Solid State Drives have come a long way, but they're still very small in terms of storage capacity when compared to mechanical hard drives. While a typical mechanical drive might have 500GB of storage, most solid state drives still have storage capacities of 64 or 128GB. 256GB of more is considered to be very large.
What about terabyte solid state drives? Will they ever be practical?
Prices Hold Back Development
The reason why solid state drives are expensive is that the manufacturing processes behind them are more expensive.
Part of this has to do with economics of scale. Although there was an over-supply of the NAND memory used in solid state drives in 2007 and 2008 Dell Inspiron E1705 Battery, recent developments and increases in popularity of solid state drives has resulted in demand out-stripping supply. That situation isn't going to change until NAND memory manufacturers have been given the time to reinvest their profits into new equipment and more efficient production Dell Inspiron E1705 Battery, a process which can take years. The development of super-high capacity solid state drives is going to remain slow until better manufacturing processes are available.
Even then, it is questionable that solid state drives will reach a price-per-gigabyte level at which the development of terabyte solid state drives makes sense Dell Inspiron B130battery, particularly for consumers. Even at a dollar per gigabyte �C which would be three times less than today's typical price-per-gigabyte �C a terabyte drive would cost $1000. That is simply more than consumers are going to be willing to spend.
Limited Options
Currently, the only manufacturer offering consumer terabyte solid state drives is OCZ. They offer two product line which reach this level of storage.
The first is the OCZ Colossus. The Colossus line of drives are a special series of solid state drives which mimic the typical 3.5 inch form factor of mechanical hard drives. The 1TB Colossus drive performs well, but costs around $3300.
OCZ also offers the specialty Z-Drive series which connects by a PCI Express interface like a video card or audio card. The claimed performance of the 1TB Z-Drive is incredible, with sustained read/writes of 600Mb/s, although it is unclear if such speeds are really usable in consumer desktops. The Z-Drive is even more expensive, with prices reach $3700 for one terabyte of space.
The Future – Not Coming SoonThe unfortunate fact is that the development of terabyte solid state drives is not going to be quick. There are significant barriers in the production of solid state drives which will prevent solid state drives of this capacity from becoming affordable anytime soon. Most users will be better off sticking with what most users due today �C buying a small solid state drive for the operating system and other commonly accessed programs and pairing it with a high capacity mechanical drive for storing large files.
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