Next generation NAND memory shown at Computex

[silicon_toad2000]

The biggest benefit of this next-generation NAND should be lower prices. The smaller the dies, the more can be squeezed onto a single wafer. With SSDs already slipping below the dollar-per-gigabyte threshold, we could be in for some real bargains later this year. According to SandForce, the 19- and 20-nm NAND will enter mass production in a "very short amount of time." Drives shouldn't be too far behind.

While we had SandForce cornered, we asked about its future plans. New products are coming, and they'll stick with Serial ATA until 2013. PCI Express is the future, though, and we should see SandForce controllers break away from SATA next year.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/23070

[White Stripes]

funny they are putting these drives on the pci bus.... used to be a bit of kit around called a 'hard card' where the controller and harddrive were mounted on the same isa bus card....

...everything old is new again...



...and am i the only one that thinks SSDs are a bad idea for 'long haul' operation? for WORM media sure but as soon as 'pagefile.sys' is put on one... well... you get where im going with that...

[silicon_toad2000]

well they recommend not to defrag these things regularly as it will shorten the life of the cards.

[White Stripes]

well they recommend not to defrag these things regularly as it will shorten the life of the cards.

a swap file would give flash memory more of a thrashing than a defragment so... im still lost on that one...

even bittorrent would give one a serious workout...

having the os installed on one of  these with data and swap, and possibly the user directories, on a mechanical drive would make sense... but it still leaves the user with a 'moving part' if they are trying to get away from the moving parts aspect of a computer..

[Bluey_412]

There is the 'Hybrid' drive (no, not a toyota) made by Seagate that has a SSD and mechanical disk combined in the one device.

Your thoughts, stripes, are probably the same kind that prompted the construction of such gadgets, basic o/s on the SSD for fast reading and then the mechanical for thre swapfile and similar activity

Toad is right too, dont defrag 'em, but do run a tool called Trim regularly, it does do more than a simple defrag

the drives DO have a huge 're/write cycles before fail' figure tho, so a lot of the concern expressed here may be unwarranted

The drives can generally outperform the connection bus even the SATA bus speeds...

Either way, i still dream of a 500gb 'hard card' that lives in a PCIe-16 slot....

We all used to dream of a machine that was so fast to boot u didnt have time to even contemplate fetching a coffee and donut before the trusty desktop was there and ready to work

HDD's in any form, have been the slow-point in PC operation and even back in Win3.1 days, we knew how fast things COULD be if we didnt have to rely on the spinning platters, let alone loading DOS from a 5 1/4" floppy...

I would love to see folks like AbRASiON in the commenters of the above story be forced to endure 1 year of Win 3.1 on a 386SX with 1 Mb of RAM and a 100Mb HDD...

[White Stripes]

...be forced to endure 1 year of Win 3.1 on a 386SX with 1 Mb of RAM and a 100Mb HDD... ...

i used to use a 486SX (33mhz) w/8mb ram and 400mb (2x200mb drives) of hdd ... was irksome that i couldnt run mirc and IE at the same time...

tho in the same vein try running windows 3.1 on a 600mhz box with 256mb ram... fastest version of windows out there

lol


as for the sata bus there has yet to be a drive (at least a fully mechanical one -- dunno about the hybrids) that can 'keep up' with the data rate so i dunno why they are going directly for the pci slot.... ...i just hope such pci creatures act like regular drives rather than being a driver-writers nightmare...

tho for as much as they cost i dont see me using a SSD in any form for many many years to come...