This is the way I see things going: SSD for boot drive, mechanical for storage.

I just bought a 1.5 TB Seagate 7200.11 for $190.

I won't need more than 64-80 GB for my windows partition/drive, although the super talent's performance is too lacklustre for me to consider it for my desktop boot drive.

But very soon, fast and affordable SSDs will oust the velociraptor as the enthusiasts' boot drive of choice.

Where are the intel ssd's? I thought they were going to hit the stores weeks ago.

When I read the headline, I shot milk through my nose.

Looks like SSD are catching up. I'd consider popping one in my notebook. Nice.

Looking at that spec, the read/write speeds are comparable to laptop 2.5" drives aren't they, except for maybe the fastest drives (http://techreport.com/articles.x/9378/13)?

All the while they use less power. Another drop in price and the game is basically over now in the mid- to high-end laptop for mechanical drives.

J-j-j-j-jmicron?

awwww, twice the capacity would have been nice, and keep it at this price.

SSD's are getting dangerously close!

With all the recent arrivals, that very nice Intel SSD review a while back is going to be out of date really soon.

I need to set some of these things into a Linux-software RAID5 or RAID10 on my Shuttle. Two per 3.5 inch bay, no heat problems, silence, amazing read speeds...

According to the official spec sheet, the 64GB MasterDrive LX SSD can also take 35 years of 50GB write and erase operations per day, while the 128GB can handle just over twice that. Both models only carry one-year warranties, though.

The reason for the one year warranty is pretty obvious, if you understand the limitations of the technology. Grab a cup of your favorite beverage and read on:-

Please remember that the SSD manufacturer claims of >N-million write-cycles and 10 years data retention are NOT COINCIDENT. There is a write-cycle count vs data-retention-time profile for the typical storage cell used in a SSD. ALL the manufacturers of SSDs seem very reluctant indeed to make this profile public!! ( I challenge you to find this profile of individual cell data-retention vs write-cycles for say the Intel X25 SSD-series in any publicly available record. Intel is likely to have the highest process quality control, hence the choice of X25.) Many conventional EEprom families publish this profile either in their data sheets or their publicly-available reliability data. Typically the standard EEPROM profiles show a 10-year retention after 10,000 write-cycles and a few days retention after 1 million cycles!!. With the very high cell-densities/very thin dielectric layers in modern SSDs, this particular weakness is magnified -- hence the so-called "wear-leveling" algorithms. SSDs are transitioning to 40nm and 30nm process nodes. The makers can significantly reduce their cost by moving to these processes, but achieve this benefit at a heavy cost. Endurance for these newer products is significantly reduced when compared to products based on the less-dense technologies used by previous-generation EEProms. A conventional Hard-disk has all sorts of failure mechanisms, but none where the stored data can gradually seep away (by leakage) even when the disk is not being accessed. Wear-leveling algorithms are only active when writing.

The first symptoms of SSD cell data-retention problems is likely to be system-flakiness with erratic system crashes etc, particularly if the SSD is acting as the system "virtual-disk". As you probably know, the root cause of any PC 'flakiness' is the most difficult to track down and is usually eliminated by patiently swapping out system components. A PC component that can exhibit this type of error due to limitations of its inherent technology should NEVER be used as a core system component.

SSDs are fine for long-term program/data storage with minimum rewrites. They are NOT fine in any application which has frequent (and unknown number of) re-writes -- e.g: a Windows OS C: drive with Windows applications with lots of re-written data and particularly if it includes on-drive virtual memory.

Of particular concern to me is the belligerent marketing of these devices for use as the only disk in laptops/notebooks. If your SSD-based notebook goes flaky within a year or so, just remember to swap out the hard-disk FIRST when troubleshooting..... Symptoms of failure should not show up until after at least a year of typical usage.........hmmm... 1 year SSD warranty... hmmm.... Might want to take out an extended warranty on that notebook if the SSD represented a substantial portion of the purchase price and also make sure the warranty small-print does not exclude hard-disks or SSDs !

Why don't they offer longer warranties if they think they could last 35 years? That would give me some confidence in buying one. It's not like a 64GB SSD will cost a lot in 3 years time either, so cost of replacement will be low for the small percentage that they think will fail.

I guess this is using the JMicron controller however, which is another confidence sapping aspect.