Solid State Hard Drive.

[retrochoir]

Due to the Hard Drive in a computer being the main cause of bottlenecks, does anyone know why we have yet to see solid state Hard Drives. Tiny memory cards are already up to at least 4GB so a solid state HD could be build to include at least 200GB.

I appreciate there would be a substantial cost involved but could we not have cheaper solid state hard drives of approx 10gig to run the windows O/S?

[Paulst30]

I was reading PcPro the other day and a company have already made a flash hard drive, up to 32Gb and will start using it in laptops by the end of the year. Imagine the access times?? man thats going to be sweet, plus more battery life, it can only be a better thing.

[retrochoir]

Absolutely! If a 32gig HD is already available then just think how soon these will be available whith a lot more memory.

Think of the boot up time. Ten Seconds?

[Paulst30]

Of course at least. No longer will Windows be limited to the speed of teh hard drive and be blamed for poor performance. The pc is only as fast as the slowest component in it. Looks like Hard drives will not be blamed for that soon.

Bearing in mind though that this drive is going to cost �350 for 32Gb what price will the laptop be and to keep costs down what rubbish are they going to put in along side the faster drive to subsidise the cost??

[retrochoir]

Wow, that is expensive. But I'm sure prices will inevitably come down as the drives become more popular and the technology to manufacture becomes more efficient.

[Paulst30]

Yeah its the true but sad fact of technology. Those who simply MUST have the newest thing going are the ones that keep it going, and those like me that can wait because they know that 2 weeks later there will be a bigger, faster thing out end up payin less.

There is a similar PCI card that houses RAM modules and effectively you could have quite a bit of storage there, Custom PC mag loaded windows onto it and it booted in 9 secs lol, wasnt very stable though cause of the ram timings but however it was fun.

[fo3nix]

There are other technologies that in a few years are going to really rival the current solid state technologies (in terms of price). They're already faster.

Intel are working on CPU architectures with built-in flash memory (codename Robson) for storing such things as chunks of the OS, or important files that need to get swapped to and from RAM often.

However, you'll then encounter other bottlenecks. The bus bandwidth, for one.