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We are starting to get to a point for at least laptops that this could really become an interesting technology!

Nov 29, 08 - 10:17 am Comment from: Macintosher

So theoretically, we're looking at a 300GB memory sticks sometime around 2010?

Nov 29, 08 - 11:02 am Comment from: DLMeyer

250/100 is slower than 220/200? And that is read/write numbers? Yet they said "typically sees solid state drives write data much slower than they can read it", didn't they? The numbers suggesting that each writes at least a little faster than they read? Yeah, I ask my computer to "read" much more often than I ask it to "write", so the 10-12% difference might - MAYBE - make a modest difference.
For me, the more important issue is cost. I've been told that Flash Drive prices are dropping much faster than Hard Drive prices. It really only takes one Hard Landing to make the FD a better buy.

Great... now if they would just make the damn things affordable...

Nov 29, 08 - 11:23 am Comment from: Cubert

Now if they can just break the $1000 barrier.

Nov 29, 08 - 11:30 am Comment from: HMCIV

The day I have to carry around a 200 GB powerpoint presentation or spreadsheet is the day I hang up my mouse and raise llamas in the Andes.

Nov 29, 08 - 12:30 pm Comment from: Wandering joe

"The day I have to carry around a 200 GB powerpoint presentation or spreadsheet is the day I hang up my mouse and raise llamas in the Andes."
icaled

Nov 29, 08 - 12:44 pm Comment from: Tiger

"The day I have to carry around a 200 GB powerpoint presentation or spreadsheet is the day I hang up my mouse and raise llamas in the Andes."

That would have to be a Keynote presentation, HMCIV!

PowerPoint can't handle such large file sizes.

@DL
"The numbers suggesting that each writes at least a little faster than they read? Yeah, I ask my computer to "read" much more often than I ask it to "write", so the 10-12% difference might - MAYBE - make a modest difference."

Being able to write just 100MB/sec when the same device can read 220MB/sec represents more than a "modest difference". The device reads 120% faster, not 10-12%.

Nov 29, 08 - 12:57 pm Comment from: Mr. Reeee

Hard Drive SPEED is as important as capacity. Anything slower than the equivalent of a 7200 rpm hard drive is unacceptable for me. mac OS X uses some form of virtual memory and hard drive speed has a big impact on overall performance.

The article contains no speed comparisons between 4200/5400/7200 rpm hard drives and the SSD drives mentioned in the article.

No prices, either

The day I have to carry around a 200 GB powerpoint presentation or spreadsheet is the day I hang up my mouse and raise llamas in the Andes.

Remember when we carried around multiple apps and documents, together, on 140k floppies?

Be careful where you draw that line.

Nov 29, 08 - 02:44 pm Comment from: El Guapo

@old school
Remember when we carried around multiple apps and documents, together, on 140k floppies?

I remember the 1.4MB floppies, the 800K floppies, and even the 400K floppies. I don't remember the 140K floppies. Were they the 5.25" disks (that were really floppy)?

Nov 29, 08 - 03:07 pm Comment from: DLMeyer

Spark said: "Being able to write just 100MB/sec when the same device can read 220MB/sec represents more than a "modest difference". The device reads 120% faster, not 10-12%"
Not the way I read it. Read is 250 vs 220 while Write is 100 vs 200. Read is slightly faster for one while Write is MUCH faster for the other - except I don't do a lot of writing. So, being able to WRITE 120%(?) faster is not a huge bonus for me. Of course, YMMV.

@El Guapo,

There was an 8" disk. I actually saw one in a classroom situation. The teacher said it must hold twice as much data due to its size! Ha. Even then I knew better than that.

The floppies you're thinking of were the 5.25" kind. At first they were single sided. Then the double sided, double density came out. Those could hold a whopping 360 KB. There were many flavors but eventually we had the 720k and 1.44 Meg 3.5" "floppy" drives.

The NeXTcube and NeXtstation introduced a 2.88 Meg but it arrived too late to make much of a splash.

Like so many things in this industry, standards were in place and the best technology doesn't always win out. At least not in quantity of use. By the time it is available it can be obsolete.

Nov 29, 08 - 03:15 pm Comment from: DLMeyer

old school said: "apps and documents, together, on 140k floppies"
Actually, I remember having a dual-drive system with 90K in each, the app and system on one and the docs on the other. Then I upgraded and installed a 128K RAM Disk so I only needed the Docs disk to make it work - and bought some speed in the process!
Those were THE DAYS! Programmers spent more time tweaking their apps than actually writing them! You could actually get some work done with a 64K system at 4KHz.

Nov 29, 08 - 03:35 pm Comment from: ken1w

You can now get 16GB into a Micro SDHC card that's only 15 millimeters long and 11 wide (one inch is about 25 mm)

http://www.sandisk.com/products/ProductDetails.aspx?CatID=1117&ProductId=2702

With the volume of a 2.5-inch hard drive to work with, I'm sure it would be very easy to make a 1GB SSD. The only thing holding them back is the retail price for such a product. But cost is heading down at a rapid pace. At some point soon, the SSD will be cheaper than the same size and capacity hard drive.

