Does a warranty over 1 year really matter? Would you _even want to own a poky, slow 4 year old SSD with a year of warranty left on it?_ : )

I see the SSD consumer market undergoing one of the most rapid price - performance - capacity shifts seldom seen in the tech industry. The form-factors, mounts, data interfaces are already ratified and established for drop-in replacement. A very very different 'adoption' rate will skyrocket SSD's to the forefrontof the consumer market -- partly because alot of the legwork was already hammered out somewhat invisibly in the Military/Industrial market.
Woo-hoo! I've been waiting for flash disk drives for quarter century. Death to spinning platters! http://www.ssd-solid-state-drives.com/

I don't really want to rehash the whole "aren't SSD's unreliable" thing again. Please see
http://techreport.com/ja.zz?id=190433
http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=734382#p734382
http://techreport.com/ja.zz?id=305316

Key points:
1. Current flash is good for 100,000+ writes
2. The controller in an SSD transparently redistributes writes ("wear-leveling"), so that 100,000 writes to what the OS thinks is the same location is actually more like 10 writes to a thousand locations
2. Most data on persistent storage is read-only
4. Modern SSDs can swap a "hot" (heavily written) block with read-only blocks containing data, not just with empty blocks
5. Modern SSDs contain a small set of extra "reservoir blocks" that get swapped in as blocks reach their write limitations (which is based on actual failures, so you get the benefit of any blocks that happen to be especially resilient to well over 100K writes)
6. When a block fails, it gets retired. If there are no reservoir blocks left, the SSD ends up getting a little smaller. As long as the disk isn't entirely full, this isn't a big deal.

That last point is important, too. SSDs aren't brittle: the failure mode is quite gradual. If you want to call them unreliable, you have to ask "compared to what?" Hard disks fail too, and often in total and unrecoverable ways. Where would you rather store your data: in a device that just slowly wears out and shrinks, or one where a single error may cause the entire device to die, taking all your data with it (unless you can do a "freezer trick" or something to get it back).

I don't know if I'm the first to notice this but... Who came up with the name "Super Talent"? My opinion, but thats one of the dumbest company names I've ever heard. Am I alone on this one?

What IS the expected lifetime of an SSD? Does it increase with size, due to having more area to spread the read writes? I know everyone and their mom likes to say SSD's will guarantee to fail .. but when, exactly?

I wonder what reliability these will have over standard disks. At first glance, they seem superior, but my experience with some Flash technologies is not so stellar as they are sensitive to radiation (normal always-present gamma rays) setting and clearing bits. The smaller the storage cell, the more prone to loosing bits. If the parts can deal with this type of problem well, then these seem to be the perfect solution for backups and networked archives.

-LS

Why a make a hard drive out of memory chips when you can have a gobs of main memory?

Why not just have computers with 128GB of RAM?

I'm being a little facetious but how long can it be before we just load all our programs and files in to main memory and forget the mass storage altogether?

I know that RAM and flash memory are different but what I'm suggesting is that the next generation of PCs (i.e. the next 3-5 years) do away the slow hard-drive interface altogether and store everything in main memory which is much faster.

I understand that one needs gobs of mass storage for your media files but this scheme makes sense if memory prices continue their downward trend.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is: "When will non-volatile memory reach the price point and density such that we can merge main memory and mass storage?"

From what I've read, SSD's can really utilize the performance of RAID-0 type setups. I'll check on SSD at the end of the year or beginning of 2009. Here's to hoping for a 200+GB 120GB read/write for $150, and then at least RAID-0 two of 'em.

Hm, the $299 30GB one is definitely looks like the best deal for a boot drive. Still too rich for my health though.

I look forward to the day when I can build a (reasonably priced) machine with no moving parts. Or I'd be happy to buy it in EeePC or Mac Mini form for ~$500.

Can someone put this in 1.8" format pls ? The Mac Book Air is crying for one.

Adi

Going to the Super Talent site and opening a spec sheet pdf file, I found the following:

"Super Talent offers a 1 year warranty for the MasterDrive MX SSD".

Sorry, but at these prices, they've got to do better than a 1 year warranty.

I like how TR said those prices are almost reasonable. It's great news, soon they'll be affordable.

You could squeeze xp on about a 5GB partition, with a bit of free space

edit- meant to reply to Kurotetsu

Another step in the right direction, pricewise.

I like where this pricing is going. Please FFWD a few years so we can ditch every notion of mechanical drives in PCs.

I like the price scaling for SSDs, unlike HDs there isn't a sweet spot in the upper middle of capacity, the price/GB just gets low with higher capacity.