Solid State Hard Drive that goes in a PCI Slot!

[Lionheart]

Hey all,

Yep. At NewEgg.com, they have a 180 GIG SSD HD available that goes in your PCI slot, lol.. How wild is that. I never thought I would see the day that HD's were cards you plug in. No fan, no special slot for the HD in a big rack.

[jmig]

Do these things replace a hard drive? Or do they just implement it? It seems they are finally getting large enough to be useful. What good is a 50-80 GB SSD if you can put Win 7 on it?

Now, if one was big enough to hold FSX and a million add-ons.

WOWWEEEEEEEEeeeeeee!

[Willy]

I think I could fit FS9 on a 180g HD very well.

[OBIO]

I could fit my 3 very heavily populated/heavily modified installs of FS9 and my mesh and scenery folders on that drive and still have about 130gig of free space. But actually, I couldn't even use that card....my system doesn't even have a PCI-Express slot.

OBIO

[Wing_Z]

Yup I've seen a 320GB one too, they are a bit expensive still.
I wonder about performance?
You'd want to see numbers about burst speed, sustained read/write etc

[Moparmike]

Heh...I remember when a card in an ISA slot was the easiest way you could put a hard-drive in a computer. :) Looks like we're coming full circle.
(Yep, I installed a few of those HDD-on-a-card units for my high school's rigs)

I'm curious what kind of transfer rates you'd get from the PCI-E slots too. Might be a good workable solution but with a good graphics card (or several) I could see the PCI-E buss getting choked up if you added storage data traffic too.

[Lionheart]

I saw a 500 and 540 Gig set of SSD HD's. So they will probably have a 1TB here in a few more months. I am sure they have experimental 2TB's floating around in the labs.

The 500 and 540 were over $1K USD. I think the 540 was $1300.00.

Some of the main uses for SSD's are;
* You can drop them and 'no damage' 99.9% of the time, not motion sensitive, no moving parts
* No need to defrag
* Extreme speed memory retrieval
* No noise, no sound, no vibration

They are the ultimate for laptops...

What this could mean, for groups like Apple, is creating your own HD to fit in an area you want to fill, such as a huge sheet of those memory cell chip modules. So imagine taking a sheet the entire size of the top area of the laptop and make that a giant HD. You would probably have 3TB's of area to use, and only 1/8 inch thick, no motors to run down or burn out, etc, low electricity burn...

I say this because Apple ended up doing this with their latest line of laptops, making a battery that fit in an area they had. They then designed a battery pack for that size of area, a large super thin thing that could hold a very large charge. Imagine doing this with custom shaped HD's.. Mind you, it would be nice to keep the prices down.. well, you have to or no one will buy them.

[ananda]

I saw a 500 and 540 Gig set of SSD HD's. So they will probably have a 1TB here in a few more months. I am sure they have experimental 2TB's floating around in the labs.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/2TB-OCZ-Technology-Z-Drive-p88-MLC-Flash-x8-PCI-E-SSD-Read-1400MB-s-Write-1400MB-s-512MB-Cache (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/2TB-OCZ-Technology-Z-Drive-p88-MLC-Flash-x8-PCI-E-SSD-Read-1400MB-s-Write-1400MB-s-512MB-Cache)

George

[Wing_Z]

It transfers data an order of magnitude faster than say a WD Raptor 10,000rpm HDD.
Sounds like science fiction.
Maybe it is?
"Item currently awaiting an ETA."
Mind you, at 6,000+ Sterling it may as well be science fiction...
Certainly these sound like the thing of the future, prices will come down quickly I imagine.
It's actually amazing that rotating mechanical disks have hung on for so long.

[stansdds]

Solid state hard drives are the wave of the future and I'm sure the prices will come down as they become more mainstream.

[kilo delta]

Solid state hard drives are the wave of the future and I'm sure the prices will come down as they become more mainstream.

Definitely coming down in price...I bought 3x Samsung 64GB SSD back in early 2008 for €800.....each!:blind::redf:

[stansdds]

Definitely coming down in price...I bought 3x Samsung 64GB SSD back in early 2008 for €800.....each!:blind::redf:
A long time ago I learned that it was not financially wise to be the first kid on the block to buy something that was new to the world. Wait a few years, let any kinks get worked out, and the prices fall.

[Cazzie]

Best of all, there are no moving parts to fail.

SSD's are definately the wave of the future. As soon as they can get the chip storage down to where a half ter drive can be made and as said, all the kinks get worked out, they will replace rotating HDs in the coming computers. In fact, I have seen several at Tiger Direct with SSDs in lieu of the old HDs. And they are rapid fast.

Caz

[Bjoern]

Even 80 GB would be more than enough for my FSX plus all add-ons.

Might just go for one this or next month...

[kilo delta]

Only downside to the SSD's is the fact that if one fails there'll likely be no warning (no moving parts means no clicking to warn of impending doom) and will be unrecoverable.... financially at least. Having said that I've had no issues with mine and haven't personally heard of any failures of these drives.
Remember to disable defrag on SSD's as it's not required and the extra read/writes can reportedly shorten the life of the drive.

[Bone]

With SSD's, would there still be a performance advantage with having photoreal scenery on one drive and FSX on a seperate drive?

[ananda]

I was thinking of having two 2TB SSDs in a RAID array :jump:

[GT182]

Problem is.... having only 2 PCI slots like I do now with this new computer I just built. Wouldn't work for me at all if I have to use the only open one I have left for something else.

Not to hijack Bill's thread but..... my other 5-1/2 year old computer died on me. :crybaby:

[kilo delta]

With SSD's, would there still be a performance advantage with having photoreal scenery on one drive and FSX on a seperate drive?

That's how I run my FSX,Bone....OS on one SSD,FSX on it's own 1TB drive and photoscenery on a seperate SSD. Works well for me.....though the bottleneck is always going to be the CPU.

[Lionheart]

Sorry about your loss Gary. Losing a computer is a really horrible feeling...

All that work, all those files, taken care of, and now gone... arrgh.



Man, I didnt think of putting scenery on a 3rd HD. That would smooth things out massively. Having FS9 and FSX on a secondary HD does speed up the sim alot, but having a 3rd for scenery would help quite a bit as I think about it.

Could you imagine, in the future; 4 quad core chips, 4 SSD HD's with common sizes up to 1TB each, dual or tri GC cross fire system... Sounds like something Mike built 2 years ago...




Bill

[Bjoern]

That's how I run my FSX,Bone....OS on one SSD,FSX on it's own 1TB drive and photoscenery on a seperate SSD. Works well for me.....though the bottleneck is always going to be the CPU.

Ain't it more the buses between the single components than the components themselves?

[GT182]

Bill, hopefully all is not lost. I had a bunch of stuff saved on a second HDD.

The original reason I bought the 1T drive was to use it for storage only.