Want is the latest news on solid state hard drives?

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/0 [...] es_cometh/

Yes, check out what skittle linked. Overall, it seems that the reading of SSD's are excellent, seek time puts a Raptor to shame, but writing cant keep up with even slow-dog laptop HD's. For the price, SSD's aren't worth it now.

If you want a drive that pisses on all other drives including the absolute fastest SSD then look no further. Oh, I almost forgot, get your wallet out.

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

You can't seriously think this is a good deal. It's not even new technology, quite a few other manufacturers have come out with similar products over the past few years. It's $2300 bucks, and apparently that price doesn't even come with the crappy DDR1 sticks that it holds. The max capacity is 16GB, or enough for XP and maybe 2 modern games. It's constantly drawing power, even when your system is shut down. Should there be a power outage, you run the risk of it completely wiping if the battery dies. Best of all, the performance difference in the lion's share of applications, while noticable, would be slight, as most apps are CPU or GPU limited. These puppies are very highly specialized, definately not for your average enthusiast.

All that being said, I still think they're pretty neat. More of a stop-gap solution than anything till a faster storage solution is found.

At ~$120, this is a far more reasonable solution:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006 [...] dex.x?pg=1

Only a quarter of the storage space, but all the same benefits at less than a tenth the cost. Good enough for a system drive.

Did I say it was a good deal? I don't remember that. I said it was the fastest drive out there. Clearly it is only for people with too much money. 16 gig is way too small and then you come back with the 4G option? Smooth. The gigabyte isn't even in the same league, or price range either, as you so aptly stated. You didn't read all of the data did you? The Hyper4 can be run in RAID. They show a 4x RAID, that equals 64G. And I will say it once more to be sure it was clear, get your wallet out.

I almost forgot, if you can afford one of these you can also afford the UPS that would hold it up for an eternity. you know, a week or two at least.

Hmmm, I didn't mean to T you off there mate, calm down. You came on fairly strong there, as if you're marketing these things. My point was, ideas such as this will likely never come anywhere close to mainstream. I don't think the Gigabyte one is practical either (you can RAID them too, didn't read all the data eh?), I just trotted it out to show that this wasn't the first time something similar had been tried. All it really is is an attempt to hack together current tech to overcome some storage limitations. I consider Flash-based SSD's to be the same thing. It's interesting, and has its strong points, but is crippled by other considerations. Both are just stop-gaps until we find the real successor to magnetic disk storage. Holographic probably isn't it, they've been kicking that tech around for as long as I can remember and don't seem to be making substansial progress. Phase-change I think is the most promising, though there are still plenty of obstacles there.

Hahaha, and a UPS that would hold up for an eternity eh? No matter how rich I was, I'd probably shy away from filling my basement with banks of lead acid batteries....

Sorry, I got the feeling that I was being pissed on based on the tone of your post. Obviously, this setup is only for the very rich. I don't have one, but I would like one. The fact remains that if you do have money to burn it is the hottest setup. It will probably never be a main stream setup, at least not in the near future. Holographic storage has been a long time coming, but I am confident they will get it worked out sooner or later. Computers will run on crystals, however I am sure I will be dead by then.

You took my use of the word "eternity" out of context. I knew you would, that is why it was followed by the qualifying statement.

It's been a while since I read the web pages so I went back and looked. I found this quote that completely negates anything regarding battery backup

I really should have remembered that. And you should have seen it, if indeed you did read all of the information, before forming your conclusions. I wasn't saying anyone should go out and buy one I just thought that everyone should be aware of it's existence. I have seen the Gigabyte drive resurface. It is a hell of a lot cheaper and might suffice as a low budget option, but it isn't the same.

Not even worth thinking about yet at all for any reason. The raptor is still fast enough and SCSI 15000 rpms will blow it out of the water any day.

But wait a while and we will see, though 10 million read writes is not enough for me to want one.