SSD on the Mainboard ?

[oolon]

But your data will still be on the hard drive that it's caching.

Ok may be I have misunderstood what they propose to do with this memory. There is of course still a risk with write back caching, that the drive and the memory will not be synced at the moment of death so I hope it has in order writing to disk, otherwise corruption would be very possible.

[Pob255]

ummm I'm sure there are some laptops that have the ssd on the motherboard, all it involves is instead of a separate plug in card you just put the same components onto the motherboard and instead of a plug you just have direct traces.
You'd only make major savings when you combine the controller into the motherboard chipset.

The other major factor with SSD's cost is the chips used, you can get far cheaper chips but they have far slower read/write times.

Ether way with the chips put on the motherboard, that's it, no upgrading or replacing them.
So if your onboard SSD is too small or too slow, tough, you have to get a whole new motherboard or a separate SSD

[DanceswithUnix]

Ether way with the chips put on the motherboard, that's it, no upgrading or replacing them.
So if your onboard SSD is too small or too slow, tough, you have to get a whole new motherboard or a separate SSD

Sounds like the argument used against putting IDE ports, floppy controllers, serial ports etc onto the motherboard nearly 20 years ago.

Cheap stuff gets integrated. If, like integrated video, it isn't up to scratch then just turn the feature off or ignore it and plug in something that works.

If I had an integrated small SSD I would probably put Linux on it for kicks, then forget it was there

[Pob255]

Sounds like the argument used against putting IDE ports, floppy controllers, serial ports etc onto the motherboard nearly 20 years ago.

Cheap stuff gets integrated. If, like integrated video, it isn't up to scratch then just turn the feature off or ignore it and plug in something that works.

If I had an integrated small SSD I would probably put Linux on it for kicks, then forget it was there

No a sound card would be a closer comparason

Most motherboards have the relatively low cost realtech sound onboard, to buy one as a seperate sound card cost under £10
If you want higher quality sound then you have to pay a lot more for a top end motherboard which has better onboard sound or for a highend sound card.

You don't get high end sound cards built into low cost motherboards and that's my point about a built in ssd.

Low end SSD's are not faster and often can be slower than a hard drive, so if a low cost ssd is built into a motherboard it's not going to offer anything much in the way of a performance boost.
The main cost of an SSD is in the flash memory chips as is the read/write performance, simply moving the control access side into the chipset is not going to vastly reduce the cost.
The only wat to keep the costs down is cheaper lower capasity chips.
Yes the chip cost will come down as they get better and higher volumes are made, but that would also bring down SSD costs.

Would it be nice to have an onboard SSD? of course it would.
Will it vastly improve your performance for less than $20 additional cost? Considering how low the grade of chips they'd have to use to keep it under $20 . . .

[DanceswithUnix]

Integrated sound is an interesting analogy, that is what I use atm

Having been through the hassle & expense of lots of sound cards, I am fed up with buying them so I stick with what comes on the motherboard.

Perhaps the Asus Express-gate could be considered the start of onboard SSD. That uses the BIOS flash chip, which has to be present anyway, so there is no extra board/interface/layout etc expense just the expense of using the next size up in flash chip. Maybe that will be the way it goes, you get a partition of the BIOS chip unlocked for general storage.

Not leading edge performance, but it would be nice to have, for example, the Windows install media built into the motherboard for those times when a relative asks you to repair their PC and can only shrug when you ask where all the install/driver CDs have gone

[kalniel]

Would it be nice to have an onboard SSD? of course it would.
Will it vastly improve your performance for less than $20 additional cost? Considering how low the grade of chips they'd have to use to keep it under $20 . . .

Also consider you're only talking about 8-16gb or so.. certainly room to have intel spec SSD in there given it's so small.