News - SSDs could fall below $1 per GB by the end of the year

[jim]

No, it's fairly useless for compressed media.

[dfour]

Damn I was almost going to pull the trigger on a corsair sandforce controlled 60gig drive for under £110 @ scan. may just wait a little longer now.

[Jasp]

Hybrid drives = everyone will think you own a Prius as well.

And NO ONE wants that. Unless you're Chris Martin.

Their already on the market, look up the Seagate Momentous XT come in 250,500 gig flavours each with 4gb of SLC flash memory built in.

[jim]

There's a caddy as well, so you can plug in both an SSD and hard drive. Performance was pretty mixed though, not particularly impressed myself.

I've got no interest in mixing components, so it's either full SSD or nothing for me. That means I'd need at least 160GB, and that's just too expensive as things stand.

[badass]

unless badass you mean the tape recorder (if it's called that, lol) costs that much.

Also directhex, a quick Google suggests that LTO4 drives offer 800GB storage and that 2:1 compression brings it up to 1.6TB. By the same logic, surely HDDs could be similarly compressed and therefore offer more capacity for the money? Or is it a different form of compression, somehow?

Realistic compression for an LTO 4 tape with real data is about 1TB on an 800GB/1.6TB Tape. That's a mix of servers with a few daabases and a lot of pictures which don't compress at all.
The £2000 plus outlay is for the drive to put it in.

[fwibbler]

Their already on the market, look up the Seagate Momentous XT come in 250,500 gig flavours each with 4gb of SLC flash memory built in.

And just like the Prius, they're nothing to write home about either.
If you want performance, you buy a Flash drive, if you want size you buy a Hard drive (unless you're rich of course)

[Cichlidash]

At £50 or less I would be well tempted into getting one for a boot drive for sure the £0.64 price prediction is really nice sadly now I probably wont take the plunge into getting one unless they at least reach that low a price now lol.

[R3MF]

already have a crucial realssd C300 128GB, unlikely to buy another anytime soon.

[miniyazz]

No, it's fairly useless for compressed media.

HDDs, you mean?

Realistic compression for an LTO 4 tape with real data is about 1TB on an 800GB/1.6TB Tape. That's a mix of servers with a few daabases and a lot of pictures which don't compress at all.
The £2000 plus outlay is for the drive to put it in.

That sort of outlay makes me wonder why anyone bothers with tape. It's not like the reliability is that much better than HDDs, access times suck and transfer rates are also beaten by HDDs, and at 1TB for £25 on tape vs 1.5TB for £54 (just checked Scan) for HDDs you'd need to be spending ~£4000+ on storage before it became worthwhile to use tape.

[Funkstar]

No offence, but that's a silly comparison. You can buy a 2TB drive for <£80 now without trying too hard - using your figure for tape (as I have little idea), HDDs are 2.5xish as expensive. Plus don't you need expensive outlay for tape? i.e. reading/writing equipment being expensive (£10s/100s)?

After a quick Google, it appears LTO4 drives are about £1,000 and up.

[cordas]

already have a crucial realssd C300 128GB, unlikely to buy another anytime soon.

Is it as PC changing as the tech sites make it out to be to go SSD?

[piggeh]

What is the true performance gain though, through SSD in a domestic setting? From what I've read before it's not much, will continue to be niche until prices start dropping to £0.20 or so per GB.

[jim]

HDDs, you mean?

No, tape compression.

That sort of outlay makes me wonder why anyone bothers with tape. It's not like the reliability is that much better than HDDs, access times suck and transfer rates are also beaten by HDDs, and at 1TB for £25 on tape vs 1.5TB for £54 (just checked Scan) for HDDs you'd need to be spending ~£4000+ on storage before it became worthwhile to use tape.

Anything is more reliable than an HDD to be honest. Not to mention that tapes are far easier to transport and lock in a safe.

I agree on the price front though.

[Splash]

Whatever happened to the hybrid drives that were being talked about a few months ago?

Sounded pretty good to me, SSD for the boot partition and standard magnetic cylinders for mass storage in a single device.

I'm pretty certain that wasn't how they worked: the intent was to stick maybe 4Gib of SSD in there as "cache", replacing the current 32Mb or so that you get.

[jim]

Agreed.

There wouldn't be any point in that type of hybrid drive, might as well buy an SSD and an HDD and have two separate disks rather than two separate partitions. In practice you wouldn't notice the difference, except that one would be far cheaper and easier to use.

[TooNice]

And just like the Prius, they're nothing to write home about either.
If you want performance, you buy a Flash drive, if you want size you buy a Hard drive (unless you're rich of course)

Keeping in mind the cost of SSD drives when it was released, it is viable in laptops where performance is often a compromise and space an issue. On desktop you can get a smaller SSD for the OS/app, and HDD for data. Laptops are typically equipped with only one HD bay and the XT easily best laptop HDDs while being much more affordable than SSDs.