Dell, Alienware price up Samsung solid-state drive options

another problem

If any of the flash memory devices i have had are anything to go by, you are leaving out the major drawback to them.

In all of the ones i have ever had, even "High Speed", the write speed has been awful. A flash drive is fine for quick read access, but if it takes you an hour to install a game on it you're going to go back to a normal hard drive in no time.

Finally...

Finally... solid state "HDD" storage is _beginning_ the process of being mainstream and, eventually, should become somewhat better value for money.

Recording data on a rapidly spinning disk where a motor controlled arm moves over it and attempts to keep a *very* small distance between the head and the platter surface is an antiquated storage system and is asking for problems, especially in portable systems but also in others.

Not that modern HDDs aren't marvels of engineering precision with great bouts of clever design, and solid state disks have their own issues, but removing one of the more common moving part problems in computers is something that I've been waiting for for a long time.

Now to fix the other one - overheating due to fan failure...

I'm from the past

I remember paying £110 for a 2gb IDE hard drive in 1998! stick on windows 98, install Quake and oh i've run out of space!

so what's that? £55 a gb?!

As it's new technology and not mass produced yet it'll be a while until we see a decent price, a year, maybe two. i'll wait until there put them into sub £800 laptops that are HD ready, have Blu-Ray, 3G HSPA, 802.11n etc.

until then i'll stick to my Dell which may catch on fire at any moment!

Write speed

Andy, the reason your flash drives have a low write speed is at least partly due to the USB interface. The Samsung SSDs use PATA (with SATA coming soon), and give a write speed of 40MB/sec, which is pretty damn fast.

I dont think its unreasonable.

The only thing that seems lame is the big markup for the UK market. Not sure why it would be that much higher. Its not like these things are made in the US.

However, I really want one for my ultraportable. After spending 2000 on a laptop for the sole purpose of getting something durable, light, and with a long battery life another $500 doesnt seem that bad if it gave me all 3.

The catch is, right now, they havent been showing quite the power gains they have been claiming. Dell pulled the statement about saving power from their website because of it.

If it really did give power gains I would be all over it once the 64gb broke the $500 mark.

£55 per Gig?

It hurts me so much to say I remember £10 per Meg (and that was only when the price fell by 50%)