All the cool kids in the neighborhood are building their PCs with solid state drives these days. Who wants to use a plain old hard disk drive, what with its icky moving parts, when you can cruise along on a drive with zero moving parts? I mean, it’s no contest. Problem: SSDs are usually what I like to call “mad expensive.” You’re paying a heck of a lot for a fairly small drive… until now~! Super Talent has a brand new line of “value” SSDs that are low-ish in price. It’s all the benefit of an SSD without the incredibly high price. At least that’s the idea.
I think Matt may have benchmarked some SSDs a little while back—well, just one, it turns out—, and Dave did a nice little round-up, but the idea behind them is that they’re really quite fast, much faster than a traditional hard disk drive. No moving parts and all that, giving them read/write speeds in the high double digits/low 100s in MB/s. You know what I mean.
So, back to the Super Talents. There’s four models, ranging in size from 8 to 64GB. Since SSDs are still sorta on the small side—you can find 2TB drives for around $150—you’re probably only going to be able to install Windows and maybe a game or two on there. You’re not going to put all of your MP3s and movies on there. And why would you want to, I wonder? You want Windows to load as quickly as possible, so you stick it on an SSD. You want World of Warcraft to load zones as quickly as possible, so you stick in on an SSD. Conversly, how long does it take to launch foobar2000 and play an MP3 or FLAC? An SSD would sorta be overkill there, no?
Price. Well, the 8GB version is $65 while the 64GB version is $175. Not too bad as far as SSDs go.
On a side note, I’m terribly sorry it’s been rathing boring today. I think we’re all a little hung over from the iPad and iPhone OS 4.0 news. Plus it’s chilly and cloudy outside.