What makes you a geek?

[Concillian]

Yeah, I'm looking at setting up another game machine now for the next few years (sans video cards as those usually get updated every two years or so) and really like the speeds that SSDs provide, but paying $2.50 to $3 a Gig is kinda harsh considering you can pick up SATA drives and put them in a RAID 0 and get pretty high speeds while spending about $1 per 5 to 6 G (about a factor of 10 to 15 less for a little bit of speed loss). The only other problem with SSDs right now is that you have a limited number of writes before you pretty much lose the use of the SSD (which isn't bad if you don't plan to make many writes, but system drives tend to have a lot of writing going on, so that lowers the life expectancy of the SSD).

SSDs probably have another couple years of maturity to go before they start looking really attractive to replace spindle HDDs.

Raid 0 offers little to no performance benefit in average usage. Even in loading levels and such, I've not seen a review that shows substantial benefit. You improve transfer rates, which are generally a small part in the overall performance equation.

SSD on the other hand, exhibits real performance improvements
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc...i=3607&p=4
note the random read and write performance advantages that are something that RAID-0 will do nothing to improve. This is where the performance comes in.

The disadvantages of SSD drives disappear in the storage system I described.
- Networked large files negate the need for very large drives on the "client" machines. Documents, video and audio reside on the storage server, which takes advantage of the $ per gig advantage of SATA. SSD is still expensive, but a $300 SSD drive is comparable in price to a SAS controller alone, and works fine over SATA.
- Reliability concerns are removed by using a mirror array on the server. 2x cheap SATA drives mirrored is the most reliable thing out there besides 2x SAS drives mirrored. Personally I buy a 3rd drive and do a USB mirror every month or two, then keep it in a fire-safe or bring to work to protect against catastrophe.

The files on the SSD would be application data. Games, OS, office apps, etc... these are easily recoverable in the event of failure. Also there should be limited write cycles, though most modern SSDs will shuffle file write locations so the limited write cycles is a virtual non-issue.

Such a setup is not for everyone, for sure. My initial point was that SAS / SCSI for the home user is dead. Even if we look at a single computer, you can have an $80 GB SSD drive for the same cost as a 300GB SAS drive. So if you need 1TB of space, you buy a 1TB SATA drive for the junk where speed doesn't matter (or 2 or 3 for better reliability), then a SSD drive for the OS and speed critical apps. Cheaper than half the storage of 15kRPM SAS drives.

But an increasing number of families have multiple computers, and it begins to make sense to have a netoworked storage location for documents and such so they can be accessible from any computer. The middle-class home of the future will have a netoworked storage solution. Even some of the TV companies are going this route (AT&T U-verse, I believe Dish is doing this with their DVRs as well). It just makes a lot more sense than large drives at every point of access.