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The 1 Terabyte SSD Arrives
An anonymous reader writes "Over recent years Solid State Drives (SSDs) have moved from luxury to affordable additions to one's PC, but mechanical hard drives are still king when it comes to capacity. That was until the revamped Colossus LT series Solid State Drive came along this week. With up to 1TB, the drive offers offers massive storage capacities of the level normally not seen in SSDs. While 1TB of SSD space hits right at the heart of the traditional hard disk market, it comes at a high price — at around $4,000 for the 1TB model, these drives are in the realm of aspirational rather than practical."
I have a handful of friends who adopted Intel's latest G2 X25-m models at their release. With new firmware, they are all still reporting notably reduced performance over time. Everyone knows what causes it, it is entirely understandable given the storage technology in question, but that doesn't make it any less of a drag. I'll wait and see how things change before doing the switch.
Paying $4000 for a hard drive is one thing, but how fast is it? Slapping what I assume to be a ton of chips together wont make for an impressive benchmark. If I had the cash to blow on this sort of thing I would rather raid together a bunch of and small fast ssd's than 1 big one.
Can we please get an affordable, 60GB one that is actually worth buying now? Last time I checked (two months ago), most of the less expensive drives were real spotty with their reliability.
Any suggestions for a decent 60GB SSD for under $120?
Living With a Nerd
This has been on newegg for a very long time: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227500
I've been waiting forever for its price to drop, but nothing seems to be happening. I don't think SSDs will be of any consequence to mainstream users before memristors become all the rage.
It's a real pity OSX 10.6 failed to add TRIM support. With Win7, this is the first time I've seen MS cut Apple's lunch.
As a media producer who uses DAW and video editing apps, solid state storage is a dream for me. I'm using much smaller SSDs now and although the power savings don't mean much to me, they are certainly quieter and faster than magnetic or optical media.
My 15k rpm drives are too loud and too warm.
When a 1TB SSD hits $1000, I'm in for two.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Oh, I'm not saying that they don't have a good place in the market. I am saying that it would be foolish to buy them from a power consumption standpoint alone. If you need IOPS, then the added cost can definitely be worth it...
The other thing you need to look at is lifespan. A 15k drive should last a company at least 3 years (I know some companies replace them yearly, but a typical rotation is 3 to 5 years based on what I've seen). Can an SSD (that's under high I/O) last that long? Or are you going to be replacing them yearly because of wear leveling issues? Again, I'm not saying that they are not worth the money. All I am saying is that it's far from a simple math problem to determine if they are the right fit for an enterprise...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
You have a strange sense of economics. Reduced demand usually means reduced prices and vice versa. Reduced consumption means less need for more power-plants and other related expenses. On the flip side, much increased demand means that the power companies have to build new plants or upgrade old ones, or upgrade infrastructure. The fact is, using resources costs money and the more you use, the more it costs somewhere. Reducing consumption does not make costs go up unless there's a false economy created by imprudent decisions on the part of the power companies or some sort of insane government involvement that keeps fixed costs high (which I can buy).
Ahh, why bother? Let's just burn through all our natural resources like there's no tomorrow so that the status quo can be preserved at all costs. I'm sure that'll work out somehow.