TDK 32g Flash HDD....

[Dr Mordrid]

Connects right up to a standard IDE cable;

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/09/18/tdk_flash_drive/

[Jammrock]

Every laptop and HTPC users dream. I wonder what it will cost and when the SATA version will come out.

[TransformX]

I'll take two of these, with a large coke and fries

[ZokesPro]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/

Bechmarks for the new Samsung Flash SSD.

I see this as the future of computer storage. Soon we'll say goodbye to our mehcanical counterpart, but not anytime soon as SSD is still expensive.

[Jammrock]

Not any time soon. By 2009 there will be 2.5 TB HDDs, while SDD *might* be at the 150 GB by then. While that will be great for some applications, such as work systems, low-end users and portables, for power users, media users, and server applications it will be a long time before SDD takes over.

Unless of course some cool new non-volitile tech hits that allows people to make near TB size drives with no moving parts. It could happen, but according to what the public know, the old mechanical drives will be around for a while still.

[GNEP]

Which is why we're getting the hybrid drives with OS-sized flash disks tacked on to a traditional HDD. MS want this approach for Vista or something don't they?

[Jammrock]

Yes. I'm running ReadyBoost on my Vista install right now, which is similar to the hybrid HDD thing. Basically, Vista stores all of the small files, the DLLs, OCX, SYS files, on the solid state device. HDDs are faster for large sequencial transfers, but flash is faster (well, good flash is) for lots of small files. Mainly because there is no seek time so a flash drive can do thousands of more seeks per second, or I/Os per second, versus a traditional drive.

So when Vista boots up, or commonly used apps start up, Vista uses the flash device (whether on a thumb drive or on a hybrid HDD) to pull the small files, and the traditional drive to pull the large files.

My boot time decrease by 20+ seconds when I enabled ReadyBoost and Vista got the cache all setup (take a few days of rebooting and playing around before the cache is properly built). Office apps start up almost instantly. Usually in about 2-3 seconds, and that's from click to useable, including Outlook. I use a 1 GB OCZ 150x SD card on my internal SD card reader on my Toshiba laptop. ExtremeTech did a thumb drive round up for ReadyBoost and put the Patriot Extreme (Xporter XT) thumb drive as the best bang for the buck, and also stated which ones were ReadyBoost ready, as not all of them are (they must meet a certain I/O threshold which Vista tests).

Jammrock

[SteveC]

... By 2009 there will be 2.5 TB HDDs, ...

Might be sooner than that even http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/17/s...rding-density/