[kommissar]

howdy!

some exciting news from arstechnica here. looks like chipzilla is serving up some new high speed ssd's, with much lower price than before! new price for 80G will be $225 in lots of 1000. it will be interesting to see what street price will be.

Intel's new 34nm SSDs cut prices by 60 percent, boost speed - Ars Technica

[Z4i]

Good news, I really want to get an SSD for my big laptop, but they're still too expensive for me. A few more months and another price drop and maybe a performance boost here or there and I'll be able to find myself an excuse!

[kommissar]

i think a lot of folks are thinking that. what should really be interesting is when moorestown comes out. the southbridge chipset for that will have a special ssd controller, that theoretically should be able to expoit ssd strengths. that could change the whole netbook performance equation.

[Z4i]

Only on the ones that both use that controller and use SSD's. These days it seems like the trend in netbooks is away from chips and toward platters. SSD's seem to be moving toward larger, high performance notebooks. HDD's make more sense for a netbook where the focus is on being cheap, HDD's are cheaper than SSD's.

[unixfool]

Originally Posted by Z4i

Only on the ones that both use that controller and use SSD's. These days it seems like the trend in netbooks is away from chips and toward platters. SSD's seem to be moving toward larger, high performance notebooks. HDD's make more sense for a netbook where the focus is on being cheap, HDD's are cheaper than SSD's.

One of the main reasons I bought my Mini (9) is because I knew that the SSD would offer significant weight and heat advantages. This is probably why the 9 deals with heat better than its siblings. With weight comparison between drive types, the difference may not be so significant if you normally carry a 17" lappy, but in comparison between an SSD and HDD by themselves, the SSD is significant enough to be a serious consideration.

Also, about the only thing to worry about if the netbook is dropped is the LCD. A coworker tried to explain to me that most laptops have technology that park the heads of the drive (ala Macbook technology) and that is should be the same with netbooks...I told him that he wouldn't find that type of tech on a $199 machine and my high end laptops have never been so expendable to test this.