raptor day is numbered.

[umala]

"Solid state drives promise to be much faster than traditional hard drives. Since there are no moving parts, the drives can reach sustained read speeds of 62 MB/s and have an access time in the sub-millisecond range. Regular hard drives typically have access times between 8 and 19 ms. In addition, SSDs promise to enhance battery life by a few minutes."
http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/17/adata_ssd_128gb

 

[jt001]

This is still much too expensive and has too low of a capacity to become mainstream anytime in the near future. One of these as a boot drive and a standard hard drive as storage sounds good though, just wish the transfer rate was a bit better.

 

[umala]

1) 128GB, too low capacity 8O ? Raptor come with 26, 73 and 150 GB
2) too expensive. 4 montsh ago I bought a 1GB Kingston USB memory and now for the same price, I can buy 2´GB.
3) I have never tried but less than milli seek time means several times faster than 15rpm hdd.

 

[Valtiel]

Those will be several hundred dollars and we expect A-Data's drive to be at least one thousand dollars.

Too expensive.

 

[AlaskaFox]

Prices will come down fairly quick as with all new tech. as they become more mainstream and they start becoming mass produced, I predict that the premium will drop to be close to (but still higher than) traditional magnetic. Plus, the hybrid drives should help provide a stop gap offering the best of both worlds, if they ever get released.

 

[chuckshissle]

It's a very good replacement for the magnetic spinning disks we use today, by it's still very expensive. Maybe next year or two well, see some much more affordable version and could be the mainstream on performance storage.

 

[plankmeister]

Is it not possible to create an IDE/SATA interface into which you plug a large (4gb perhaps?) CF card, format it as NTFS and use it as a boot drive? I'm sure I've read about such a device somewhere...

get a couple of them... OS on one, swap on the other... Normal hard disk for apps/data. That'd kick ass!

 

[sprite]

Theres the Gigabyte i-ram if thats what you mean, you'll need sticks of RAM to put in it though.

 

[nigelf]

if these are somewhat affordable, would they work in any pc that has a SATA/IDE (depending on which model you get) connector? i.e. could i stick the 2.5 inch 128GB drive into my lappy?

 

[jt001]

1) 128GB, too low capacity Shocked ? Raptor come with 26, 73 and 150 GB
2) too expensive. 4 montsh ago I bought a 1GB Kingston USB memory and now for the same price, I can buy 2´GB.
3) I have never tried but less than milli seek time means several times faster than 15rpm hdd

1. 128GB may be enough for average joe but for most people on this site nowhere near enough. My main storage array is 1.28TB, that's exactly 10x more than this, so to get that much storage with these would cost around $10,000. Not a bargain by any means.
2. $1,000/128GB puts us at around $7.8/GB, my array, including costs for a raid 4 controller, puts me at $0.49/GB for redundant, faster storage with perfectly acceptable seek times
3. The seek time may be better but the STR is much much lower than my array. I'll stick with mechanical SATA and SCSI drives for the time being.

Also, these have limited write cycles, and reliability is very important to me.

In a few years this may start finding it's way into mainstream notebooks and maybe even desktops, but for now it doesn't really have a place. Though it does look exciting it's still way ahead of it's time, once the technology matures and the price comes down I will definitely have a few of these for boot and programs, though I don't see myself giving up my storage raid anytime soon.

 

[umala]

1) 128GB, too low capacity Shocked ? Raptor come with 26, 73 and 150 GB
2) too expensive. 4 montsh ago I bought a 1GB Kingston USB memory and now for the same price, I can buy 2´GB.
3) I have never tried but less than milli seek time means several times faster than 15rpm hdd

1. 128GB may be enough for average joe but for most people on this site nowhere near enough. My main storage array is 1.28TB, that's exactly 10x more than this, so to get that much storage with these would cost around $10,000. Not a bargain by any means.
2. $1,000/128GB puts us at around $7.8/GB, my array, including costs for a raid 4 controller, puts me at $0.49/GB for redundant, faster storage with perfectly acceptable seek times
3. The seek time may be better but the STR is much much lower than my array. I'll stick with mechanical SATA and SCSI drives for the time being.

