After many announcements, now it is possible to read some details on a solid state drive in the review published at bit-tech.
Even if a really interesting alternative to hard disk drives because of the absence of moving parts (and then of the low power consumption that makes these drives ideal for laptops), there is a big drawback of solid state drives: the number of read/write cycles that NAND Flash memories are able to sustain.
As reported in the review, that amount is into the many millions but that hasn’t stopped people in the past trying to use large Compact Flash cards as a dedicated pagefile drive and having them die within a day. There is no mention in the article if this drawback is still present also in solid state drives.
The Samsung drive was compared to a normal 7200RPM consumer hard drive and an enterprise 10,000RPM hard drive, to see how they all faired in a variety of situations like OS load times, game save load times and general productivity. Results can be viewed in the complete review.
