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2006 MAY BE the year that will mark the slow start of slaughtering the old electro-magnetic dinosaurs, replaced by a flashy answer. Hard drives will pretty much kick the bucket - it's no long slot - soon.
After Samsung launched Q30Plus-SSD with a 32GB solid state drive, it was only the matter of time before the other vendors claimed their share of the pie.
Solid-sate drives are cool, but hard drives still have superior capacity. I myself never used all that much space, so I would be especially interested in a super-fast drive
See what iRAM does to Windows in terms of boot times
Damn, that computer was amazing fast!
I wish my computer was fast like that.
SSD (Solid-state disks) are cool, but they have small diskspace, limited amount of writes and some operations are slower than on mechanical disks I think. But it will be interesting to see how the progress...
And SSD disk is totaly silent, that is what is best!
...and some operations are slower than on mechanical disks I think...
Really? I don't see why that would be. I was under the impression that any Flash ROM address could be accessed instantaneously, while of course, hard drives have to spin to the addresses one by one. I guess I'll have to read up on that and figure out which is faster...
But yeah, Flash ROM totally rocks! I've heard that a Flash ROM drive only uses around 5% of the power consumed by a hard drive, so just think of how long a notebook battery could last! Pretty sweet.
As far as the limited number of writes, I sure hope they can up that number. For now, I would only use a Flash ROM drive as a backup, since backups aren't written to and read from as frequently as an OS or application drive.
I will note that I had a 256 MB Flash ROM stick that I filled and emptied daily for over a year, and it never had any troubles whatsoever. So hopefully the short life span issue is more hype than anything. I guess we'll find out soon enough...
Flash drives and ROM sticks are physically tougher than hard drives... no moving parts. I don't know how long it will last, but since I format around once a year, life-span won't make much of a difference.
There is an Wikipedia article about this;
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_disk
"The flash memory cells tend to fail after around a million writes which made early devices unsuitable for storage which is often updated in place, such as swap files."