Corsair joins SSD party with 2.5-inch 128GB drive
By Ross Miller 
posted January 21st 2009 12:17PM
posted January 21st 2009 12:17PM
posted January 21st 2009 12:17PM
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Think we'll have a terabyte by Christmas?
No doubt there will be one by the fourth quarter. But none of use will be able to afford it.
No but maybe 600-750 mark or whatever they come out as. I think we will have Terabyte SSDs by the end of next year maybe early 2011.
(I say between 600-750 because I don't what the next capacity is after 500GB)
I should say that's based on price not Tech.
1TB drives are already out
Just get over these expensive SSD rampage.
Your less than USD $200 Seagate 1T storage raid 5 rig are fine for 99.999% of your usage.
Unless, you want to buy it in case of a earthquake.
Probably: 1TB 3.5-inch at LEAST announced by Christmas, probably available, too expensive for most people. 500GB 2.5-inch, and affordably (possibly same price as hard drive) 128GB.
i say one should wait another 3-4 months to switch to ssd
I'll be glad to just replace my disk based HDD since prices are so low you can just replace them every two or three years adding storage also.
You look forward to replacing your "disk based" Hard Disk Drive? :P
yeah, yeah, I see the mistake now.
A normal mechanical hard drive has better constant read and write speeds than that. They're not Low enough in price. Until we get a reasonable price like 500GB SSD at £100 Then I will go for it. Until then. No thanks.
Well I don't know about you, but I certainly rarely deal with 90MB+ sized files that have 0% fragmentation? The virtually zero seek times of SSD's make more difference than you can possibly imagine. They do have a zero seek time, the stated seek time is pretty much artificially created by the way the SATA interface works. If we get an entirely new interface just for SSD then just watch how much faster your PC boots. Hard disks are by far the largest bottleneck in the modern computer, regardless of constant Read/Write speeds, SSD's are vastly faster in practical use.
Still slower than the Read/write speeds than OCZ and others. Although they do say in the article though they use a Samsung controller rather than a jmicron that seems to be dragging SSDs down.
Ill stick with my raid 0 setup till SSD's fall in price. Cold booting vista x64 in under 10 seconds is good enough for me right now.
for a laptop maybe
not a desktop drive for heavy use
Meh, a 120Gb OCZ Vertex is only £32 more, yet has a new controller and is much faster than this - 200MB/s read, 160MB/s write.
Wow, what a dud. Last-gen speed, last gen price. What the hell?
Look at the G.skill titan 256 gb for $500. With almost 200 mb/s read /write.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/01/20/g-skill-titan-256gb-ssd-review/1
Corsair this is total failure.
"At £326 / $449, it's priced on par "
Yeah sure.... if we were in mid-2008 maybe. These are definitely last gen specs, (infact honestly worst then). A SSD of this offering should be priced at within the $100-$180 range honestly with all the new SSDs coming out with blazing read and write speeds.
can someone please tell me what the big deal is with SSD over the regular SATA hard drive? faster? more reliable? why the big difference in price?
In theory - yes on both counts. Since you don't have moving parts, you shouldn't have as many failure problems. It should also (in theory) operate faster as you aren't relying on a magnetic head to read/write.
We are in the infancy of these drives, so they have their quarks. Hold off a little while and theory will become reality.
I imagine they have around 71 septillion quarks, and a couple of quirks to boot!
"hold off a little while and theory will become reality."
Not necessary, you just have to spend some money... There are already a few different manufacturers with drives that are faster than any 3.5" 10K RPM desktop drive, and certainly more so than even the fastest laptop drives..
The premium might seem like a lot to average people but to a business they might be considered cheaper. SSDs are suppose to be less susceptible to failure due to bumping and jarring of a notebook. If you have a bunch of sales people with notebooks the downtime/failure cost can easily out cost the small premium. Showing up with a notebook that doesn't work could cost a client, make your business look bad, you might lose data, you might have to pay for data recovery, the sales person might have to work without an important tool, there could be times you are paying for someone to stand around waiting for the notebook to be repaired. The cost of having an IT guy load the OS and all the software on a failed machine could alone save the premium. A $100-300 premium for a 32-64GB SSD over a possibly unnecessary 250-500GB HDD seems like a very good deal to me.
I know I'm being a nervous nelly but I don't know how much I'd trust 128GB+ to these things.
I'm also curious as to how well these would perform as scratch disks. How long are they supposed to last?
At least for the first few years I would trust my 128GB more with an SSD than a HHD.
However, I would totally trust either. Backup people!
Well SSD use clever algorithms to spread the data writes evenly and are rated to last many years, but of course when they have small capacity and you use all of it intensively like major video production; things would be less optimal, but for normal use it should last many years according to the manufacturers.
(longer than a seagate 7200.11 at least :P)
Considering that even when they finally fail (which will be longer than the lifetime of the computer its in, and for average users it'll be 8-10+ years), they just become read-only drives and you don't lose your data versus the routine catatrosphic total-loss of harddrives, you're better off...
Well they do get slightly dated quick because every so much time a twice as fast version is released.
For the same price I think I'll take 4x1TB drives of the spinning variety. 8 times the storage per device, 32 times more storage and 1 drive will meet or beat the transfer rates of this SSD. Raid them in 0+1 or Raid 5 and its no contest...unless of course to decide you want to start jumping around with said drives spinning.
Try sticking four 3.5" drives in a laptop..
With or without a hammer?
that, my friend, was the right answer.
Pretty enticing but I'm a fan of capacity and not just speed. Guess I'll stick with my 1.5TB drives for now.
While I, on the other hand, couldn't fill my laptop's 160gb hard drive if I tried, so I am actually thinking about getting this.
I'll take your 160gb if you switch, my 80gb is stuffed.
I’m so sick of the “I’ll stick with my 2 dollar terabyte drive” weenies.
Raw capacity is not the point of these drives.
Speed, reliability, quite and less heat are the significant leaps here.
I bought 2 cheaper SSD drives for a media center computers. I have 5 terabytes of storage on a windows 2008 server in my house. I use the SSD for loading windows and running the computers as extenders. Very fast start up, no noise and pretty much zero heat. A winner all around.
Would anybody mind schooling me - what is the difference between SSD and / or flash drives, that is, any difference even exists.
SSD's are flash but with a better controller and internally put in a parallel configuration and are attached to your normal HD-drive connector (SATA) instead of USB and are generally much faster because of that, and have more room and are designed for constant intense use, normal flashdrives are not expected to be written all the time and doing so causes damage (-over a lengthy times, but still-) because each cell can only be written to so many times but SSD controllers take care that things are moved about and you don't end up writing the same spot over and over while not using other parts of its memory cells (reading doesn't influence flash so it's the writing strategy that matters).
Because of the writing issue and near instant access of any part of it; SSD's (and flashdrives) don't need defragging either, and in fact should specifically not be defragged, so that saves pain for the user too since you don't need to keep an eye on fragmentation and do lengthy defrags to prevent system slowdowns like you have with classical HD's.
SSD costs more