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

Re:No problem! -- It was in my experience

[SlashdotOgre]

A couple years ago (Fall 2005) I did my senior engineering project in college using embedded Linux devices which utilized 512MB flash drives (CF) as the only storage mechanism. The devices were basically Soekris boards with Debian and some highly custom WiFi drivers/software designed for mesh networking research. After my project, I was hired on by the research institute which funded the project, so I got to play with these things for a while. Nearly every mesh node that used flash ran into "hard drive" issues within a year (we suspected the failure frequency was directly related to how often we used the devices). Most of the time it was simply the MBR becoming corrupt which you could fix by mounting the card on a Linux computer, chroot'ing and re-running LILO; but in a few cases we had to replace the entire card due to corruption. These devices had fairly typical usage patterns of a normal desktop/laptop (booted daily), and we were no where near the 3-5 year estimates most people give flash drives.