this news is atleast 2 days old...

"With no mechanical moving parts, no spinning platters, and just really fast flash memory, a SSD is likely the best upgrade that you can perform on your rig due to the storage subsystem being the slowest part of the typical computer system."

Uh, what? Unless your only task on the computer is loading software (and not actually using said software), an SSD does not buy you very much. If you game, that extra $200-$400 would be better spent on a GPU or CPU. If you create content (videos, whatever) you need more storage than an SSD even has. If you don't do anything very intensive, just save yourself the money.

QFT!

Although i admit i wouldn't mind having a few of these...

OCZ makes a 120 gig SSD, 2.5" interface for $279. Now I just don't understand why they're so expensive to make in general. You'd think manufacturing something with moving parts would cost significantly more.

Hellwig,

Most people (read: not corporations) are using SSD Hard Drives as their OS HDD, or a scratch drive for photo and video editing. This speeds up things tremendously. Whether or not it's worth the time to you is one thing...to some it is. Personally I'm fine with my 5400rpm WD Blue drive that has a really dense platter and gives me the performance of a 7200rpm drive. If/when SSD drops in price, I'll think about it.

Great, now they drop the price. I just bought two of these! J/k, they're still to fucking expensive. This is the one price drop where you won't see that comment.

Didn't i read this exact article 2 or 3 weeks ago?

Or was that "price's are GOING to drop?"

Anyway... to much $$ still

Ugh, I seriously would like a SSD to replace my hard drive in my laptop, but the damn price...still at $630. And that's not even CAD!

The problem is the fast SLC flash is expensive to produce, therefore to get any significant size, they have to be expensive.

Crom you are right, the fixed price of a HDD is a good portion of the drive. As flash scales, the only fixed price in an SSD is the interface which is vastly cheaper. It will still be another 5 years before Flash scales to the kind of prices to compete with HDD.

I would be happy with a SLC 128GB SSD at $140 for my OS,some games and the other normal software.

Prices are still just to high. Hopefully next year it will be getting close.

Why couldn't intel cut prices of every drive by $100?

The only drive I could consider, but probably won't anymore soon, is their lowest priced drive. But looking at the performance, I can get faster drives from the competition. Their slowest MLC drive is noticeably slower than their more expensive MLC drives.

By the time I'm going to buy a SSD drive, it won't be intel anymore.

And,crom, OCZ doesn't use the controller Intel uses. Though they are starting to become good. Especially those SATA3 SSD's.
Heck, I'm still running Sata1 on my notebook, which is less than 2 years old! time sure went by fast!

Intel makes some of the best SSDs, but I would not pay the price premium they're asking (even after the price drop) when there are better values out there.

Atleast when were buying Intel they know what there doing and actually product a quality product, not rebadge a bunch of other components to make there product - i trust intel over any other SSD company any day.

Mehh, not cheap enough for mainstream. At that price I can still get 2x 2tb and still have money left for ice-cream and a ring pop.

Its not for the average joe just yet hence the premium

your taking quality vs quantity - two different things

I want 128gb for $50. Until then I'll stick with my raptor.

Well, that puts the 80GB x-25M at about the same price as a 300GB 15k SAS drive. I'd like to see a good RAID comparison between the two... I'm gonna have to see if I can find one. If not, it might be a good idea for Tom's to cover.

Found one, its with the x-25E though. Still it'll be interesting to see.

http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3532&p=1

They are not more expensive to make.
Companies make huge profits off early adopters that pay a premium price to have it early. They know that so they charge an arm and a leg. Also if they ease into market it is safer. Start with high profits and low volume. Then ease on into higher volume and lower prices after the manufaturing and best prectices have been perfected.

REALLY!?
That's pathetically narrow sighted.
Sumsung is big into memory.
OCZ is (in my book) one of the kings of high performance memory.
It's only natural for memory makers to make SSD's. I would be more worried about companies that have NO experience with memory despite a HDD making history. Like Seagate, Western Digital or even worse, Maxtor.

Stop whining and/or making excuses. SSDs are great for some purposes. Personally, a 32G unit would be overkill for storing the OS & programs so you can get most of the benefit simply by aquiring a small SSD and using a normal HD for your data.

However, you can also try software RAID. It can give you really good read speeds without hurting the write speeds. And you get lots of storage space plus drive failure protection. A 4x500G array (1.5T storage) will set you back around $200.

However, if you are a notebook user, neither option applies. You only have space for a single device. So get the SSD that meets your needs (i.e. larger than your current used space, but not more than you'll ever fill). Compared with the anemic 4200 and 5400 rpm notebook HDs, an SSD will fly. It'll be like you've got a new computer.

And if you don't want to shell out the bucks for a good one (Intel, OCZ Vertex, etc.) then don't whine about the price. You can bet that these companies would love to bring SSDs out at mass market prices but they can't do it without losing money on the deal.

Now if only they made one to replace the IDE HD in my old Thinkpad...

Samsung makes rubbish HDD's, fridges and dvd burners - lets not even go there.

Rather odd Intels first attempt is still beating all competition, and they have been in the flash memory and general sillicon industry since the early days - wtf are you talking about?

Also note these new SSD's are excelent for military grade stuff - rugged since theres no moving parts (SSD's in general)

Also take note the Intel OEM warranty - they were more then happy to give 5 years if i read correctly?

To the person wondering why they are expensive, in spite of the fact that they have no moving parts and must be cheap to manufacture ... one reason could be they charge the price they can get. And for the time being, they can get quite a lot, because the entire SSD industry is still being born. Once there are many competing products with good reputations, then they'll start to compete via price. But for now, they're just earning back their r&d costs, and they have little incentive to lower prices.