look at today's SSD drives, currently their at 128GB (i guess). Price per GB, hard drives reign supreme. All I'm saying maybe 2010 SSD.

Samuel Wat

@Chewbenator: Already doing this. I run my OS on a 32GB SSD and have 1 internal TB drive and 2 external TB drives. My most accessed data is on the internal TB, that way I can turn off my external drives when they are not needed.

bucho54

Until SSDs can consistently and reliably outperform my desktop 15k SAS [Raided] hard drives -- and at a reasonable price point; I'll be sticking with SAS HDs.

WasabiX

@bucho54: the problem with your idea is that you forget that one of the few components, the memory chip it's self, is actually a very hard thing to produce and not because of market demand as much as its just a technically challenging product. They get ecstatic when they get yields in the thousands when with HDDs we are talking about MILLIONS of the pieces involved in their production being made in a day. And sometimes they are tossing out whole wafers due to failures, which is why RAM prices where always so volatile.

We have a long long way to go before SSD will ever catch up to the price of HDD, and in all likelihood, it will never happen unless some amazing process for chip manufacturing comes into existence.

OletheaEurystheus

@Samuel Wat: @WasabiX: I've ran both. SSD wins in speed, but obviously price/GB is waaaayyyy off.

bucho54

@awdark: This is still an issue to some degree. 100K writes is not true across the board. There are different levels of quality in any drive and they all have different amount of writes. When using an SSD you do not want to write to it in the same way you do on a HDD. There are several tweaks that are recommended such as disabling page file, no defrag, no drive indexing, etc. Defrag, for example should be turned off so that the drive can wear evenly across all the flash. If you constantly defrag a SSD then the "beginning" of the drive will wear out faster then it is supposed to.

bucho54

@OletheaEurystheus: You couldn't be more wrong. As SSDs become the mainstream the price shift will occur. Don't get me wrong this is far out on the horizon. There are far less components in a SSD than a HDD. As the need for SSDs outgrows HDDs, the cost of manufacturing will decrease for the SSDs, and it will increase for the HDDs. Supply and demand.

bucho54

@OletheaEurystheus: I'm not forgetting the memory chip. That was part of my point. When companies manufacture more and more of a product (the memory chips), the manufacturing process ALWAYS get better (faster and cheaper). I agree with the first part of your last statement, we DO have a LONG way to go. That might be why I said it is far out on the horizon. However, saying that it will never happen is just plain ignorance.

bucho54

The place where you'll see high-end SLC SSDs are largely database servers that do a lot of random seeking.

This is where SSDs not just beat out 15K SAS arrays, but completely obliterate them. We're not talking increases of 15 or 20%, but more like 1 to 2 orders of magnitude (1000 - 10,000%). You'll start seeing these disks showing up in SANs in relatively short order to serve applications that have lots and lots of random I/O. Not for high sustained transfer rates, not for lots of storage, but for when random reads are all you do. And there's a lot of OLTP systems that can definitely see some very impressive gains from these drives.

MrFoof

@bucho54: if you still feel safer with paging enabled then you can set the page file to a hd or a smaller and cheaper ssd or sdcard...just dont eject the sd card if you ever take that route :P

urbanturban666

only way to really drive down the price is if we all start buying them....or we all stop... the price will drop if the amount of ssd buyers creeps upwards or downwards...i can see the laptop market slowly making the switch...kinda reminds me of the old 4x 600$ cd burners...except i waited till burners were like 80$ :P

urbanturban666

Val Henson (Linux filesystem hacker) isn't convinced:
[valhenson.livejournal.com]

In short, if you're using something that presents itself to the OS as a drive and takes care of wear leveling itself, it's probably doing a braindead job of it. It'd be better if these devices presented themselves to the OS as memory devices, not drives.

Matthew Miller

@OletheaEurystheus:

It'll be a laptop thing.

Droppy droppy.

mergedwarrior

my eee 1000 has an sasd, and I love that about it. It may be only an 8gb and 32gb drive, but it's good enough to squeeze vista home premium with vlite and a few applications on the 8GB (32gb is SLOOOW).

My desktop, I like the hard drive in it because it's a 1TB and it fits everything I need on it.

My main laptop (HP DV7-1025NR) has 2 Hard drives (250 and 320GB's). I don't need the space on that machine. I think that in 4-8 years we'll be seeing most laptops either come with the option for SSD, or sometimes SSD for OS and HDD for media, so like a 64-128GB SSD for os and applications, and a 320gb or more HDD in the second bay for your media. The battery life, speed and reliability would still be there, but for the people needing the space for their media, they will still have to be careful with their laptop.

Unless...

We could do something where we have a 128GB or more SSD in the laptop, and store all of our media in the cloud, because think about it. 4 or more years from now, we will probably have some pretty good cloud OS's or some other form of cloud computing compared to today. Maybe then SSD's will make sense. Store everything on servers with HDD's and your OS and programs locally on your fast but loer capacity SSD. Makes sense, right??

Sam_Zebian

@OletheaEurystheus:
hand cranks, screws and dials are much cheaper to produce than etched silicon, yet i seem to be seeing more microprocessors than babbage difference engines.

willyolio

The article doesn't mention that they're in the process of closing down their research facility in Pittsburgh.

NanMus