Anyone use them? Anyone thinking of using one? I'm tempted to get one once I can get ~80GiB for ~$120. I know, the price for that capacity currently hovers around $220, but last year they were $320, so there is hope. And I'm talking about quality drives, using the Barefoot, SandForce, or Intel controllers and high quality flash. Not the sub-par ones they ship on netbooks or any other OEM.

I think I will only have to buy one more high capacity (2TiB) mechanical drive to last me a number of years, and in the mean time can stock up on lower capacity SSD's for boot and application drives (I have use for 3, currently).

prepare to do a ssd lecture at the next meeting.

There is a lot of confusion going around SLC or MLC, the huge amount of controllers available, the supposed "decay" in performance as time passes, TRIM support in Windows and the particular implementation used in each drive (internal RAID, for example).

In short: Better read a specific review of the specific drive you want to buy. Right now I only trust Intel's SSD, but they get quite expensive.

I was more just throwing it out there on the off chance that someone followed them as much as I do. And yes, while Intel has produced some fast and reliable ssd's in the past, they're far from the definitive best. Yes they tend to lead in random reads and writes but they trail horribly in sequentials. And they've a good track record of trim compatibility on their G2 drives (the whole first batch of which had faulty firmware) but they refused to release trim compatible firmware for their G1 drives. Their prices are reasonable but sequential performance decays even further when you get down to their reasonably priced 40GiB drives that are self-branded or Kingston branded. Of course you're not going to be buying anything with SLC (there is no point), and no one uses the original JMicron controllers anymore (at least no one that is serious), the indilinx, sandforce and intel drivers are all neck in neck and prices are becoming quite reasonable. Late-life performance on some drives is lackluster, but reformatting and keeping %-filled low solves all of your problems, just as keeping >10% of a mechanical drive empty for paging is important.

So yeah, while knowing stuff about individual drives is necessary, that is not grounds for disqualification from further discussion in my book. I want people to be able to come here for news and information as well. They are the future, they are incredible, and I look forward to buying at least one in the next 12 months. Obviously new units are coming down the pipeline at different capacities and price-points, but ~$2.00 per GiB and at least 60GiB will be my threshold.

We should do a field trip to the apple store to do your little demo.

We totally should!