Posted by Kromey at 1:39pm Feb 11 '13don't seem to be catching on very well.
Don't get me wrong, they're definitely out there and available, but the average computer shopper seems to want (or at least the big companies think they want) more GBs rather than fewer seek milliseconds. And, really, why would they ever want less of anything? They're paying more, they should get more!
Sarcasm aside, it seems to me that the only people really after SSDs are the same ones more likely to build their own rigs than buy a pre-built one. Why would the pre-fab computer makers cater to people who aren't going to buy their pre-fab rigs anyway?
The hybrid drives are in fact very snazzy. You get much the same benefit of having a larger drive cache on your standard hard drive, except you get it on steroids. It's the Lance Armstrong (too soon?) of hard drive caching technology! And as an added bonus, the cache tends to be primed (on the smarter drives, anyway; those still using the old caching algorithms effectively have their cache wiped by the bootup process accessing the system kernel and drivers and such) when you first boot up your machine, rather than empty as is the case with standard hard drive caches (which basically use embedded volatile RAM chips, and thus gets completely cleared when you shut down). These hybrid caches are slower than the standard caches, but they're still massively faster than a disk seek and that lets them more than make up for it by giving you a billion times more cache hits!
Don't get me wrong, they're definitely out there and available, but the average computer shopper seems to want (or at least the big companies think they want) more GBs rather than fewer seek milliseconds. And, really, why would they ever want less of anything? They're paying more, they should get more!
Sarcasm aside, it seems to me that the only people really after SSDs are the same ones more likely to build their own rigs than buy a pre-built one. Why would the pre-fab computer makers cater to people who aren't going to buy their pre-fab rigs anyway?
The hybrid drives are in fact very snazzy. You get much the same benefit of having a larger drive cache on your standard hard drive, except you get it on steroids. It's the Lance Armstrong (too soon?) of hard drive caching technology! And as an added bonus, the cache tends to be primed (on the smarter drives, anyway; those still using the old caching algorithms effectively have their cache wiped by the bootup process accessing the system kernel and drivers and such) when you first boot up your machine, rather than empty as is the case with standard hard drive caches (which basically use embedded volatile RAM chips, and thus gets completely cleared when you shut down). These hybrid caches are slower than the standard caches, but they're still massively faster than a disk seek and that lets them more than make up for it by giving you a billion times more cache hits!
SSDs in general - Kromey