SSD Drives are no longer inefficient, or unaffordable

Jul 23, 2009 by Tech-Digit

Solid State Drives, hereafter referred to as SSD’s are the fastest and most efficient way of storing long term memory, but it gets better. These drives, as powerful as they are, ran up to about a thousand dollars each when bought in BULK! The prices were astronomical, and still are rather high compared to standard hard drives. The 80 gig model, the X25-M, made by Intel has been marked down from 595 dollars to 225 dollars in lots of 1000. While this may still be high, it is about a sixty percent rate decrease. A truly amazing leap for SSD.

In addition to this breakthrough with 34 nanometer technology (the reason the price has dropped), it has also increased the speed! Read latency (essentially lag) is down twenty five percent! This brings it to about 80 times faster than a standard hard drive. Also, apparently write performance had doubled.

With increases in performance, and drops in price such as these, we find ourselves bottlenecking our system with our memory! Many systems cannot handle that kind of read or write speed. Even the software can’t. Most operating systems don’t support things of that nature because this is such leading edge technology.

The only drives featuring this 34 nanometer technology are 80 gig and 160 gig versions. Due to their expense and the failing of the worldwide economy, Intel couldn’t rationalize a 320 gig model due to the fractional adoption rate. The market isn’t going to get any better unless companies start producing products that the people can buy. The people does not include the upper 1 percent willing to drop a thousand dollars on a new memory slot.

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