I'd like to see a performance test of the Intel X-25M vs the new Seagate 500GB 7200.4 HD. In the first (fastest) 80 GB of the disk the Seagate runs at 90 to 100 MB/sec sequential read. Not as fast as a the Intel, but in the real world I wonder how much difference it makes. Is it worth $400 over $140?

I don't know about everyone else, but SSD is no option for me at that price point. You can purchase a new notebook at the same price as these drives and although they may offer some benefit, the cost ratio is not justified - especially at their storage ranges. Intel is slashing prices to see some kind of movement in inventory. I really don't expect these to fly off the shelves despite their popularity and hopefully that will force intel to cut prices much more.

Ack noobs - go check what people are saying at newegg on the X25M!

Its like a premium option on your computers not an essential so dont expect essential prices etc - both will still run windows and be limited in games by your video card/cpu/memory etc, just that "thrashing" on normal mechanical hdd's goes away because it can do multiple transfers 100x better then there mechanical variants etc.

I doubt that we'll see a terrabyte drive this year! I think they will be introduced later!
Though with the economic instability you never know!

Also, am I reading this right? The 80GB Notebook drive costs less than the 32GB Desktop SSD?

I paid $400 for a 128-gig SSD a few months ago at a leading retailer (Fry's Electronics), and the prices continue to drop (as of this post the same hard drive is down to $250). You can see the current prices on their website.

It's no wonder Intel is dropping their prices, they are overpriced to begin with.

I had SSD once, now I use protection always
Thanks, Mariusz na Poland

For our database apps that are painfully slow on a raptor, I am hopeful that SSDs will make a big difference in performance, am waiting for something like the fusion i-o...
http://www.dvnation.com/Fusion-IO- [...] eview.html
Now .that. is performance!

We have been testing the fusion Io drive here at work and that thing flies. The main problem with them right now is the drive space. We have supercomputer systems manipulating huge datasets. Our older machines were running 10k 300GB SCSI drives and our newest servers come with extremely expensive hardware sas controllers, yet we are using 7200 RPM drives because they are the only ones that come in 1tb size. As it is now each cluster has over 800tb of space, imagine the cost of 800tb of Fusion Io cards. At home, I have been thinking about getting some cheap SSDs. Intel needs to cut prices a lot more for me to even consider them. For $120 I can get 2 30gb OCZ Core Series v2 drives. From what I have read putting them in raid0 greatly reduces the slow writes penalties that plague most SSD drives.

Damn Newegg. Those $60 30gb Core Series v2 drives are now $85 after rebates. For $170, it doesnt seem as tempting..

I am going to wait until this time next year for one of these solid state drives in raid 0. The price is still a little to high!

These prices are crazily espensive compared to SD flash, Memory sticks and the like on a price per GB rate (at least more than 3x as expensive). They are about 10x more expensive than a regular hard drive.. and the market will just not support that price for mass consumption. There's also the question as to whether these drives will last at least as long as contemporary hard drives under heavy use. Most likely the answer will be yes, but unless a warranty backs that claim up.. the consumer will be wary with a simple 1-3 year warranty versus the limited lifetime given to many SD and other flash cards.

If you want a decent ssd price structure for q2 2009.. try.. this:

32gb: $129, 80gb $179, 160gb $259

No way will a $900+ price tag stick today for a flash device, unless it were 2 terabytes.. not 160gb. You flash companies seriously need to stop living in fantasy world with your manufacturer's suggested pricing if you want to move some inventory and take market share from hard drive companies.

Actually the war will be for all of the above for me. It has to perform, or I can stick with inexpensive, tried, and true HDD. I want speed, price, and the ability to store alot of information and it has to have a lifespan. Not to pick on the new guy, but these drives are built with known failure; 100,000 write cycles, some 1,000,000. and with a windows swap disk on one of these, 100,000 write cycle can happen in months, if not weeks. While they may incorporate wear leveling alogrithms no real data is out on how these things really perform. The ever decreasing disk space is not what people want when most of the time information is increasing at exponential rates. The final nail in my not buying an SSD is that most come with less than the three years warranty that HDD manufacturers, and even some up to 5 years offer. The MLC variety comes with typical 1 year, while the SLC comes with 2, and I actually believe those numbers, I think that after two years of use the drive WILL FAIL shortly thereafter.

moving parts = fail

Been using computers since, ummm, 1988 and thus far have had exactly one out of maybe 30ish hard drives fail on me. I have another one that I broke, but the drive did not fail, I just broke the SATA port off it while installing my video card. While it is true that moving parts will eventually fail, it is also true that SLC and MLC memory modules will definately fail at or before a specified usage level. There is no way for a normal consumer to have any real idea when their 160GB SSD will become a 150GB or 10GB SSD. Of course if SSDs continue to improve in performance, durability, capacity and price, eventually they may become similar to CPUs and Video cards in that they will be must upgrade items to improve performance. Just for now I have experience with HDDs and that experience tells me that if I have an offline back up HDD along with a raid mirror on HDD, I have every confidence that I am all but .000000001% certain to keep all of my information. I have no such experience, nor does the imperical evidence presented give me confidence in SSDs.