The hows and whys of SSDs

Posted on Wednesday, October 01 2008 @ 5:11 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck

Rob Hallock from Icrontic delves into the history of flash memory, explains its uses and discusses its benefits and limitations.

"Solid State Disks are poised blow the doors off of traditional storage media. As the inevitable end-game of the great bet on flash memory, they are coming in strengthening numbers to obliterate benchmarks, make or break companies, and free-fall in price. The revolution this nascent market is set to unleash will leave few questions as it makes a staggering rise to preeminence."

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Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.

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Re: The hows and whys of SSDs
by Anonymous on Wednesday, October 01 2008 @ 13:33 CEST

Very, very pricey for what you get (faster speed).

Worse, the durability is still in question. There is a lot of argument amongst experts, but there isn't a lot of field experience on how fast, how often, or even how a drive will go bad. You should be able to be left in "read only" mode which would let you recover all the data off a drive, but that's not certain. There is wear leveling, but how well does it work?

First adopters are spending huge amounts of money on these drives. And we all know how well first adopters of Blu Ray and HDDVD ended up. They could well be playing with a lot of money and a few short years of life, or they could be laughing for years with perfect drives.

The hint is in the warranties, which in nearly all cases is 1-3 years. Few drives dare to warranty for 5 years, which should probably be a hint to buyers.

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