Are you on the SSD bandwagon?

Cybelex said:

Windows 7 is being designed to have a smaller hard drive footprint than Vista just for that reason--that SSD is getting more popular, but the drives are not very large. But most people who have used SSD say that the performance increase is nowhere near what they expected. The drive is just one of the chokepoints in computer operation.

SSD is likely to have a pretty short lifespan in the tech arena since memristors will likely make the whole idea (and current computer designs) obsolete in less than 10 years. We can then expect "instant-on" computers that need no power to retain solid-state memory.

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I agree with you on Windows 7 - my next build later this year will be a Windows 7 with SSD boot drive (Intel XM series).

I disagree with your timeline on memresistor technology. My career has been commercializing stuff like that and I've spent way more time in a wafer fab than I want to think about, and with memresistors currently at the labwork stage I doubt they'll be ruling the roost in a mere decade

As for the first few posters - look out for speed metrics before you go SSD!!!! The Samsung, and most cheaper SSDs, use JMicron controllers that result in only moderately improved speed over HDD. Intel uses custom logic and the experience is amazing but the price is high.

Most SSD drives have terrible write performance because an erase cycle is required before data can be written to the chip. To combat this newer NAND chips allow two concurrent write operations in different blocks. Controllers use this feature to improve performance by writing bytes across all memory chips and then striping the data, long story short its a long drawn out process to recover data from SSD drives and the data recovery shops that do service SSD drives charge a LOT of money to recover data.

NAND memory amazes me, I've pulled data off chips that most would consider dead however I would NEVER trust any NAND technology exclusively with mission critical data, ALWAYS BACKUP!. As blocks age they start to return bit errors, all it takes is one more bit error beyond what the ECC data can recover for you to loose your data. This happens very frequently with high density MLC chips.

My biggest concern with SSD in consumer products is what happens when the user pulls the plug and doesn't shut the device off properly. If the device is in the middle of a write cycle (ie: the sector is erased before the write operation starts) it will leave the block in question erased, if the drive is modifying its translation lookup table while this occurs well... now the drive doesn't know where logical sector 0 is on the physical memory chip. hmm.. fun stuff, i'm ranting but all rants aside, ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR DATA.