click SanDisk is introducing a 32 GB Flash drive. Specs are:

Quote: ...62MB/sec sustained throughput, 0.12ms average access time, and it draws only 0.4 watts...

How do you think this will affect the i-pod / laptop markets. The price tag looks like $600 right now but it should come down.

I remember seeing one of these at E3 a few years ago (ah, Kentia...), although the price point was ridiculous. I think it's a great idea, and one that's been way too long in coming. (Robot arms in your computer, manually accessing the data!?) Keep in mind, though, that a 32 GB hard disk hasn't been reasonable for quite some time, and having one of these and a hard drive doesn't provide many of the benefits of having just solid-state.

Quote: Original post by Sneftel
...having one of these and a hard drive doesn't provide many of the benefits of having just solid-state.

With a 0.12ms response time you could set it as swap space and store large programs that take above average to load off a normal harddrive. Other than that though, 32GB would be useless. Still impressive though.

People underestimate the bottlenecks caused by IO blocking from seeking when multiple programs are reading/writing a disk at once.

Game developers: Now that we have dual core development machines and 2 gigs of RAM, it's the disk that's bottlenecking our productivity. Imagine being able to build code and data without having an IO seek bottleneck.

Quote: Original post by Sneftel
[...]having one of these and a hard drive doesn't provide many of the benefits of having just solid-state.

It's like a RAM drive, but permanent. The size is just right for a large swapfile and a few programs you want to start quickly. If only more porgrams were portable-friendly. It'd be great to have visual studio on a portable drive and have it just work without having to reinstall it on each computer you come to. Of course, you could just install an OS and some programs and use it as a complete bootable solution. It's not going to be your portable movie collection by any means, but it's large enough to have several development suites etc.
Also, I'm guesing it'd go well with laptops since it would reduce the chance of impact-induced data corruption from very low to basically nil.

I would bite. My macbook only has a 60GB sata drive built in and I have an external 400GB firewire for my big stuff, so when 64GB flash disks come out, it becomes realistic to use flash as the main HD. If I could get an extra hour or two out of battery life because of using a flash drive, it might be worth a bit extra money.

Quote: Original post by lethalhamster

Quote: Original post by Sneftel
...having one of these and a hard drive doesn't provide many of the benefits of having just solid-state.

With a 0.12ms response time you could set it as swap space and store large programs that take above average to load off a normal harddrive. Other than that though, 32GB would be useless. Still impressive though.

It's not large, no, and not worth $600, but useless? Ok, I'm out of the gamer loop, but I'd be shocked if my parents' use much more than half of that. I do computational modelling and, if I'm reading "df -H" right, my workstation's got a 40GB drive.

If you look at the specs the people who will pay 600 USD for this are the military. It would be great for battlefield laptops as it

a) Uses less power and so runs longer.
b) Massive g-shock survivability.
c) Greater thermal range.
d) works at a greater range of air pressures (no HDD breath hole).

I'd bet good money that some spec-ops people have these on pre-order.

Quote: Original post by lethalhamster
With a 0.12ms response time you could set it as swap space and store large programs that take above average to load off a normal harddrive. Other than that though, 32GB would be useless. Still impressive though.

If you're going to be using it for swap space, you'd be better off with slow-ish non-persistent memory. Accelerating application loading could work, but $600 is a pretty big chunk of change to spend on saving eight seconds during startup.

Quote: Original post by lethalhamster
With a 0.12ms response time you could set it as swap space and store large programs that take above average to load off a normal harddrive. Other than that though, 32GB would be useless. Still impressive though.

How big of a swapper do you need? Upgrade to four gigs of system memory, which is many times faster than this solid state HDD, for about half the cost (assuming you've already got a gig).