The 1 Terabyte SSD Arrives 237
An anonymous reader writes "Over recent years Solid State Drives (SSDs) have moved from luxury to affordable additions to one's PC, but mechanical hard drives are still king when it comes to capacity. That was until the revamped Colossus LT series Solid State Drive came along this week. With up to 1TB, the drive offers offers massive storage capacities of the level normally not seen in SSDs. While 1TB of SSD space hits right at the heart of the traditional hard disk market, it comes at a high price — at around $4,000 for the 1TB model, these drives are in the realm of aspirational rather than practical."
Welcome back to the 90s (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering Flash is reaching the point with its feature sizes (32 nm) where its data retention rate (1 year) and number of write cycles (8,000) is dropping rapidly (enterprise SSDs use 65+ nm SLC Flash instead), it's hard to see how Flash-based SSDs are winning, exactly.
Re:That's a lot of money..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Welcome back to the 90s (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, they are WAY faster. They are also growing in size more rapidly than traditional hard drives. They have gone from like 32gb to 1000gb in just a couple of years. They are also rapidly dropping in price.
Even now, a lot of people only use like 30gb worth of disk space. Sure, they have more, but they don't use it.
32 GB / $125 USD / Sequential Write: 187.5 MB/s / Sequential Read: 294.5 MB/s.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211419
For a lot of people, that would be the largest upgrade in terms of speed they could possibly give there computer. Maybe reducing the time to load photoshop from 8 seconds to 2. Loading Word for 3 seconds to instant. Simple as that. For $125 dollars.
64 GB / $149 USD / Similar speed
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139132
128 GB / $351 USD / Similar speed
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148319
Again, these are the largest speed improvements that you can possibly give your computer right now. That isn't insignificant. At all.
Sure, they aren't really there YET, but it won't be that long.
Re:Welcome back to the 90s (Score:3, Insightful)
32 GB / $125 USD / Sequential Write: 187.5 MB/s / Sequential Read: 294.5 MB/s.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211419 [newegg.com]
You do realise that sequential reads and writes are pretty much irrelevant to most people, right? The big benefit of SSDs is _random_ read and write speed, which is where HDDs really suck.
For a lot of people, that would be the largest upgrade in terms of speed they could possibly give there computer. Maybe reducing the time to load photoshop from 8 seconds to 2.
And how often do you load photoshop? For most people, saving six seconds on something they do once a day is hardly going to be 'the largest upgrade in terms of speed they could possibly give their computer'.
I put an SSD in my new HTPC because I wanted it to boot up fast, and while it probably halves the boot time there it's otherwise pretty underwhelming.
we paid that for a megabyte in late 1970s (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Welcome back to the 90s (Score:3, Insightful)
I put an SSD in my new HTPC because I wanted it to boot up fast, and while it probably halves the boot time there it's otherwise pretty underwhelming.
Isn't it quieter? When I installed a SSD in my mythtv frontend, hard drive noise went from noticeable, to gone.
Re:Price. (Score:2, Insightful)
Come back in a year or so.
Re:Yay (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'll wait a while. (Score:2, Insightful)
The wear of defragmentation is never worth the POSSIBLE increase in performance. All manufacturers say it, all tech journalists worth anything say it. Until I'm told by a reputable source (with numbers backing it all up) that defragmentation has a potential benefit for SSDs, I'll listen to the advice given by those who know what they're talking about.
As for filesystem issues, using a modern OS like Windows 7 or recent Linux or OSX releases will mostly take care of that as there have been updates to take advantage of SSDs. Sure, if you're still using Windows 95 with FAT, you may have issues, but anything built in the last few years will take care of that nicely (and continuously improving firmware and drivers further improve performance while diminishing issues).