The idea of solid state drives or at least chip based storage has been around for decades now but only in the past couple years have they been introduced by manufacturers as a possible replacement for disk based mechanical drives.
Unfortunately the price point for a SSD is still 15 to 20 times that of disk based drives so even if they were available in the same density they would be out of the range of anyone that is not getting stimulus funds.
So once you get past the idea of dropping $1000 on a drive that is not all that much better then your standard 3.5″ drive that costs $70 what applications could demand such an investment.
Well first you would consider applications in industrial settings or within electronic devices that have constant abuse from impacts such as mobile devices. Also because you are not restricted on the dimensions of the storage media you have the possibility of creating drive shapes that match the device. They can be long and thin to fill the void in a iPad case or any shape that is required. In this situation even if used as a cache device SSD can provide reasonably safe storage where a drive would fail much quicker.
The drawback in the technology that will restrict its use on the desktop is the ability to reduce the size of the media in manufacturing to match the larger capacity disk drives. This will also be a problem for server technologies.
SSD will eventually replace mechanical drives in many applications but when storage capacity is the primary concern at least for the next decade you can expect to buy the same type of drive that you are using today with slight upgrades.
For the moment SSDs come in a maximum standard density of 250GB for around $700. They are targeted as a drop in SATA drive replacement for Laptops because they use less power.
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