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Solid State Disk (SSD): Production up, prices down

Everyone should know by now what a Solid State Disk can do for your laptop or desktop computer, there have been enough comparison videos showing the boot-up time of Windows with an SSD compared to a normal drive.

Tweak Town have taken a look at the industry and where it stands now, things are looking much better than they have ever looked when it comes to SSD’s.

In their final thoughts they said “Solid state drives are not going to hit one day, cause mass hysteria and have people waiting in lines outside of their local Apple Store like some products. Even at the 300 Dollar price point for a 64GB drive, enthusiasts and business users will be the first to take advantage of the new, lower prices.

Over the next few months, big box builders will start to offer solid state drives in more of their middle class notebooks, and if big memory manufacturers like Samsung are not able to meet demand, the prices will rise again. Thankfully, these manufacturers appear to be ready to meet demand or at least know they need to ramp up production quickly.

It is my belief that upgrading your platter based hard drive to an SSD will produce the most significant change to your computing experience for a modern computer. I am neither talking frames per second nor calculation from a benchmark, but your overall, real world ‘I use my computer everyday’ tasks. The difference is similar to running an eight-year-old 20GB, 512KB cache drive with Vista installed and then moving to a new SATA II drive.

Over the next 30 days, I will run my Lenovo T61 notebook with the Super Talent Master Drive MX and give a detailed report of my experiences dealing with the battery life, losing 40GB of storage space and the overall system feel. This isn’t a shelf notebook that is used on the weekend; my T61 goes with me everywhere and twelve hours on my lap a day is not uncommon”

Read the three page market review.

Hands On: MTRON PRO 32GB 2.5-inch SATA SSD Pro Series

MTRON have started to launch a range of new solid state disks however the MTRON PRO 32GB 2.5-inch SATA SSD is from their pro series, so you would expect the storage device to perform well in its performance test. Tweaktown has decided to give the new SSD some attention by giving us a full hands on review.

There first impression once they hooked up the MTRON PRO 32GB 2.5-inch SATA SSD was in its performance, Tweaktown said that it was truly breathtaking. However; this comes at a cost and that is the price of the thing, this is due to it being a new technology, well about three years old but as soon as more laptops start to use the device then we should start to see the price coming down.

The new MTRON PRO 32GB 2.5-inch SATA SSD has a hard brushed aluminum case, and just looking at the images you will notice that this 2.5” drive uses standard mounting holes.

As we mentioned early Tweaktown was impressed by the performance of this SSD, there final thoughts were “From everything I have seen by looking at two of MTRONs most popular products, the technology has two areas that it will need to overcome before being considered a true consumer level product. The first is price; the MTRON PRO as of this writing, costs 1159.00 US Dollars as tested in 32GB form.

The next limiting factor is size. A full install of Vista Ultimate with necessary drivers is going to take up close to 20GB, and that is before Office is installed. Most business travelers will use a version of Vista that is not so bloated, but the truly technical traveler will ditch Vista all together and install XP to regain a little extra battery life. At first I didn’t think being limited to only 32GB would be an issue for me until I went to install BAPCOs Mobile Mark 2007 and realized that I couldn’t install the software.

All things considered, the MTRON PRO is fast and I have no doubt that notebooks will gain a decent amount of battery time by using it (we will have to test this when a larger SSD in 2.5 inch form comes around). At this time, I can’t recommend the MTRON PRO to anyone that needs to fill their notebook with the usual goodies like Office, Acrobat and other typical programs that we all use every day as the amount of space just isn’t enough. The good news is that larger 2.5 inch notebook SSDs are available and DV Nation carries a large assortment. The bad news is that 64GB will cost about the same as a decently loaded notebook, and 128GB would cost what a full system does at a boutique dealer like Alienware, close to 4000 US Dollars.”

For their full review visit: Tweaktown

SSD (Solid State Disk) in laptops: prices still high, will you wait?

If your buying a laptop in 2008 then it’s a good idea to look at SSD (Solid State Disk) options as they have many benefits, but as soon as you add this to a laptop one thing changes right away and that’s price. SSD’s are still a lot of money compared to normal hard drives, maybe they will come down in 2009, but for now expect to pay more money for this little extra.

Earlier today peter reported about the upcoming Toshiba Portege R500 12Q that will come with a 128GB SSD drive and it also features a dual-layer DVD writer, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, 12.1-inch LED-backlit display and a Core 2 Duo ULV U7700 processor. There is no word on price yet, but again we can expect it to be more than it’s competitor with a normal hard drive.

Will consumers make the move to SSD now or will most people wait until the price crashes, I have always been one to buy early on and also one that pays the price for it. While prices have come down a little, this time I am waiting it out and they may be some time yet.

Do you own a laptop with SSD and if not would you wait until the price comes down a lot or pay a premium now?