B&H Photo Video has Crucial 960GB M500 2.5" Internal SSD US$599.50 (+ shipping) for pre order.
Expected availability: May 30 2013.
I reckon it ia a good price from a seller with a good reputation.
I'm not too familiar with ssd drives. Should this last longer than a normal hard disc drive? Can these be used in a laptop? Much faster?
SSD drives are way better than normal hard drives (hence the exorbitant price). They are much faster, and less prone to damage from drops and hard knocks since they haven't got moving parts.
If you store your computers operating system on an SSD it increases the speed of your computer significantly. A common thing to do is put a small (128GB) SSD in a computer and install windows on it, then have a secondary large capacity hard disk drive (1,2,3,4TB) to store your data. This gives you the speed boost and the capacity at a fraction of the price of what you can see above.
Mechanical hard drives are still better for long term storage in the sense that it is cheaper to set up a bunch of hard drives in a RAID and replace them as they die, than use SSDs, which do still wear out over time.
Saying that, i would sell my mum for a few of these.
Thanks heaps. But a ssd drive would last 10 years plus?
A normal hard disk won't last 10 years plus, or at least shouldn't be trusted to…
SSDs degrade over time, develop bad blocks and so on. This isn't as much of an issue as it sounds, they are designed to work around bad sectors. This gets really complicated, and actually differs between different types of SSD. From what I understand it is mainly dependent on the number of writes.
As far as performance, I have a 512GB Samsung 830 SSD in my MacBook Pro. It has definitely been worth it, Xcode remains usable even with huge projects and Photoshop launches almost instantly. Before the SSD, Xcode would constantly grind to a halt (this is for a 500mb+ project) even with a Quad Core i7 and 8gb of RAM. I have had it about 3 months now, and it has probably already saved me enough time to have paid for itself.
Data recovery on SSDs is somewhat close to impossible, so backups are a must. Actually, forget that, backups are always a must.
Life Expectancy: 1.2 million hours mean time to failure (MTTF)
Endurance: 72TB total bytes written (TBW), equal to 40GB per day for 5 years
But I notice they only give a 3yr warranty, which is great btw.
Once you have had the second disk die in a RAID 1 array before you could replace the first, you stop paying so much attention to MTTF.
Yeah I would say 10 years for an SSD would be optimistic (correct me if I'm wrong ppl). Each data block can only be written to around 10,000 times or so I've heard.
Direct quote from http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/283327-32-life-span
"I think SSD lifespan depends on 3 main factors.
The last point I think is quite important. The SSD drives constantly read and write as you use your PC. Since each block of space has a limited lifetime (e.g. 10000 writes) the drives tend to rotate the space and try not to use the same space for a while. How often this rotation has to reuse the same drive block depends on how full your drive is. A 240gb ssd with only 50gbs of stuff and windows on it should last longer than a 60Gb with 50gbs of stuff and windows."
another interesting point: If you were to get a 60gb SSD and just fill it up, and empty it again and again as fast as you could non stop 24/7 it would last about 2.5 years.
That is better than my WD Green 2TB drive. Have it for 2 years (in an USB enclosure), hardly used it (less than 100 hours in total), already having bad sectors.
Mechanical hard drives can shit out at any time, they are very unreliable in my experience, but there are plenty of external factors that play a role as well. SSD's are definitely the way of the future, just a waiting game to get the prices down :( But by the time SSDs are viable for mass storage, we'll all be using cloud storage over NBN I'd wager, if the politicians ever sort their shit out :(
What do they charge for shipping?
Its US$599+ US$25 shipping direct from crucial.
http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT960M50…