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Rhia Knowles wrote: > > I think this is where SSDs come in. Removing the moving parts to > remove one reason for failure (heads impacting on platters) and the > energy costs for those on the move, but they are increasing the > capacity on those too. I always thought the drive for SSD was to do away with seek time. The main power saving focus is on laptops, and hard disk drives aren't generally a big part of laptop power consumption to start with (in one test I saw during their disk drive benchmarks the screen light still used more power than the disk drives!). Some of the flash drives use significantly less power than an active hard drive, and some have lower idle power draw as well. But then I don't think the laptop (or software) people have tried to squeeze the power as much as they could from traditional hard drives, as I'm pretty sure idle power drain could be pushed down further. The issue of limited writes for flash is I think solvable in software. We've reached the point where flash disks using a sensible levelling strategy can live as long as the PC they are in is likely to. But I think you are right, in that SSD disks are undergoing a revolution in capacity and price. You are still paying a 400% premium, but that is much less than a few years ago. Now I've just seen a load of disk errors from one of my desktop drives. That means 2 out of three of the hard disks in my desktop machine are failing this week. And this one won't be in warranty...... Argh.... I probably need a new computer but it'll have to be another disk drive instead. Fortunately it is part of a RAID mirror so hopefully it'll limp along another few days and won't eat my data. Simon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html