I have to agree with the comments on SDD *NOT* being cheaper. I just purchased a 256 GB SSD for a Lenovo ThinkPad X300 at the cost of just under $700 (USD).

It needs to come down in price before it becomes "cheap" and "affordable".

On the plus side, it wasn't that long ago when 30 GB SSD hit the market so it's great to see larger capacities!

Where did you get your data from?
1. HD reliability average specs of 5 years is field proven. SSD still don't have 5 years in the field, so nobody knows.
2. SLC NAND flash are specified by chip vendors as having a life of 100,000 program/erase cycles (MLC are much less). These chips will kick the bucket in a day on a typical pagefile duty if it have not been for some clever wear-leveling algorithms and block-writes modes. But if your drive is pretty full, you can do so much with the tricks.

how many stores have Intel X25-M G2 80GB in stock ?

i still think theyre a total ripoff

I agree with most of the comments. SSD prices have actually gone up, significantly. The 129GB Vertex was available for £275 a few months ago. Now it's selling for £399. That's a proper mark-up!!

When the 80GB Intel X25-M G2 Drives came out, I got mine for £170. In a few weeks they've gone up to £195.

Ridiculous!!

I wouldn't touch one with a bargepole at those prices.
I guess it'll be about 5 years down the line before there's parity between a SSD & an old fangled electro-mechanical
HDD contraption.
By then,I myself will be coughing & spluttering down the knackers yard,if SSD's don't get there first.

@ Joe - Maybe he was referring to the smaller ones like the 30GB model - I saw it for $112 @ newegg. I'll wait an extra year just to see if the SLC drives get cheaper.

Now is NOT the time to buy SSDs. Intel's SSDs are way overpriced from their standard pricing, and I don't see an end to that until after the holiday season.

How ironic that I was waiting for cheaper prices during the holiday sales, but instead computer part companies are now jacking their prices up by about 50-75%.

I'm not bothering with upgrading until after this year ends, when these companies report a record *bust* on their holiday sales, and I get to reap the rewards.

you said "IF YOU'RE HOLDING OUT to buy a solid state drive, your wait may be over.

SSD drives have not only become substantially cheaper, but have also improved quite a bit by now."

Actually SSD prices have been getting more expensive lately. I have been watching the cost of the 120 GB vertex go from $339 at the lowest to a current price of $499 on new egg, and all decent 128GB drive that were around $339 are $379 and up.

I don't think the author has any idea how much writes affect NAND memory. The worst case scenario has any SSD produced in the last 2 years lasting at the very least, 10 years. You can't get a hard drive to last more than 5, and half will fail after 3 years.

The average user will get 20 to 50 years out of their SSD before writes begin to fail, and even then, there are already backup mechanisms in place to use the extra flash in the drive to replace faulty sectors.

Saying that your SSD drive is slowing writing itself it to death is about as HUR HUR DUMB as you can get. SSDs passed HDDs in longevity a while ago. Stop spreading myths.

Startech makes a 2.5 in inclosure for laptop drive too. It will take 4 drive in total. Add it fits into 1 5.25 bay. Currently i'm using it to run my raid 0 with 2 x 160 gig 7200 spin seagate drive. Ive got 2 500 gig 7200 spin drives on order. There is 1 power connection for the intire box. tested it the other day for read (114) and write (58). Ive git vista Home Premium. The nice thing about it is that you can use SAS drives in it if you have a controller for it.

http://www.startech.com/item/SATABAY425BK-4-Drive-25in-Removable-Mobile-Rack-SAS-SATA-Backplane.aspx

Since people/companies had been building RAM Drives (with continous volatge supply so they ratain data). With such SSDs i guess its time that benchmarking sites also start including DDR1/DDR2/DDR3 RAMs as speed reference with these SSDs.

according to:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.