i know everyone wrongly said that 2008 would be th ssd year. but it really looks like ssd will become a common mainstream product by later this year and earlier 2010 now that price/capacity have sharply improved. who knows, it might start seriously compete with HDD tecknowledgy by mid 2011 once we start getting ones with 500-700GB capacities.

I read over the articles about the fragmentation problem of the Intel drives and have only one question... Would a block of the drive be dedicated to look up tables for data saved on the drive? Fragmentation is a problem on spinning medium because of the two factors of rotation and head position, but I don't see how this would be a problem with an SSD.

I think it's different types of fragmentation, SSDs are susceptible to fragmentation like HDDs but it doesn't make a difference because the access times between getting at the different fragments is nearly instantaneous

We'll see how it dose with independent benching...

Mainstream in 2010? el oh el. maybe in 2020.
Its to expensive. Drive size is too small, and they have a shorter life then hard drives. if by mainstream you mean everyday mom and pops Inet PC has one? 10 years from now ... maybe.

SSDs have been dropping at a 75$% rate for the past 2 years. A 256 gb SSD costs 900$. In about a year (or maybe slightly more), a 1 terabyte SSD will run you 900$. That's going to be 90 cents per gigabyte. Don't believe me? Just look at what NAND flash is doing. Look at how OCZ, Intel, and G Skill are going after the market. What happens when Western Digital and Seagate (the two largest HDD makers) get into the market? SATA 6.0 SSDs will be out in 2010 and will have mainstream pricing. I'd bet on it. If we see a similar trend, you'd have to believe that terabyte SLC SSDs will be mainstream in no more than 5 years. MLC will be mainstream in under 2.

ACtually it was the old fw that read/wrote 250/240 but due to user pressure that was decreased infavor for more IOps instead of str, since more IOps will boost real life performance when the drive is used as a Os and apss drive ....

If a simple addition of cache improves performance that much, what's to stop intel from stealing ati's gddr5 and slapping 512mb onto each of their ssd's?

maybe the fact that its memory for graphics board?

Memory is memory. It works the same way regardless what it's used for.

I followed the link at the beginning of this article, and OCZ's web site lists the maximum write speed of the 120GB drive as 160MB/s and the 250 GB drive is 160 MB/s, not 240 MB/s as this article would have you believe. The read speed of both drives is 250 MB/s.

OCZ would provide several user-replacable FWs for Vertexes, one for high write IO, other for high write bandwidth.

Everyone would choose what they need. They are shipped with high IO FW.

I think a 60GB SSD for less than 200 would be very tempting!
Especially if it boasts near to the same specs as the others speedwise (250MB/s)

OCZ really likes to talk about the MB/s for its Bandwidth. Does anyone have any data on its IOPS specifications? I'd really like to find this out-- I think it would be more telling of performance.

Sadly, it is not published.