Fast and small SSD

[pointertovoid]

Hello everybody!

SSD may be quick (at least a few among them...) but are quite expensive (especially the few ones that are faster than an HDD). On the other hand, they have capacities I don't need (32GB, 80GB, 160GB). Such capacity may be interesting for a laptop with a single disk bay, but isn't necessary for my desktop: I would have an additional HDD even if the SSD had 160GB, and then, what I really need to put on the SSD is Windows, without the paging file, and maybe a few tiny applications - everything fits into 4GB easily, and 8GB would hold nearly every application I use.

I haven't found such an SSD - tell me if you know one with the speed I'm looking for! The nearest equivalent would be a quick CF card on a Pata adapter, but they aren't that fast: about 45MB/s. A Raid of them would achieve just 90MB/s at the expense of 8s added boot time for the Bios of the controller: bad bargain. No, I really want to have something like 200MB/s with no added boot time.

Would more people be interested in such a disk, or am I the only one on Earth? About 200MB/s, really quick on small files as well, capacity 4GB or 8GB, size 2.5" or 3.5", for maybe 50€ (us$70)? What do you think?

If enough people want to have such an SSD, it may encourage manufacturers to offer one.

Edited June 9, 2009 by pointertovoid

[Tripredacus]

We recently upgraded our Oracle server and replaced the HDDs with SSD. I think it has 2 32GB SSDs from Intel. I don't know the cost, but I think they are pretty expensive. The first one we got for free.

X25-E: http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/extreme/index.htm

X25-M and X18-M: http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/index.htm

[pointertovoid]

Found another scenario where customers may not need 32GB of Ssd: in a client-server network where the workstation only has the minimum OS locally and picks all the applications it needs over Ethernet from an Scsi server. Such a workstation has no Hdd at all and needs again 4GB or 8GB Ssd. Nice for the silence as well.