Will SSD go mainstream in 2009? Well yes and no.

The yes answer is you will see SSD storage technology is low cost devices like netbooks. However at the performance end of the market there is still the huge issue of the high cost.

Even though Intel doesn’t have any serious competition at the performance end of the market they have decided to drop the prices of their high performance mainstream offerings.

For your typical consumer looking for a FAST storage technology you are looking at the Intel X25-M.

The X25-M has a transfer rate in excess of 200+MB/sec and would breath new life into any PC or Laptop that with a SATA II connection. Forget about Core i7 or the latest DDR memory. The plain old spinning hard disk is by far the biggest bottleneck in any computer and has been for years.

The smart move is to go SSD for your operating system and a larger traditional hard disk for media storage. This gets round the relatively low capacities of  80GB and 160GB SSD.

The only barrier to entry for performance SSD is the cost. In the UK you are looking at a cost per GB of between £4 to £4.50 which in relative terms today is very, very expensive especially compared to traditional hard disk technology. The cost alone will keep SSD on the fringe for another 12 to 24 months.

My job however is to be on the bleeding edge so I managed to find an X25-M in stock at the new price point. So expect a triple boot review (XP, Vista and 7) in the next few days.

Link About Latest Price Reductions: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2340525,00.asp

My other posts about SSD here: View all posts in SSD Solid State Drive

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 4:56 pm and is filed under SSD Solid State Drive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.