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Whoa. That was fast. With these hybrid drives in development, I was expecting later this year or next year.

It's cool - however, they are still ridiculously expensive and their read/write times are far from what I'd expect.

I hope this will mature fast, I'd sure like to see a fast ssd in my next build sometime down the road 8)

With that price you can buy that 750GB drive from seagate (5 times the size, good performance), and still have almost $200 left. The 65/55 r/w speeds for the faster drives are compatible with modern disks, but the 32GB size is a little bit limiting.
Right now is not a good option, but in time prices will drop and sizes increase.
That's cool the industry is going that way. Rely on a spinning disk seems a little bit too fragile to me

EDIT: oh man... the $599 is the 16GB!!! $20,000 for the 128GB.. aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh
no, thanks.

are these hybrid? I thought hybrid drives would sport a big ssd memory with spinning disks. These ones they say "no moving parts", i guess they're pure flash memory.

8O 8O I think I'll stick with my dataDVDs and extra HDDs for backup
But I guess the important thing is that they are on the market

Completely off-topic, but that website has one of the worst layout/font/look I've ever seen.

wow, but they have some cool stuff
check it out:
http://www.dvnation.com/fusion.html

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sure man... i never said they were bad products, i just said they're expensive. They have their uses, otherwise they would never be sold... The examples you showed illustrate perfectly were they could be used.
But what i meant is that they're still too expensive to be considered using in a desktop system, for example, even in a high-end system. If someone pays $6000 for an alienware, they have raid arrays with raptors, which are faster than the 10k rpm scsi, with lots of GB. If you want the biggest ssd drive of 128GB it will cost 20k $.

I like the idea of a shock-proof, silent drive, really like it. But today, unfortunately, it's too expensive if compared to other technologies.

are these hybrid? I thought hybrid drives would sport a big ssd memory with spinning disks. These ones they say "no moving parts", i guess they're pure flash memory.
No, as the title says, they are solid state drives, no moving parts.

However, Samsung is also developing hybrid drives ATM.

I've seen worse. Much worse

Well, in the beginning, lots of new technologies are expensive.
With mass production, better technology, more experience and growing demand, however, the prices will drop significantly.

Has anyone seen any actual testing of the speed of the solid state drives vs. hard drives, including also real-world benchmarks? That would be very interesting indeed! Please post if and when you find or produce any tests!

What bugs me about these drives is that no-one seems to have realised that they have a very finite lifespan. There is a limited number of read/write cycles each cell can do, and once you start getting cells failing, you might as well get a new drive. Its going to cost a lot in the long run.

On the upside, I guess there IS the low power usage, the ruggedness, and the fact you have bragging rights. But I wouldnt use one in a desktop, there would be no point at all.

Stick with traditional drives on this one, unless you routinely hurl your laptop outof moving cars and down stairs.

Completely off-topic, but that website has one of the worst layout/font/look I've ever seen.

I have one large-and-unnecesarily-long word for you. www.webpagesthatsuck.com. We could put it in the daily sucker. But I've seen so many that are worse than this. So bad, they make my eyes water. One example is the site for a court, something like the sanfransisco court or something. But it was bad, really, truly bad.

Yeah, well the site said (I'm sure someone said something like this about prescott) that they have a 5 million write/erase cycle, which is much more than all the other flash things I've heard lately. Me, I wouldn't get one for my desktop. If I had to spend that kind of money on a storage device, I'd either get something like a 5 terabyte NAS or a 32 gig RAMdisk, the one that plugs into your pci slot. Getting nanosecond seek time and thousands of megabytes of speed, it just sounds way better. I'd also get the one with the internal battery so I don't ever lose anything... and maybe get a small external with the money left over to back it up,lol.

That's very amazing and no doubt all hd would be like this. Solid state and no moving parts whatsoever, less heat and virtually no noise. But for the price it's still very limited to the ones who have deep pockets.

And you seem not to realise that ordinary magnetic hdds also have a finite lifespan. Once you start getting bad sectors, you can throw that out, too. Remember that you have no moving parts, and those are 5 million erase/rewrite cycles, with theoretically infinite reads (unlike magnetic hdds). Unless you have a really small ram and a huge pagefile, and you keep deleting and reinstalling everything every second, they will last much longer than ordinary hdds.

However, if only once your battery runs out, or there is a short, then all your data goes bye-bye...

IMO: these are the way ahead. They just need to mature. Their prices will drop significantly in the near future.

Flash memory is non-volitile. Thats why you don't lose all your pictures when you pull the memory card out of your camera.

These sort of things have been on the market for some time.

Obviously their prices have dropped off significantly, only $20,000 for 128GB? Thats amazing...

Very true, although traditional HD's have been designed with reliability as part of their makeup. Flash RAM is still going to fail long before a HD does, even if you discount mechanical wear and tear.

Given the complete difference bewteen the technologies, it would be stupid to compare MTBF figures, even if Samsung have put any out yet. (For the record, my Seagate Barracuda has an MTBF time of 500,00 hours, or 57 years (apparently))The main point being, that is an SSD has to do the same amount of writes in the average day that a standard HD does, it'll fail sooner. Given that thought, it would make sense to use these devices in low access volume situations, where HD access isnt a major concern.

You certainly wouldnt want to use one where a pagefile is concerned, as mentioned above.