Windows 8 to mainstream solid-state drives, says analyst

This could be the year of the solid-state drive.

Newfangled uber-thin Windows 8 devices and falling flash memory prices could double the size of the solid-state drive market, according to a research note today from IHS iSuppli.

Read more at source:
Windows 8 to mainstream solid-state drives, says analyst | Windows 8 - CNET Reviews

 

[darksupernova]

I hope the prices do come down! Would love to install them in my laptops!
Got one in the desktop, probably the best upgrade I've ever done, would recommend it to everyone.

 

[Coke Robot]

Seems legit. Windows 8's hybrid boot feature with a SSD makes boot time pretty much non-existent, which is what I harp on when I suggest to people about that. Along with less power consumption. Of course.

Although I have to ask the general audience, I've personally not running on a SSD (going to do so on my next motherboard upgrade so I can buy a PCI-E based SSD) so I'm kind of wondering about how Windows performs over the long run. The thing that ends up slowing Windows to a constipated poop is usually winrot or I've seen with Kaspersky, just a weird degrading of performance. Do those type of issues not ever happen with a SSD? I feel like they would.

Coke, 2 suggestions:

1. Don't buy a PCI-e attached SSD. They are a) expensive and b) are not really any faster than e.g. the new OCZ Vector

2. I have not noticed any slowdown 'in the long run'. My oldest SSD has been installed 4 years ago and the current performance is only marginally slower than on day1. The same for my other 5. I have OCZs, Intels, Crucial, Mushkin and now a brand new Vector which is not yet installed.

The reason why I'm looking at the PCI-E SSDs is that their transfer speeds definitely go past SATA III speeds for sure, usually around 900MBs/second. Also, the SATA Express bus will be released in a few years and combines SATA and PCI bus speeds for a normal form factor. I'm still iffy though on their reliability however.

And I kind of figured in the long run, a SSD overcomes any performance issues that a normal hard drive would encounter. Good to know that those problems don't exist! Now if EVERY PC had a SSD....

 

[whs]

Don't get too impressed by those transfer speeds. What really counts is the 4K blocksize speed because that's the blocksize the OS uses 70% of the time. The big blocksizes that are so impressive on measurement charts hardly ever exist in real life. My new OCZ Vector has a R/W speed of appr. 300MB/sec for the 4K blocksize. That will be hard to beat - even with a PCI-e attached device.

But at the end, what really gives you the performance is the access time. And PCI-e devices are no better than Sate2 or Sata3 devices in that respect.