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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bruno Cipolla who wrote (32505)	6/14/2006 4:45:25 AM
From: Bruno Cipolla	Respond to of 60323

Old hard drives start to kick the bucket Computex 2006 Inevitable? The industry has heard of it theinquirer.net (pictures in article) By Theo Valich in Old Taipei: Wednesday 07 June 2006, 23:10 Find your ideal job Computing Careers 2006 MAY BE the year that will mark the slow start of slaughtering the old bastard electro-magnetic dinosaurs, replaced by a flashy answer. (i like it!! BC) Hard drives will pretty much kick the bucket - it's no long slot - soon. After Samsung launched Q30Plus-SSD with a 32GB solid state drive, it was only the matter of time before the other vendors claimed their share of the pie. And so Transcend is coming out with two solid-state hard drives, having a capacity from two to eight gigs. While this of course, isn't big enough for real what the vendors call in their strange pidgeon English "usability", a lot of notebook vendors are already taking note, since 8GB is pretty much enough for an installation of Windows+Office+Photoshop. The drives use a 44-pin IDE connector known to the wonderful world of notebooks, and an ECC function keeps the data safe from corruption, reckons Transcend. But, things won't stop at 8GB. There are 16GB models being slated. If you don't need gigabytes of storage data and can live with a longer battery life, solid state drives just might be a ticket to ride. Sort of why not risk it for a friskit. We suspect that SSDs will first destroy the 4300rpm and even slower spinning hard drives. µ

To: Bruno Cipolla who wrote (32505)	6/14/2006 7:51:02 AM
From: SBHX	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Sequential read/write speed might be lower on flash, but random seek time is way faster. OTOH, price-wise there is a lot of ground to cover before the SSD can replace HDD in any significant volume. The entry level desktop drive @160GB (as per www.dell.com) retails about $50 = 0.32/GB (pricewatch.com).. This price is not about to half next year, but density has been doubling every year, so next year, 300GB should be $50. There's a better opportunity with laptop drives as 100GB for laptops is still over 100, which makes it $1/GB. That appears to only double capacity every 2-3 years. (The $100 is likely misleading as there is little active upgrade mkt for laptop HDD, which makes the manufacturers cost substantially lower). SSD's advantage is also size. since smaller and thinner laptops can now be build.