Originally Posted by
Landing Gear
A number of new laptops have solid state (flash) drives as options.
Any reason not to take one?
Price, capacity.
Originally Posted by
ScottC
Price is slowly becoming less of an issue, but I'd still hold off on buying one directly from the manufacturer. A 128GB SSD can be found online for around $250, but companies like Dell still charge an additional $575 for them...
Swapping out the drive for an SSD is often no more than a 10 minute job.
That said; I'd still wait. The speed increase is certainly there, but it isn't worth the extra cash just yet. SSD's are still pretty new, and until the big players (Seagate, Hitachi etc...) get into the market, it's all being dominated by small players.
My guess is that 2009 will be the year of the SSD, and that we'll see prices plummet to the point where they become only 20% more expensive than conventional drives.
Note that not all SSD's are equal by any means. You can increase parallelism to get faster access but this drives the price up, also.
A couple of years ago I saw a prototype SSD at CES. It was in effect a whole bunch of drives in a RAID 0 configuration within a single package--it was capable of nearly saturating the SATA II connection.