Alienware Puts 64GB Solid-State Drives In Desktops

Lucas123 writes "In the face of Seagate's announcement this week of a new hybrid drive, Dell subsidiary Alienware just upped the ante by doubling the capacity of its desktop solid-state disk drives to 64 GB. Dell has remained silent on the solid-state disk front since announcing a 32-GB solid-state option for its Latitude D420 and D629 ATG notebook computers earlier this year. Now, Alienware seems to be telling users to bypass hybrid drives altogether. 'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana, Alienware's product marketing manager 'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'"

Comments

obsolete?

[orionop]

'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.' Call me when either the capacity or price of solid state drives comes close with those obsolete drives, then we will compare...

Re:obsolete?

[morgan_greywolf]

And it won't. 'Economies of scale' don't happen here. Flash memory production already outstrips HDDs. The fact is that the process of manufacturing memory, including flash memory, is expensive.

Why does your computer have a relatively small amount of RAM and huge storage? It's the same economic question we've been facing since the introduction of computing. You need some fast, temporary storage and some slower permanent storage. And the reason has nothing to do with technological barriers -- it boils down to economics. Memory is expensive, hard drives are cheap. That's it. No matter what happens, nothing is going to change that equation anytime soon. SSDs will remain a niche technology for gamers with deep pockets and maybe a few other high-end uses like scientific computing. It will take at least a decade or more before this filters down to the point that the average PC is using SSDs.

Re:obsolete?

[vagabond_gr]

Memory is expensive, hard drives are cheap. That's it. No matter what happens, nothing is going to change that equation anytime soon. You mean *per gigabyte* and that's true. But tape drives are even cheaper, yet few people are using them because 1) access is ridiculously slow 2) nobody needs so much space. Hard drives are taking the same path. I don't need more than 64GB on my laptop, and soon I'll have much more than that. What I do need is to replace my 4200 rpm slug with something faster, without draining my battery. If I can get a 64gb flash disk at the price of a 500gb hdd, I'll do it today.

Eventually

[iknownuttin]

FTFA: ...the flash-based technology's steep price point continues to hamper adoption, analysts say.

Yeah, but as the first adopters and the die hard gamers looking for every advantage they can get buy more of these, we'll see the price drop eventually.

It also means that the extra speed and reliability really isn't worth the high price for most business folks who would be, I guess, the ones to really drive the market in the beginning stages after the first adopters.

Re:Solid first!

[TubeSteak]

"Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state," said Diana. "Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now." Yes hybrid is a Band-Aid, but the wound it is trying to heal is the excessive price for solid state.

Again, for the majority of computer users, swapping to the disk is more of a problem than the ultimate speed of their HD. They'd get more bang for their buck by buying another GB of RAM... which is why I don't really see solid state prices coming down anytime soon.

There isn't a significant need for it in the general consumer market.
Maybe laptops will create enough demand for lower prices... but that remains to be see.

Hybrid is a band-aid?

[AKAImBatman]

'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana

Now there's a misleading quote if I ever heard one. Magnetic drives currently allow for storage of 250GB and up for a cost of $0.50/GB or less. In comparison, Flash Drives are are still measured in dollars per GB. The hybrid drive allows a bit of a tradeoff. A fast storage cache combined with massive space in exchange for a slight increase in price. Thus it's possible to have 1TB or more of storage, but with the performance characteristics of Flash memory under most circumstances.

Not too impressive...

[evilviper]

Okay, for some $1,700+ you get two 64GB SSD drives.

And what do you get for that ridiculous amount of cash? According to Alienware's best PR spin:

"speed up operating system boot and application launch/runtime by up to 2 times." ...and:

"consume up to 50 percent less power than rotating HDDs."

Those specs aren't exactly thrilling, particularly since "up to" tends to mean you'll never get close to either spec.

Seems like a complete joke to me, which oddly fits in quite well with the rest of the Alienware line-up.

Actually

[samael]

Flash costs seem to be halving each year at the moment, while hard drive capacity is going up by a smaller amount.

Flash may eventually max out, still more expensive than hard drive space, or it may eventually overtake it. I'm not convinced that there's anything inherently more expensive about flash construction techniques in the long term.