Also, these have limited write cycles, and reliability is very important to me.

In a few years this may start finding it's way into mainstream notebooks and maybe even desktops, but for now it doesn't really have a place. Though it does look exciting it's still way ahead of it's time, once the technology matures and the price comes down I will definitely have a few of these for boot and programs, though I don't see myself giving up my storage raid anytime soon.

hey, please remember that I am talking about Raptor, not normal hard disk or storage capacity

 

[timswar]

Just want to mention that the 128 SSD is a 2.5inch form factor drive... it's not meant for a desktop... i'm sure they could fit quite a bit more memory into a 3.5inch desktop drive...

now, for laptops, it's great... my laptop currently only has a 120 gig harddrive in it... in a few years when the price comes down (and storage rates increase) it'll be ideal for notebooks...

 

[stan116]

Try 36 Gb/74Gb/150. I really do not know where you arrived at 26Gb & 73Gb? Do your research before you post.I own two of each,and i have to agree with the other post.To expensive and to new to go out and buy one.

 

[kcrush]

Looks interesting but like others I will wait a year or two after it debuts before buying it as a main drive so they work out the issues.

Something else to liquid cool to make sure it doesn't get too hot from lots of use.

And yes I"m sure it will be very expensive at first but then so are the raptors, but I've never regretted spending a single penny on any of them.

 

[cxl]

Actually, I think that 128GB is way too large.

Please give me reasonable priced SATA II 16GB (or even just 8GB) drive that I can install in my desktop. I will install just system and basic applications on it, then use normal large capacity HD to store most data (and swap file). That makes the most sense to me....

 

[tekzor]

Try 36 Gb/74Gb/150. I really do not know where you arrived at 26Gb & 73Gb? Do your research before you post.I own two of each,and i have to agree with the other post.To expensive and to new to go out and buy one.

stop defending your overpriced crapy drive purchase. This technology is better in every way to the raptor drives. Deal with it and the price. This is a true upgrade to HDD. Over priced raptors imo are only for people that think they are getting the "best".

 

[yori182]

I think the exact numbers are irrelevant as his point was still made. The Raptor hard drives came in three sizes, two of which were below the A-Data 128GB drive mentioned, therefore mentioning capacity as a concern in respect to the Raptor drives made no sense...and if you want to nitpick about meaningless information...

To expensive and to new to go out and buy one.

It is spelled "Too" when you want to express something as excessive or greater than another.

I think the new drives sound good, but hope the prices will come down.

 

[Dahak]

On a price/performance level,those drives are still very pricey.Maybe in a year or so the prices will drop off,but until then I'll stick with the traditional hard drives as they are still within my pocket books reach.Goodluck.

Dahak

AMD X2-4400+@2.644 S-939
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2X1GIG DDR IN DC MODE
WD300GIG HD
EXTREME 19IN.MONITOR 1280X1024
THERMALTAKE TOUGHPOWER 850WATT PSU
COOLERMASTER MINI R120

 

[MarcusL]

The article doesn't mention the write speed of the flash array. Flash usually stinks in this area. While the lifespan of flash has improved greatly, putting something that is constantly being rewritten like the windows disk cache on the flash could rapidly burn through its limited number of write cycles.

Soon, we'll be seeing raptors with perpendicuar recording and other hard disk advances that will move the target further out. I think raptors will have a market for at least a few more years.

It will be years before the cost of solid state is competitive. For the same money, you can get a RAID5 or RAID6 setup of 7200 rpm drives and get far more storage, far more performance, and far more data security.

The new 15krpm 2.5 inch drives might obsolete the raptors before solid state drives get a chance.

 

[balister]

I don't know about buying the 128G, but buying the 64G and using it as your O/S drive might not be a bad idea if the price isn't too exhorbinant. Like many here, it will be interesting to see what this is like in a year or so when prices come down as they recoop their R&D costs. Solid state drives have been a long time in coming and there have been many, many drive ideas over the years.

