Alienware Puts 64GB Solid-State Drives In Desktops 235
Lucas123 writes "In the face of Seagate's announcement this week of a new hybrid drive, Dell subsidiary Alienware just upped the ante by doubling the capacity of its desktop solid-state disk drives to 64 GB. Dell has remained silent on the solid-state disk front since announcing a 32-GB solid-state option for its Latitude D420 and D629 ATG notebook computers earlier this year. Now, Alienware seems to be telling users to bypass hybrid drives altogether. 'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana, Alienware's product marketing manager 'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'"
obsolete? (Score:5, Insightful)
Eventually (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but as the first adopters and the die hard gamers looking for every advantage they can get buy more of these, we'll see the price drop eventually.
It also means that the extra speed and reliability really isn't worth the high price for most business folks who would be, I guess, the ones to really drive the market in the beginning stages after the first adopters.
Re:Solid first! (Score:4, Insightful)
Again, for the majority of computer users, swapping to the disk is more of a problem than the ultimate speed of their HD. They'd get more bang for their buck by buying another GB of RAM... which is why I don't really see solid state prices coming down anytime soon.
There isn't a significant need for it in the general consumer market.
Maybe laptops will create enough demand for lower prices... but that remains to be see.
Hybrid is a band-aid? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now there's a misleading quote if I ever heard one. Magnetic drives currently allow for storage of 250GB and up for a cost of $0.50/GB or less. In comparison, Flash Drives are are still measured in dollars per GB. The hybrid drive allows a bit of a tradeoff. A fast storage cache combined with massive space in exchange for a slight increase in price. Thus it's possible to have 1TB or more of storage, but with the performance characteristics of Flash memory under most circumstances.
Re:obsolete? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does your computer have a relatively small amount of RAM and huge storage? It's the same economic question we've been facing since the introduction of computing. You need some fast, temporary storage and some slower permanent storage. And the reason has nothing to do with technological barriers -- it boils down to economics. Memory is expensive, hard drives are cheap. That's it. No matter what happens, nothing is going to change that equation anytime soon. SSDs will remain a niche technology for gamers with deep pockets and maybe a few other high-end uses like scientific computing. It will take at least a decade or more before this filters down to the point that the average PC is using SSDs.
Mass produce (Score:1, Insightful)
Not too impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
And what do you get for that ridiculous amount of cash? According to Alienware's best PR spin:
"speed up operating system boot and application launch/runtime by up to 2 times."
"consume up to 50 percent less power than rotating HDDs."
Those specs aren't exactly thrilling, particularly since "up to" tends to mean you'll never get close to either spec.
Seems like a complete joke to me, which oddly fits in quite well with the rest of the Alienware line-up.
Actually (Score:4, Insightful)
Flash may eventually max out, still more expensive than hard drive space, or it may eventually overtake it. I'm not convinced that there's anything inherently more expensive about flash construction techniques in the long term.
Re:obsolete? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not too impressive... (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now, few people will be able to afford this, but there do exist people with too much money who will over spend for the slightest gain in performance, namely battery life, now. For business travelers, some companies might see it as justified for their employee to be able to work on his laptop on the plane for an extra hour or two before he runs out of power. If they rate the extra time that the laptop is functional against the extra work the user will be able to do while using the laptop (figured as the hourly wage of the user), the hard drive would pay for itself once it had extended the battery operation of the device by 30 hours. That is, $900/$30/hr since a business machine only one of these drives (we just got brand new XP computers with 80GB hard drives, and even that is overkill for business use). So, while it is still years from being a good buy for home use, they should be ready for the rest of us in 8-10, unless flash cost hits a tipping point sooner that causes the prices to drop even faster.
Re:No problem! -- It was in my experience (Score:3, Insightful)
Did you compare their lifetime w/ 1 GB cards w/ the same data (but much more empty space)?
William
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
shock (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solid first! (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree ram does more for performance for the time being, if and only if you don't meet a minimum level of said performance, but at this point if you are a gamer/programmer/autocad user/etc you're going to want to look at a solid state drive in the next 3 years anyway. Since 30 or 60 gigs of ram isn't *THAT* cheap yet, although that day will probably come as well but be at a relatively similar percentage of storage as it is now (since all data will likely increase in size/complexity). Unless we all get 500GB ram drives anytime soon, which I'd estimate to be an easy 5 years + away.
Examples: Autocad - Want to load a 3GB design/drawing/etc? I'm pretty sure solid state would be a lot nicer for things that big. Working on many big drawings/designs/etc? I'm pretty sure that'll save more than a few minutes almost instantly.
Gaming - Played Fury lately, or Team Fortress 2? Newer games are starting to have significant load times even with Sata2. Fury even on fast computers take 30+secs to load between maps, minimum. And that represents the new Unreal engine 3 [wikipedia.org].
Re:what does it do to load times? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Until they notice the throughput (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solid first! (Score:3, Insightful)
You forgot notebooks!
Anyone who's trying to breath new life into a notebook that already has as much RAM as possible will get an awesome collection of performance boosts by switching to solid state: