So we can make a /true/ comparison to the competition :)

Price is not everything.

I just stuck a couple of FDMs instead of disks into gear I am building and their performance does not live anywhere near the claims of the flash lover crowd.

The write performance measured as "rm -rf" speed on UFS2 under BSD is about 5%-10% of the performance of a modern 7200rpm hard drive if not even less. It is so slow it is not even funny. OK, that is for a poor-man's 40 pin single write channel FDM disk replacement, not for a server drive, but even for this I would have never expected it to be so slow.

So can we have some independent benchmarks first run on proper server OS - Linux, BSD, Solaris or the like please and not synthetic sysoft garbage which says just about nothing about the real performance.

Then we can compare what is what. Until then the flash has only one advantage over disks - noise. Everything else (even power consumption) is actually worse.

There are already plenty of reviews out there, google is your friend.

As you say, some of the cheaper SSDs do not live up to expectations on many fronts. But the more expensive units do.

OCZ seem to be one of the better options, the power consumption is very low (much lower than spinning media) and the seek times and read speeds are very fast. The write speeds are only comparable with decent HDD. You do pay a significant premium for these advantages though.

Why do people have to use pejorative language like "the flash lover crowd". It doesn't help your argument, it just makes you look silly.

Interesting that the speeds intel is quoted as giving are well above anything else on the market, I'll be looking out for some real world benchmarks to test out those claims.

FDMs are not the same as SSDs. They're based on much cheaper (and far far slower) chip technology.

A quick search throws up transfer rates of around 10-20Mb for a typical 40-pin FDM. That's around five to 10 times slower than current SATA II SSD drives.

love SSD's!

judging by the fact that the "extreme" parts only offer increased *write* speeds and not read speeds, as a tech-freak-gamer, i would not need the "extreme" version?!

cool. a few more quid to put towards a 4850X2, when they come out! ;)

loads of (mostly reg, he!) tech stories here, kidz!:

http://www.eupeople.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=5