Something I remember hearing about in the mid 90s was crystal drives where they used a laser to write data into the atomic bonds between atoms in a crystal. The problem was that the drive was highly susceptible to shock and even a minor shock of less than a G would throw off the laser used to write the data thus making it impossible to regain the data. The projected data storage in the mid 90s was along the lines of a TB per 1" cube (when HDs were strugling to get to 8G in size).

 

[clue69less]

"Solid state drives promise to be much faster than traditional hard drives. Since there are no moving parts, the drives can reach sustained read speeds of 62 MB/s and have an access time in the sub-millisecond range. Regular hard drives typically have access times between 8 and 19 ms. In addition, SSDs promise to enhance battery life by a few minutes."
http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/17/adata_ssd_128gb

It's not just the Raptor's days that are numbered. All of us and all the things we play with are changing and will go away at some point, replaced by something faster, lighter, cheaper and/or sexier. Or, any of the above could just turn to dust over time and not matter anymore. But nothing is forever except change.

Still, WD doesn't need to worry about losing many Raptor sales to SS drives just yet. Give it a few years and most of us will have SS drives or something even better.

 

[darkstar782]

62MB is a little slower sustained transfer than a Raptor, or even a Seagate 7200.10 750GB drive.

Sub Millisecond access times are cool, but not worth $1000 plus to anybody except people running database servers and similar.

Both NAND and NOR flash have a limited number of read/write cycles.... not something I would want in my system hard disk, where windows is constantly editing data.

 

[niz]

hey, please remember that I am talking about Raptor, not normal hard disk or storage capacity

Yeah and many pepole (heare at least ) put 2 raptors in raid 0 if they want more storage. Which also gives much better (upto double) the performance too. total cost is like $400 for 300GB of screaming fast raid array.

The same in these new flash drives woiuld cost at least $2000 (i f 1 is at least $1k).

Also, what they are really keeping quiet about is that flash memory is only good for 100,000 writes before it dies. Thats OK for USB thumb drives or whatever, but when you start using it for a system drive, 100,000 writes to the same sector can happen pretty damn quickly, especially if you run a shitty operating system like MS Windows, as Microsoft can't get their paging algorithms right, and for some reason windows does about a hundred registry writes a second even when youre not running any apps ( run regmon if you don't beleive me).

The real reason the hard drive industry are pushing this tech. is that its going to force everyone to replace their hard drives much more frequently, pobably like every 2 years or so, and they're gonna be much more expensive.

 

[cxl]

Also, what they are really keeping quiet about is that flash memory is only good for 100,000 writes before it dies.

That is true for single cell. However, firmware of drives is designed to avoid repeating writes to single cell - it spreads writing across all capacity of drive. That way you would need to rewrite all data on the drive 100000 times to have it die. That equals predicted lifetime of HD.

Thats OK for USB thumb drives or whatever, but when you start using it for a system drive, 100,000 writes to the same sector can happen pretty damn quickly, especially if you run a shitty operating system like MS Windows, as Microsoft can't get their paging algorithms right, and windows does about a hundred registry writes a second even when youre not running any apps.

Yes, pagefile would be better placed on normal HD. Why waste expensive flash capacity to something that is not used too much anyway?

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

...
Something I remember hearing about in the mid 90s was crystal drives where they used a laser to write data into the atomic bonds between atoms in a crystal. The problem was that the drive was highly susceptible to shock and even a minor shock of less than a G would throw off the laser used to write the data thus making it impossible to regain the data. The projected data storage in the mid 90s was along the lines of a TB per 1" cube (when HDs were strugling to get to 8G in size).

That is called Holographic storage technology. They are out @ 300gb per disk (size of CD). It has been in development since 1960's (?) and I expect to eventually replace hard drives, though some new recording technologies for magnetic hard drives, such as Heat Assisted Recording, and others, will challenge the validity of Holographic storage.