So where's my 1TB solid state disk to replace the 256GB one I've been using in my laptop for 3 years now? It seems as though all innovation in storage stopped in 2009, and we've been coasting ever since. And don't even mention there's still no 4TB hard disks. My blu-ray rip collection isn't getting any smaller and our storage systems aren't getting better anywhere near fast enough.
You don't need a solid-state drive for your movies. That's just wasteful. Mechanical hard drives are fine for data that will only be read, and only sequentially. Plus, they're still 10x cheaper, even given the currently inflated hard drive prices and record low SSD prices. There simply isn't a market for a 1TB consumer SSD. What you're really looking for is a hybrid drive with 64+ GB of Flash.
EDIT: Also, at the end of 2009, TRIM support was just hitting the market, and SandForce-based drives were just being announced. Since then, TRIM has become universal, as has 6Gbps SATA support, and most controllers have been through at least one other iteration. SSD caching has also hit the market in a variety of forms.
Hence, hybrid drives. Better yet, save yourself some money by ripping out the optical drive in your laptop and use that space for a second internal drive.
I seriously need a 1TB SSD (which either don't exist or are still way too expensive) for my laptop because I am constantly moving files off my local system and onto my file server which could also seriously use some 4TB drives, which also don't exist. I am running out of space on each of my systems faster than I ever remember.
If the stuff you're moving around is going over a network, then you obviously don't need SSD performance for it, since your laptop doesn't have a NIC capable of more than 1Gbps. If you can't fit two drives in your laptop, then you are exactly the kind of user that hybrid drives are targeted at.
I'm moving stuff to network drives all the time because the SDD drive capacity of my laptop is too small. Even after 3 years there still isn't anything on the market that is an acceptably priced replacement. Like I said, where is my $300 1TB SDD that should have been on the market by now?
3 years is a really long time for an entire industry to be totally stagnant. It's somewhat similar to how Intel has been sitting on their asses for the past few years ignoring the entire mobile computing revolution.
The SSD market has been anything but stagnant for the past three years. That's a ridiculous assertion for you to be making - three years ago, the SSD market was still immature and not at all ready to be mainstream. The first halfway-decent SSD (Intel X25-M) is only about four years old, and it's nowhere near competitive with current SSDs for price, capacity, or performance.
You seem to be under the false impression that the NAND is the most important part of an SSD. It's not. From an engineering perspective, it's the least important component - it just happens to be the primary reason for cost scaling with capacity. The controller and it's firmware are far more complicated, and make all the difference for performance. Those components have made a lot of progress in the past three years. And even the NAND has advanced, just not exponentially, because while density is inversely related to unit cost, it is also inversely related to durability, and the drives 3 years ago weren't designed with excessive longevity requirements.
I suspect it's coming. You can get a 512g for $399 now. I'd wager a small amount that we'll see 1TB SSD in the next year - it may still be $800+ when they first arrive, but will come down more after that.
AFAICT, the OCZ Octane is the only 1TB 2.5" drive on the market, but I suspect you'll start to see more of these later this year (at slightly more sensible prices, one would hope).
$1270 for a drive that is essentially a RAID-0 of two 512GB SSDs, packaged in a single 2.5" drive. OCZ also has the Colossus drives that offer 1TB as a RAID-0.
Drive speeds have increase, capacity is slowly rising. Why compete on capacity when hdds still dominate it. But yes, this industry is still slow in it's evolution.
