Originally posted on October 9, 2007 @ 11:25 pm
The hard drive sector has not seen a lot of groundbreaking innovations in many years but the growing popularity of solid state hard drives may be a sign that the hard drive market is about to enter a new age. We all know how delicate traditional platter-based hard drives are. Any kind of sudden bumps could damage the sensitive mechanism inside the drive and we’re not yet even talking about the platter itself. With the release of more and more high capacity flash based drives there really is a growing interest in solid state drives as a legitimate successor to the old technologies.
Alienware, the well known gaming desktop and laptop maker, announced that it will begin shipping solid state hard drives in some of its desktop and notebook models.
The company’s Area-1 ALX and Aurora ALX is touted be the first desktops to be equipped with a 64GB solid state disk or SSD. No price was announced yet for the product but a cursory look at Alienware’s website shows that it is charging $1,700 for a Raid 0 configuration employing two 64 GB SSDs.
That is a very high price to pay for a new technology. But then, it is also understandable, given that SSDs are still prohibitively expensive at this point of its existence because the demand still has not reached a critical level that would warrant a lowering of prices. SSDs are really a good choice though because of its faster access time, lower latencies and the aforementioned resistance to hard bumps.
I’m definitely going to jump on the SSD bandwagon — once prices drop to realistic levels.