Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop - Gizmodo Comments

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

1roll20s — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:13:38 EDT

It'll probably be awhile yet before SSD replaces HDD for mass storage. I'm not taking application space, but the terabyte or two you want for video and audio storage. HDD is down near $0.20 a GB and even $2.50 a GB sounds spendy .

1roll20s

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

gizak — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:56:04 EDT

@TheCyberBob: SSD = Solid State Drive. Electromagnetism is NOT what fcks up a regular HD these days - it's the MOVING parts that brake down eventually.

SSD = less heat, less energy, more efficient, and faster.

gizak

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

TheCyberBob — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:23:14 EDT

@VishusBurn: "They are the most unreliable part of a computer and people are very eager to get rid of them for good."

True. But the only thing that SSD's guarantee for stability and longevity over typical disc HD's is not being able to get fsck'd up by any form of electromagnetism. Disc based drives will be around for quite some time anyways. Too many discs in a corporate environment per company and at this price to make it viable to just go and switch em all out with the new hotness.

TheCyberBob

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

cr0ft — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:41:36 EDT

Well you can hardly compare the cheap slow flash that is in a really cheap slow mini-laptop with actual speedy optimized SSD drives. You certainly can't base an opinion about all SSD options on such highly limited experience.

There is a flash based option out there (I forget the name) that promises something like 800MB/sec too... that is going to an extreme in the other direction.

SSD is the future, plain and simple. The only reason nasty old rotating metal platters are still with us is the fact that they have managed to drive manufacturing (and sale) costs down to where it's still more MB for the dollar... that won't last forever and good riddance I say.

cr0ft

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

Tired_ — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:30:29 EDT

Six months ago, this news would have really excited me. Now, after using my Eee for a while, the slow writes are a deal-breaker for me. IDE worked great to eliminate external controllers from computers, can't they make some kind of OS-transparent logic internal to hybrid drives, so they don't need special OS support? With speeds and prices as they are, I would love to see some kind of triple-hybrid drive with a large high-speed capacitor-backed RAM writing cache (set up so it can flush itself to the disk even after power loss), as well as the high-read-speed flash memory cache on it, that I could drop into any system as an upgrade.

Tired_

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

soggy_cheerio — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:19:35 EDT

@thebear91: Yes, it's called "wear leveling".

soggy_cheerio

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

rimplestultskin — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:51:30 EDT

even an an AMD fanboy, i'll be happy if intel can deliver on these ideas. because at $2.50 a gigabyte, it would still be exorbitantly expensive to back up my 300GB hard drive onto solid state, but 1 grand is less gruesome on the wallet than 4 grand.

plus, when flash gets cheap enough, huge amounts of skip-free space on my car stereo FTW. and a phone that has more than 47MB of media storage.

rimplestultskin

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

jamesuschrist — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:36:27 EDT

Yeah, but Apple definitely has a hand in driving up demand for SSD's. Demand not for Apple's MacBook Air, but demand for supplier's drives. More computers sold with SSD's = more suppliers investing in the technology = lower prices. Equals equals equals!

I am VERY eager to see SSD's take over, not for the consumer space but for the server and enterprise space. You don't get tired of replacing HDs when you've got 2 or 3 computers at home, you get tired of replacing HDs when you're responsible for 200-300 computers and a couple rack enclosures full of servers.

jamesuschrist

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

BillyShears — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:14:00 EDT

@dagamer34: Um, what? Apple was certainly NOT the first laptop manufacturer to start tossing in SSD-based hard drives as an option.

BillyShears

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

shenanigans61 — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:13:13 EDT

So...will it blend?

shenanigans61

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

VishusBurn — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:55:39 EDT

@chuchi78: 10-15 years?

Way off. Think more like 4-7.
TV's are not comparable to storage devices.
PC builders(myself included) are sic of hard drives crapping out.
They are the most unreliable part of a computer and people are very eager to get rid of them for good.
Once these come down in price; people will be all over them like flies on honey.

VishusBurn

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

chuchi78 — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:33:38 EDT

It'll be a good 10 to 15 years before we see spinning hard drives go the way of the floppy. They're always going to be cheaper than their SSD counterparts. Think tube TVs next to LCDs/Plasmas or even rear-projection units. There are still companies making them and flat panels have been around since the mid 90's (and longer for projection). Until the SSD drives become as cheap (or cheaper, as if), there will always be room for cheaper technology. That is, unless the tree-huggers actually get spinning drives pulled due to excess energy waste. Let's hear it for sub-$100 200-gig SSDs!

chuchi78

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

clarkjw — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:38:30 EDT

with sony's new hard drive laser encoding tech. HD's will be around a while, esp in desktops, since they'll hold 5-10x the memory with the same architecture

clarkjw

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

killerstache — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:28:56 EDT

i miss the pic with solid snake. i loved reading a story about ssd and seeing that pic lol.

killerstache

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

thebear91 — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:27:12 EDT

One thing I'd like to know about SSD's is whether or not it has the ability to map out bad areas of the RAM, like a hard drive will do.

160 GB, a few bits are bound to go bad.

Me thinks HD's, even in laptops, will be around for a while.

thebear91

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

dagamer34 — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:24:26 EDT

@1stage:
Flash made for hard drives is not the same as Flash for general storage. Speed differences in reading and writing to cells is what makes it problematic when talking cost reductions in computer drives compared to other consumer ones.

Even if you hate the MacBook Air, the one thing it did trigger was the massive use of hard-drive grade Flash chips so that demand will increase, manufacturers will invest more sooner, and we might have cheaper prices faster.

dagamer34

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

Ph30nix — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:18:35 EDT

@Ferg1: What makes you think ipods will be cheaper due to this? This just means that apple will take more profit.

Ph30nix

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

Ferg1 — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:06:07 EDT

cheeper ipods comin at cha FAST!

Ferg1

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

Synthaxx — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:53:48 EDT

I'm a bit hesitant to make any grand claims about this.
But i think it's fair to say that we can say goodbye to spinning hunks of metal in all but the desknotiest of laptops within the next 2 years.

Desktops might take a bit longer though.

Synthaxx

Intel Bringin' SSD Drama: 160GB Capacity, 50% Price Drop

Sean Harrington — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:47:45 EDT

Hmmm... two years seems excessive. Figure $10 a GB for SSD now, that would put it at $2.50 in 2010, so we have to wait two years for a $400 160Gb hard drive?

It will be sooner and cheaper.

Consider that other flash devices have exceeded the 75% price decrease in shorter time: 4Gb USB drives are about $30 now versus $120 a year or so ago, so that is 75% in ONE year, not TWO years.

I anticipate we'll see SSDs at $5 a GB in 6 months, not in a year.

Sean Harrington