"50x better and several hundred times faster are mind boggling numbers. If those numbers are true, the productivity throughput you will get by just replacing a HDD with a SSD will more than justify any cost. Current limiting factor in PCs is the hard drive. "Several hundred times faster" is exactly what everyone has been waiting for."
well the first part is true, but shouldn't lead to your conclusion.
yeah 50x better is fantastic, and hundreds of times faster is fantastic. but these are comparing Intel SSD to other SSD. On the other hand, comparing other SSDs to magnetic disks - the relevant comparision for the market - SSDs are already thousands of times faster than magnetic disks. Heck, even that is an understatement. If you're doing something, like booting up your machine, and the OS is seeking all over the disk, then a SSD is likely to be tens of thousands of times faster.
now in practical terms, what is this saying? its saying that if you replace the magnetic disk drive in your laptop with any old SDD, you're going to see a huge improvement in performance. booting up the machine, for example, will go from minutes to seconds. if you go from a current SSD to one of Intel's new ones, it will take fewer seconds. cool. but cool in a geeky way, as i said. the big performance boost comes from going to SSD, not to Intel SSD specifically.
longer life is also good. but its also likely overkill. most of what people put on their hard drives almost never changes. put a document somewhere and then edit it: its hardly likely that you're going to edit it more than 10,000 times during the lifetime of the machine, which current SSDs handle fine. ipods and digital cameras and so forth use this stuff all the time. to fail because you've written it too many times is rare. i've never seen it happen.
The talk from the IDF was that apps were loading instantly and productivity was a leap forward. When you add the amount of time you wait for your computer to do its operations due to its hard drive, and how much that time costs, you can easily see (especially now that NAND prices are down 70% yoy) that SSD costs becomes insignificant. All I can say is.... GIVE ME ONE NOW!!!!
you can buy it now. you could have bought it any time over the last two years. sony has laptops with SDD. apple's air can be bought with SDD. all of this is true of the CURRENT generation of SDD.
Intel's stuff looks cool. but its not a difference between slow and instantaneous. its a difference between instantaneous and "more instantaneous".
and the reason nobody buys this, and why nobody is pushing it hard, is because of the price.
