Dell, Alienware price up Samsung solid-state drive options
Ow, that hurts
Want to equip your next laptop with a Flash-based solid-state hard drive? You can if you're after a Dell XPS or an Alienware m9750. Samsung said this week it's sending 32GB and 64GB SSDs to both companies. But fitting them will cost you.
Alienware's m9750: now with solid-state drive options
Alienware, for instance, includes single-drive 32GB and 64GB SSD options, each priced at $500 (£246/€362) and $1100 (£542/€796), respectively. These prices are on top of the base cost of the notebook. You can buy an entire notebook for that.
Alienware said it would also offer a 128GB RAID dual-drive array, but its online configuration tool didn't yet list this option when we checked today. Its UK site only lists the 32GB option, for which it wants £264.
Dell's M1330: cheaper SSDs than the Alienware
Dell is now offering SSD options with is XPS M1330 13.3in widescreen laptop. The 32GB option costs $450 (£222/€326), the 64GB SSD $950 (£468/€687) on top of the basic cost of the machine.
Here in the UK, the M1330 is offered with a single SSD option: a £376 32GB drive - even allowing for UK sales tax, that's over £100 more than Dell's US customers pay.
SSDs provide much faster data-access times than regular hard drives and are far more power efficient. The downside, as you can see from the examples above, is their relatively poor price per gigabyte score. For less than half the price of the 32GB, you can increase the UK M1330's 120GB of HDD storage to 250GB.
COMMENTS
£55 per Gig?
It hurts me so much to say I remember £10 per Meg (and that was only when the price fell by 50%)
I dont think its unreasonable.
The only thing that seems lame is the big markup for the UK market. Not sure why it would be that much higher. Its not like these things are made in the US.
However, I really want one for my ultraportable. After spending 2000 on a laptop for the sole purpose of getting something durable, light, and with a long battery life another $500 doesnt seem that bad if it gave me all 3.
The catch is, right now, they havent been showing quite the power gains they have been claiming. Dell pulled the statement about saving power from their website because of it.
If it really did give power gains I would be all over it once the 64gb broke the $500 mark.
Write speed
Andy, the reason your flash drives have a low write speed is at least partly due to the USB interface. The Samsung SSDs use PATA (with SATA coming soon), and give a write speed of 40MB/sec, which is pretty damn fast.
I'm from the past
I remember paying £110 for a 2gb IDE hard drive in 1998! stick on windows 98, install Quake and oh i've run out of space!
so what's that? £55 a gb?!
As it's new technology and not mass produced yet it'll be a while until we see a decent price, a year, maybe two. i'll wait until there put them into sub £800 laptops that are HD ready, have Blu-Ray, 3G HSPA, 802.11n etc.
until then i'll stick to my Dell which may catch on fire at any moment!
They can go suck man parts
£8.47 per Gig. I suppose it could be worse, but I still wouldn't spend that much money on a hard drive. In fact, can anyone remember how long ago it was when a regulare hdd was priced up similare?
As for these new solid state drives, sod 'em. If there that expensive, i'll just wait till the prices come down, in a few years time. And if they don't take off and get dumped, well, its just one more peice of technology I didn't waste money on.
It's £2.60 per Gig roughly on a serial ata drive for a laptop (a rough average taken from 3 of the most expensive dives i could find) so unless you just have to have a hard drive with no moving parts, its realy not worth it.
