Tested reports that, according to iSuppli Market Research, storage prices for Solid State Drives will fall below $1 per gigabyte by the end of this year. That would still be at least ten times the cost of a traditional hard disk drive. This might stimulate OEM sales, at least, and encourage manufacturers to start mainstreaming the technology.
The biggest advantage of a solid state drive, in our opinion, right now is as an operating system/program partition. We’ve added SSDs in most of our systems as OS drives, including our server. It allows us to spin down the traditional drives where we store our media. It, coupled with advances in boot technology on Linux, continues to speed up our boot experience.
Currently, a lot of our computers go down when not in use, and we’re trying to design more to do this. We’re down to only two systems running 24/7, and hoping to get that to one this year.
But, our own desires aside, if the price is competitive, we could see mainstream adoption of SSDs. They have no moving parts, are fast, which is a great advantage. They have longevity issues, but with some software wear-leveling techniques, and a three-year warranty(standard for HDDs as well), there shouldn’t be a barrier to using them. The technology continues to move forward and improve.
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