SSD drives -- do you use?

[Deja Q]

Thinking of getting one for my laptop. Seems silly it should have the better gear for once, but a minor drop wouldn't ruin the drive, and portability combined with power savings would be nice.

Mind you, I did put in a 9 cell battery (4+ hour life with wi-fi disabled) and an external battery pack (APC, appx 2 hours lifespan), but the more the merrier...

[struggle4progress]

1. I keep looking at the SSDs and drooling -- but they're still too pricey for my tastes

I can get a 1.5TB harddrive for somewhat over $100 and a 64GB USB flashdrive for about the same. A 500GB drop-resistant external drive can be had for less than $200

Corsair wants about $750 for a 256GB SSD; an Intel 80GB SSD may set you back $350-$400. And performance may degrade after the SSD has been used a while: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=13

So my current thinking is they're not really worth the expense yet

[IDemo]

3. They are intended more for the enterprise market currently,

with laptops and netbooks being the only realistic consumer target until prices drop.
The costs involved in producing an SSD versus a thumb drive with the equivalent capacity
are the result of increased hardware and firmware design. An SSD will employ "wear leveling"
to spread writes as evenly as possible over NAND memory locations to extend the useful life
of the device. NAND memory cells will eventually fail with enough write cycles. They also use
"ECC" (Error Correction Code) to ensure accurate data transfer.

The biggest advantages of SSDs to the enterprise market are significantly lower energy requirements
and much faster read speed vs.mechanical hard drives. The low electrical demand is also an advantage
for the laptop user, as well as a resistance to damage from drops.

I'm currently employed in the SSD R&D lab here.

[MyNameGoesHere]

4. Well when they start making a SAN controller that

can handle the max i/o's of SSD they MIGHT become a enterprise replacement for spindles. But until then they are an expensive toy at best. $20k for a 450gb SSD and i can only have 3 before i take a chance of saturating my controller.

[hobbit709]

2. Built my own with a 8Gb Esata flash drive

On my mini ITX audio recorder box. From POST to desktop is 10 seconds. Then I use a 40Gb notebook drive to write data to.