Solid State Drives in Notebooks?

spenney asks: "It seems like the most problematic part of any notebook is the speed of the hard drive (and they also get noisy). I noticed this site selling 2.5" solid state disks (SSDs). Anybody currently using one of these in a notebook? I can't find pricing anywhere, but they've gotta cost a fortune." How long do you think it will be before the major laptop manufacturers start adopting this technology?

Comments

they say the price is $1-2/mb

[pavel_pod]

... see this page:
http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edfeatures .html

Re:What about the limit on number of rewrite?

[ikeleib]

Flash disks have a layer between what the computer sees as it's "blocks" and what are really it's blocks. It uses a system that evenly distributes writes around the memory and marks off bad blocks. Unless you frequently write data onto your entire disk (like a video recorder), it isn't much of a problem.

Also, many flash parts have a 1e6 writes rated life span. That is, they will survive a *minimum* of 1e6 writes or you can have your money back.

Re:What about the limit on number of rewrite?

[mr3038]

Doesnt Flash memory have a really low number of rewrites, like 10,000 after which the chip goes bad?

Actually, they say that typical endurance is 27 years for a drive that gets written 100GB a day and 28000 years if the drive gets written only 100MB a day. And those are just for 1GB model. 4.6GB model can take 100GB a day and still survice 123 years. I'd call that damn reliable. No details how they do that but I guess there's some hardware layer that remaps new data to least used areas.

The only thing I don't like is the read and write speeds. And the price, probably.