One of my dream geek projects (ssh, don’t tell my wife 
) is to upgrade my laptop to an SSD storage. I do most of my freelance work on a laptop and I would love to see increased battery life and improved data failure tolerance such an upgrade promises. Besides, I hate it when the thing heats up so much that I have to place a book between my laptop and my lap to avoid getting burned.
The falling flash memory prices look really encouraging. Already today I can buy a 8GB SD card for $27 or a 16GB flash drive for $58 (after rebate). It would make one think that there should be good deals on solid state hard drives as well since they have lower size constrains than e.g. SD cards. In real life however the opposite is true. There are really no SSD bargains out there.
The prices on solid state disks have not come down, at least not nearly as much per GB as other flash media. I have looked around and while there are some high performance SSD’s for servers for sale, there are really not that many offerings in the general consumer market. It looks like solid state media hasn’t hit the market yet and low volumes keep prices high. Ultimately after digging through the price comparison sites for half an hour I have found just one product that didn’t have an insane price, this 32GB SATA compatible drive by Transcend for $165.
I could probably get 320GB for that price if I went with traditional storage type. The prices on regular hard drives have come down too and this is another reason why SSD’s don’t get broader acceptance despite the news like this. The higher HDD volume demands dictated by digital music and video adoption also keep SSD’s out of market.
Do you have a laptop? Have you considered an upgrade to a solid state drive? Please share your experience.
I have every intention of moving over to SSD when it’s affordable. Not because I use a laptop (and frankly, I have to say you’re thinking the wrong way about laptops if you’re using it on your lap - they’re not actually for laps! You risk overheating it, nonetheless burning yourself. Get a fan pad and put it on a desk), but just because I have so much stuff, torrents, and greatly concerned about my photography work. I use an external storage drive (160, I think) that I fear for every day
You could get a Compact Flash 2.5 adapter that as dual slots for CF cards & put 2 32GB CF cards. You will still have faster start up times & more battery life! There also might be a 3 CF slot version out now.
Interesting, will I be able to entirely remove my HDD and boot from the CF cards? This is the ultimate goal, to get read of the hot noisy power sucker!
I’d be careful with those CF adapters. I don’t think CF cards are rated for the amount of read/writes that SSDs are. The failure time might be a lot sooner than you think. That’s one of the reasons we don’t run Windows off USB flash drives (that, and the USB bottleneck).