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A Zalman TNN 500a Case or a simulat custom built one with all that fits inside without making noise. All x86 CPUs and all memory that fits in, all OSes and most used software ready configured and installed into an extended BIOS ready to run 5 seconds after I booted. No HDDs, all SSDs. The fastest OpenGL card available.

Curiously enough, the Mac Pro Quad Core maxed out with all that fits in (~19 000 €) comes pretty much close to what I'd consider the best possible workstation.

Imagine a maxed out Quad Core Mac Pro with SSDs in all 4 bays and a passive heatpipe cooling. That would be my dream machine. I guess the SSDs (custom built from these guys), the extended BIOS and the manpower to set it all up for me would be the biggest pricepoints for the box itself. 40 000 to 60 000 dollars? Dunno, something like that.

As periferals I'd like a thermal transfer printer (with 20 000 pages worth of ink and spare parts), a high end inkjet with 200 000 pages top quality paper and the ink for printing on them and a Z-Corp 3D rapid prototyping printer plus enough high-performance material, binder and color to print an entire army of Heavy Gear Mech figures and a few Star Wars Spaceships. All drivers preinstalled, tested and working.

Add in all the software goodies available for good measure (The entire Adobe Line, the entire Apple Line, Lightwave 3D 9, all training DVDs and plugins available + any software needed to make best use of the printers and the prototyper). Maybe some programming productivity / software design applications as an extra (Gentleware Enterprise CASE System, The Visual Paradigm Enterprise line)

Last but not least the system should come with all this in a documented base configuration where all of the above is set up and works and a tested desaster recovery to restore it should the need arise.

All this could easyly amount to 200 000 - 300 000 Euros - and still fit in a normal room. Then again, you said money doesn't matter.

I think that setup would keep me busy for a while. :-)

So Sandisk gets press for doing this. Memtech and Bitmicro have had solid state flash drives for well over a year, with SCSI, SATA and PATA interfaces as well. And they range up to 64Gb.

Bitmicro

Memtech

And there are most likely even more out there. These are just the ones I know of.

Tried looking up such a device? Try this one.

12 Gbyte capacity under 16mm (0.63")
60 Gbyte maximum capacity
Full -55C to +125C military temp. range
3.5" drive low profile form-factor
UDMA-66 compliant IDE interface
16 byte CRC/ECC and Active Remap(TM) for exceptional data reliability
Kicker(TM) Hold Up Circuit
Active Remap(TM) Data Reliability Feature
    5 volt, low power operation
Completely solid state - no moving parts
2000G operating shock
20G operating vibration
0.1 millisecond random access time
26 Mbyte/sec cached Read performance
20 Mbyte/sec cached Write performance
8 year product warranty
8 million erase/write cycle endurance

Imagine something like that in a laptop. Can you say "woot"?

Memtech, eh? Hmm...if this is any indication of the state of the art, I'll stick with regular mechanical drives, thanks:
* 26 Mbyte/sec cached Read performance
* 20 Mbyte/sec cached Write performance

That kind of performance wasn't good enough 3 years ago, let alone today.

Memtech has been doing this sort of thing for a while now.

Yea, they have the 35 inch SC3500 Sidewinder. Imagine how much data you can put on a disk that big!

That was weird...my link disappeared.

Let's try again.

Wake up!

Memtech has been doing this sort of thing for a while now.

Still, this is great news...the more companies that switch to flash technology, the more the technology itself will become mainstream. It's about time we did away with platter-based HDDs.

Solid state is going to take off big time. Combine a solid state disk drive with a fanless CPU and you have a general purpose computer competing against appliances that have historically been able to charge a premium for their solid-state reliability.

This raises some interesting questions. What if you can buy a computer today that will last for, say, 50 years? What are the implications? Software reliability comes to the fore as never before.

If solid state drives are good enough for Mars Rovers, they're good enough for me.

I guess this implies that I would like to be a Mars rover... :/

What is holding it back is critical mass, until people DEMAND it, no one will fully develop it, and until it is developed and produced in great quantities, you can't expect the 'economy of scale' to kick in.

It WILL the future, SOME type of solid state storage. Just like VCRs, video cams, etc., its expensive at first until sales reach a point that the manufacturers see enough demand to develop it further, and reap the benefits of the volumes. Then competition will kick in, which will drop the prices. Ironically, this means two years AFTER everyone wants it, but it is coming. Its the last of the moving parts in a computers (fans not included).

Personally, I would settle for a nice 10gb solid state drive for doing work, and batch it all back to a traditional hard drive after I am done working, as a stop gap measure. They have drives this size, but they don't publish prices generally (any vendor) and it falls under the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" catagory, still.

Have you looked into the Terapin Mine? It sounds like exactly what you're looking for:

USB master, USB slave, PCMCIA slot, 10baseT, and it's small! Replace the rotating-platters laptop drive with a solid state version if you're really worried about vibration.

Oops, too late to edit. :P Alternately, you can go IDE. These are 12GB units, and you can hook up 12 per IDE RAID controller, 6 controllers per system, for a total of 864GB per system.

These days, everyone's deploying "FlashMemory;" I would think it a very nice thing if there were something in the way of a solid state technology that would provide something much cheaper than RAM, and less sensitive to vibration than disk.

What would be real nice would be to have something that would provide the 512MB of storage you want for a portable computer, cheaper than flash, and without the mechanical requirements of hard drives...

1980's - 1 k SRAM chips VS 32K and 64K bubble memory. 256 K and 512 K was projected.

Now...how did this all turn out for Intel?

Memtech bought out all of Intel's patents/technology. They are no longer being made by memtech, however they will repair them for you :-)

Will IBM fare better? If the goal is to target servers with 256 mb chips, I wouldn't go out and buy IBM stock based on this revelation. I'm sure this technology has a place in the market, I just don't share the optimisim of the ZD author of this RAM being a server RAM replacement.