http://www.toshiba.com/taec/Catalo [...] yid=900314

I know ram drives and SSDs have been around for a while. They seem to be on the edge of mainstreem. If the performance per dollar gets equivalent to HDs, i would think it would be a better choice. Several companies are making these now; samsung and toshiba are 2. With manufacturers like them marketing and mass manufacturing SSDs, the price could come down rather quickly.

would you use one for a gaming machine? would it be a huge benefit? Would this reduce the requirements for RAM/virtual memory/paging files?

Obviously, i don't know much about SSDs, but this seems very cool. No moving parts are always better. On first glance, i would think it would be a better investment than HDs if priced the same.

SSD is only a different storage type. It has nothing to do with "RAM/virtual memory/paging files".

Why SSD? It faster, use less energy, no seek time, no moving part, constant transfer speed.
Why not? Very very expensive, hold less.

Will take a while until the price per GB match an SSD.

Anyone can correct me or add pro/con.

That sommed it up pretty nice.

Another drawback are the limited write-cycles flash memory has. They try to circumvent it by adding some logic to the drive that makes sure no part of the HDD gets written to more than others. I've read a test a while ago about someone using an USB stick to boot windows. The flash memory broke after a few months of usage. Since USB sticks usually don't have the write-logic a SSD drive has, they will break a whole lot sooner.

500GB SATA HDD for $100. Nuff Said.

Yeah, i agree at the present time, it makes better financial sense to stay with HDs.

The Toshibas article has some life cycle info that looks good. The technology will only get better. I imagine over the next five years, SSDs will become competitive with HDs. Outside capacity and price, i think it is a good option. Once they get the price and capacity equivalent to HDs, SSDs will take off. Maybe more so for notebooks, because of size, lower power requirements and shock resistance. What does the new Apple Air use for storage?

Edit: the Air has an option for a 64G SSD.

The basic package comes with a 1,8" mechanical hdd. Could've been even smaller, but without doubt mechanical. For some extra cash Apple offers SSD drives.

Yeah, but it adds another $1,000 to the price.

It would be interesting to have the 128G SSD for OS and a few games...And just have a cheap 500gig Sata for storage.

You get more than just a SSD for that $1000.

You already have a nice rig!

some important thing to take under consideration for all non SOTA (state of t art) but backwardrobe compatible folks (ha! folks) out there,

this solid state drive you pointed there is an ata II drive, i maintain laptops for quite a while and when they release the new standard of byte depth the ata III and above , lots of laps dancers out there couldnt go above the 125 - 250 Gb .

most ata II at 125 - 250 gb use an internal converter of the ata III to ata II so the byte depth works in the computer.

funny this is i was about to buy one , a magnetic hd that is, but since the market caps me to 250 gb and the price of
these is in the 150 $ / 200$ with delivery to public, the choice of having a noiseless per read laptop, and that i can
rest it on my 200W coiled speakers , is an oubvious switch to me,

if you dont care were its gonna rest on, or near of , go full throttle on the sold state my friend, you wont end up with a
damaged up smart table, but if you want a long smooth old school run mabe the hdd has proven its long run

difficult choice hey

n1ght

It's an old thread but will add this:

We built a new server and I requested having 4 SSD OCZ 32GB. We added an Adaptec 5805 RAID card. We configured the SSD in RAID-5 (90GB). It hold only our PostgreSQL database.

I tried HD Tach and got a result of 400MB/Sec read. WOW! It's fast!

We just need more Manufacturer so the prices will be more affordable!

Try IOmeter and some random writes. From what I've found, most are blazing fast on reads, but most can't cut it will small writes (though a few are phenomenal).