Seagate has announced that they will next month be releasing both a 2TB SATA drive and its first SSD. Solid state drives use RAM technologies to provide disk storage instead of the “round and brown” like a very large cache memory. The obvious result from this is that the disk is significantly faster, it is also significantly more expensive.
It is great to see a major drive manufacturer starting to pick up on the technology though as it is an important step in the reduction in price of the technology. It was not so long ago that a relatively small memory stick would cost a couple of hundred dollars, now the lower quality 1GB sticks can be found for under $20. There has been a similar reduction in the prices of most memory technologies in recent years.
At the moment SSD are only really viable for corporate applications that have the highest value and performance requirements. With costs for significant storage being over 10 times that of the equivalent hard drive storage, using SSD’s also involves a larger infrastructure costs as the individual drives have smaller sizes for individual drives. While the performance of SSD devices is higher it is not higher by the same ratio that the price is hence why the application needs to be business critical to justify the cost.
There will be enough demand in the corporate sector to drive demand high enough to also drive the cost down. While this will be ultimately goodness for the rest of us once the price comes down enough to allow us great performance. Even if the SSD only takes the place of the OS volume in our PCs or even only enough for the swap file it will give significant performance.