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Originally Posted by Cthulhu
Not to be that guy who says "Oooh, shiny. I like shiny," but imagine that solid state drives will help reduce energy use in the coming future. For the moment, they are blasphemously expensive.
Of course, even with a SSD, there will still be the cpu that gets hot, requiring a fan, and all those shiny circuit boards will be stressed when the system turns on.
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We're starting to see that. Hitachi is pushing a hybrid approach with a mix of solid state and hard drives. Core OS code is on the SSD for fast booting, while applications and data reside on the hard drive.
Of course, Hitachi is one of the major manufacturers of the flash memory used in SSDs (the others are Panasonic, SanDisk, and Toshiba), so they have in interest in promoting things that will use their products.
Expense is one problem. Flash memory prices are dropping, and will drop further, but most folks still won't want to pay what SSDs with anything like the capacity of hard drives cost.
And there's a technical limit that can bite: flash memory is limited to about 100,000 writes before failing. It's not a problem in things like expansion cards for handhelds. The circuitry on the card transparently maps bad spots as unusable, so degradation will be graceful. And expansion cards in handhelds are read from far more than written to, and you are likely to replace the card with a faster, higher capacity model long before you notice any performance issues. But I think that sort of thing
could bite on the sort of applications people do on larger machines.
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For me, since my computer is in the same room as where I sleep four feet away, generally turn it off at night to remove the light pollution of its many LED's and the disturbing buzz of its little fan.
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Mine is close to where I sleep, too, bit I don't see the LEDs and the fan is inaudible.
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Anyway, it'll be nice to have such fancy machines to read on once we small all those nasty printing presses.
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Don't hold your breath waiting.
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Dennis