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macnn/electronista

01/02/2008, 2:15pm, EST

Wednesday, January 2nd

Crucial intros SSD for notebooks, USB

Crucial today became the latest storage producer to explore solid-state hard drives with a new take on the formula. Simply titled the Crucial SSD, the 2.5-inch disk holds either 32GB or 64GB of memory and is meant as a faster, more durable drop-in replacement for conventional rotating hard drives. Like most of its kind, the SSD has no moving parts and is almost completely skip proof; without the need to spin, it also has an access time of under 1 ms and often performs faster than the old technology, Crucial says. Unlike most such drives, however, the new disk is not limited to the inside of a computer. A new external kit converts the device into a USB drive for easily removable storage.

The new Crucial device normally plugs into any computer's internal Serial ATA ports and is hot-swappable, allowing it to be removed if not essential to the system itself. Mounting brackets are included to fit the drive to desktops. No pricing has been announced for either the 32GB or 64GB versions, both of which are scheduled to ship to computer stores along with the external kit before the end of winter.


Filed under: upgrades/storage
Other story tags: SSD, Crucial

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njfuzzy
The End
0
01/02, 2:23pm, EST
We're watching the end of the magnetic hard disk based drive as the mainstreat storage solution.
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thesearcher
re: the end
0
01/02, 2:47pm, EST
Because SSD is so cheap right now? Wishful thinking much?
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mindcrash
re: the end
0
01/02, 2:55pm, EST
It's only a matter of time before SSD or something similar takes over magnetic hard disks. Posting a snarky comment doesn't change that.
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thomastwo
economies...
0
01/02, 2:56pm, EST
Come on economies of scale! Die HDD Die!
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mgpalma
I wonder how long it...
0
01/02, 3:39pm, EST
will be before we see decent hard drive sizes? I have a 750GB drive in this iMac, 4x750's in my Mac Pro, and 1 in my Mac mini. If SDD is to replace normal drives they will need to be a lot bigger. Any ideas-I realize it would all be speculation.
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Clive
size
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01/02, 7:36pm, EST
Well, here's a clue: five years ago 64MB was a reasonable sized flash drive, today Crucial is selling 8GB cards for around GBP:50.00 (USD:100.00), and other people have them in even bigger sizes.

So, in five year's time you might be looking at multi-terrabyte SSDs costing GBP:100.00 or so.

Or, looking not too far into the future, drive sizes are likely to double in size, and halve in cost over the next year to eighteen months.
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testudo
Re: size
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01/02, 10:57pm, EST
Yes, but what will be the cost per MB of those compare to hard drives? I'm sure 5 years ago if you said "Hey, in a five years time we'll have 64 GB flash drives!" people would be saying "Wow! Goodbye HDD, 64GB would give me enough space to store everything I would ever need!"

Yeah, that's why I've got 2 400GB drives in my Mac, plus three 500GB drives used for secondary storage and several other external firewire drives.
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macbones
expense
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01/02, 11:26pm, EST
Well, I think in 5 years 250 GB SSD will be cheaper than 250GB HDD. Cheaper to manufacture. I also suspect we are nearing the end of rotating storage in general- that includes bluray and HD dvd.
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testudo
Re: expense
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01/03, 8:33am, EST
No one would argue that. But to assume that HDD will stay where they are is the problem. Right now it'd be a lot cheaper to get a 2 GB flash drive than to manufacture a 2GB HDD. But 5 years from now, you don't think HDD will reach into the multi-terabyte range?
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Clive
size & expense
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01/03, 8:34am, EST
Testudo: I think that, probably, in five years time SSDs will cost more per GB (what's a MB!? :-)) than HDDs, at smaller sizes - but that SSDs will become a preferred format because they will be more reliable, and will be available in significantly bigger sizes than HDDs (eventually, probably multi-TB in five years, where HDDs are going to struggle to go).

MacBones - I think you're wrong about DVD/BluRay. The inherent advantage to these formats is that they are really cheap to reproduce. ie you can press thousands of them at a time for pennies each. I doubt flash/SSD drives will compete with that in the short term. Likewise, when you want to give people copies of documents on disk you aren't going to give away flash cards rather than cheap plastic discs.
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