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The State of Solid State Storage

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the see-get-it-i-repeated-the-word-to-give-the-title-a-punch dept.

carlmenezes writes "Pretty much every time a faster CPU is released, there are always a few that are marveled by the rate at which CPUs get faster but loathe the sluggish rate that storage evolves. Recognizing the allure of solid state storage, especially to performance-conscious enthusiast users, Gigabyte went about creating the first affordable solid state storage device, and they called it i-RAM. Would you pay $100 for a 4GB Solid State Drive that is up to 6x faster than a WD Raptor?"

5 of 481 comments (clear)

  1. Let me think. by gandell · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Would you pay $100 for a 4GB Solid State Drive that is up to 6x faster than a WD Raptor?

    Nope. I'd rather wait longer and have more capacity for less money. After all, I use Windows as my primary OS. I'm used to waiting.

    Truthfully, though, if the price came down, I'd be interested in this for a Windows install, and then install all my apps and save all my docs to an external IDE.

    --
    Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
  2. Surely! by Bin_jammin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd consider buying it if I were building a system that needed some fast write speed... maybe video capture. Be neato if I could get a few and stripe 'em.

  3. Darn straight I would/will! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 5, Interesting
    FreeBSD allows you to allocate a dynamically resizable filesystem out of swap (see: md, mfs). I'm thinking of mounting the whole thing as a super-fast swap partition - basically, as a giant L4 cache - and mounting /tmp and a few other speed-critical filesystems out of there.

    Mmmm, hyper-fast builds that don't depend on the latency of moving parts...

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  4. Re:No Way! by peculiarmethod · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't agree. I record music on at least 8 tracks at a time into a single cpu. I NEED higher transfer rates. If it's 4 gigs, thats enough to keep it recording without a drop in an entire days worth of recording. Then I can dump all that data to a slower, larger drive. It may not fit everyone's needs.. but this is PERFECT for me.

    --
    ** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
  5. Non-Technical Users Don't Understand by bigtallmofo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anyone that says this isn't worth it is not very technical in my book.

    An affordable 4 GB is fantastic for this kind of thing. Use your imagination:

    1. Imagine how fast your system would be installed on a battery-backed up RAM drive.
    2. Imagine how fast your system would be with your memory swap file installed on this.
    3. Imagine how fast your database server would be with its transaction log installed on this. Hey, throw the tempdb (for SQL Server) on there as well.
    4. Many other things.

    If you're thinking of this as a standard hard drive to store your DivX movies and MP3 files, you're not thinking right. Solid state drives are miracles that can speed up systems beyond anything you would expect.

    --
    I'm a big tall mofo.