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."

Comments

I'll wait a while.

[carlhaagen]

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.

Re:I'll wait a while.

[gmack]

It is only a slight performance improvement for large files. For large amounts of small files it's a huge gain thanks to the lack of head movement.

I picked up a 32gb SSD drive to handle the OS and apps and left my 1TB drive for movies. The difference in boot times and app load times are very noticeable.

Uhmm....

[sonicmerlin]

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.

Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this.

[PopeRatzo]

Imagine the power savings and time savings replacing existing storage with these.

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.

Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this.

[ircmaxell]

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...