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Maybe their service was just disconnected because they didn't pay their phone bill.

So explain this to me, again, one more time: Why exactly should I spend $2,000 on a new SSD in 2008?

You shouldn't, obviously.

But:

1) You won't have to. The SSDs you are referring to will drop in price by at least a factor of 5 by the end of 2008, for a variety of reasons. Read and write throughput will almost certainly rise to SATA2 bus speeds. People like Torvalds are excited about flash SSDs because they are aware of near-future hardware trends that you apparently are not.

2) There are flash SSDs which are already much faster than any SATA hard drive: http://www.fastsilicon.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=333&Itemid=60

3) Adding more RAM is inherently expensive from an architecture standpoint. I looked on Newegg and I can't find a motherboard that lets you add more than 8G of RAM with available RAM densities, so while the first 8G may be cheap, the next 8G isn't. If you have to upgrade to a 64 bit OS, going beyond 4G is pretty damn expensive. (Are you running XP Pro 32 or 64?) Whereas, flash SSDs are expensive today, but they are not inherently expensive.

4) Even for your relatively mundane use, a 32G swap partition, if properly managed as a persistent buffer cache, by a real operating system, would still have a huge impact on performance. Virtually your entire file system working set could be in the buffer cache. If you think it is in RAM right now, try quitting and restarting Firefox while watching the hard drive activity LED. Does it flash? OK, your working set is not in RAM. :)

5) Lots of people do much more challenging things on their computers than you do. I routinely do data analysis that strides across 30-40G databases. It is completely IO bound, because of seek latency. A proper SSD would deliver at least 10x speedup -- even if the throughput were no faster than a hard drive.

Martin

Damn! StupidFilter's at it again.

There is some evidence to the contrary. If the problem has been fixed for so long, how come there are still tons of people returning their 360s for repairs?

"Its more secure having the actually memory embedded inside the machine instead on the outside in a port, accessible for anyone that have physicall access to your office."

The same pieces could easily be inside the case. Not all USB ports are external. Of course, SATA CF adapters have been available for sometime:

http://www.fastsilicon.com/storage-reviews/addonic s-adsahdcf-sata-cf-adapter-review-6.html?Itemid=27

By the way, anyone have links to tutorials for installing a hypervisor to such a setup?

The first link merely confirms that Vista implements protection for protected media (I.e. HD-DVD / BluRay), not for other media. In short, it's just like XP, except you gain the ability to play HD-DVD/Bluray. I'm calling FUD. (It also conjures up some bizarre scenario requiring simultaneous HD-DVD watching and medical diagnosis, and even that oddball scenario seems doubtful, as it assumes that content protection degrades everything displayed on screen, and not merely the protected content stream. Is that really true?)

The second one regarding AEC cites the same article as the first one, and after some further googling, it appears to be bullshit as well.

"Apparently this was written by someone who's never sat at a vista machine nor seen the changes at the application level in the way Vista's mixer handles audio from different applications. Acoustic Echo Cancellation functionality works fine in Vista here. As well as being commonly used in "applications like hands-free car phones", it's also commonly used in VOIP systems, and these seem to be unaffected in Vista. How to implement AEC (and we admit that how AEC is implemented at the driver level is different in Vista) is well documented in the DirectShow9 SDK for Vista."

http://www.fastsilicon.com/opinions-editorials/bla me-vista-4.html?Itemid=42

(Sure, just a link, but so is yours. In addition, your source's bizarre hospital-diagnosis mishap example is so plain weird as to discredit him as a source in itself)

Hence, I'm calling FUD again.

I drop my Rio Nitrus from 5 feet almost daily, hell I darn right throw it when I'm running (I'm clumsy, ok?), it just bounces off the ground like a rubber ball, thanks to it's rubberized sides.

The Rio Carbon happens to have the same rubberized sides.

Guess the Nitrus and Carbon are just better-built products than iPods...

Well I don't have an example of the page, but I do happen to have one of the captcha tests they were using... :)

Click here to decode pr0n captcha

-JT