There's SSD drives that use less than 1 watt. Really if you want a fast hdd you have to shell out the same kind of money as for SSDs, for usually smaller sized amounts of drive space than the usual SATAs at 7200, and go for a 15,000 with a big cache. Noise; that depends on your case.

That's what I notice anyway, using an old PII compared to a quad - the hdd's are still running at the same speed though! Still takes an age to access things and for them to be brought up onscreen.

What the usual hdd's need to do is make their casing see-thru, and have (pc) cases where the hdds mount around the sides at viewable windows. That'll make them as popular for ages to come. That'll be satisfying like watching Colossus working away.

moves like a fly walking

>> as the memory chip drives become increasingly popular over the slower, less reliable spinning disk drives, 

Less reliable? Care to quote a source on that? Your statement is hard to believe especially given that flash memory has a significantly lower number of write cycles before failure than magnetic drives.

Yes I already know about the smart algorithms they use to distribute writes around flash, but that doesn't stop the drive having less and less capacity over time as bits fail and blocks get marked as unuseable.

SSD, SSD, why the f88k are we still dealing with this inferior memory technology. When are we going to get the non-volatile memory like FRAM and others that has the speed of static RAM, without the limited lifetime of EEROM? I hate having to compromise.