Nov 29, 08 - 05:46 pm Comment from: qka

I'm sure it would be very easy to make a 1GB SSD

Maybe you meant 1TB? Making a 1 GB drive would be going backwards.

As for all you old timers - do any of you still have any 8" floppies around? I do, but I have nothing to read them on. I also have a 14" 5 MB hard disk. (Yes kiddies, those numbers and units are correct.)

Not the way I read it. Read is 250 vs 220 while Write is 100 vs 200. Read is slightly faster for one while Write is MUCH faster for the other - except I don't do a lot of writing. So, being able to WRITE 120%(?) faster is not a huge bonus for me. Of course, YMMV.

You *think* you don't write. Actually you do. A lot. The OS does it behind the scenes all the time, through virtual memory —there's other stuff that uses it too like application tmp files, document auto-saving, caching, system maintenance, logs, etc.

My main issue with SSD's is that Adobe CS4 apps will not run on them. Not sure if they will enable SSD capability in CS5 or not. Also, current HD's are at 1.5TB now, so SSD's will need to make a MUCH bigger jump in size, performance and match the price in order for the demand to be greater. Why buy one of these for anything but a laptop or keychain drive when SATA is cheaper?

The interesting thing is of course that Apple invested $500 M in the joint Intel Micron venture, and also prepaid for a buttload of FLASH from them. Can you imagine a > 256 GB iPhone? Just sayin.

rws writes, "There were many flavors but eventually we had the 720k and 1.44 Meg 3.5" "floppy" drives."

How curious that the 3.5" floppy has remained unchanged in performance since it first appeared circa 1984, while every other PC component - disk, CPU, RAM, display, etc. - has improved by orders of magnitude. It took Apple to push for its retirement.

Nov 30, 08 - 11:35 am Comment from: MacLovin

ummm.... qka? I am very interested to see a hard drive thats 14" accross, but I couldn't find any pictures of one on google image search... wanna help?

Nov 30, 08 - 11:51 am Comment from: DogGone

Alienware are now selling a 128GB SSD for $550. Last year Apple first sold a 64GB SSD for $1K. So the price is dropping , capacity and speed are increasing rapidly.

My guess is than in 2 years 1TB will be available and ~$300. In 5 years SSD will be ubiquitous.

I can't imagine the form factor will stay at 2.5" for long either.

Hard Drive SPEED is as important as capacity. Anything slower than the equivalent of a 7200 rpm hard drive is unacceptable for me. mac OS X uses some form of virtual memory and hard drive speed has a big impact on overall performance.

That is a fact. OS X will page out memory to the hard drive if you don't have enough RAM to cover open apps and files plus about 1.5GB for OS X. this seriously affects performance because the hard drive is slower than RAM.

Some apps, like Adobes, page out to disk regardless because of the huge image files, but will perform a lot better with huge amounts of RAM and a page out disk/fast boot drive. Check out the Adobe forums for the current speed tweaks or Barefeats.

If you got a MacPro, slap a couple of 10,000 RPM WD Raptors in a RAID 0 and clone your boot drive over to it (bootcamp cloning requires Winclone in addition) and set that bad boy as your boot drive.

Of course a very big limiting factor is the current crop of Intel processors with severly limited bus speeds. Too many engines and only a funnel to channel the power through.

Got I miss the dual processor G5's with their 1GHz FSB PER PROCESSOR....

*cries*

Nov 30, 08 - 12:18 pm Comment from: DLMeyer

Maclovin said: "I am very interested to see a hard drive thats 14" accross, but I couldn't find any pictures of one on google image search"
Yer asking a lot of my old brain, but I'll try. I think the very earliest HDs, right after the Drums, were 14" across. Look for them on the 1960s and 1970s IBM and DEC systems ... maybe others as well, but my memory doesn't cover those. While the DRIVES were huge, the storage capacities - by today's standards - were not. Heck, a 256K memory module was taller, deeper and wider than I am - even today. Monsters!

Nov 30, 08 - 04:27 pm Comment from: WriterGuy

I remember saying in the early 1980s, when the first IBM XT computers came out, that why would you need a 10MB hard drive? How many files did you need to store.

How little we knew...

Nov 30, 08 - 04:33 pm Comment from: TheConfuzed1

I want one in my iPhone. :D

How much slower is a SSD vs DRAM? In a few years we might not need DRAM anymore!

I'm a little curious to see the comparisons between current laptop 5400/7200 drives and the SSD's in performance. A price per gigabyte listing would help, too.

Maybe in two years, the storage and price will come down to the point where many will find it worth the extra money for the extra performance, like chucking my 5400 laptop drive and buying a 7200 to replace it.

I bought a WD triple interface 1TB HD that can be configured as a raid or standard drive for less than $200 this weekend. How many years do you think it will be before SSDs of this sixe will be priced in a similar manner?