I spotted a new interesting SSD review. it's a $379 5.25" drive bay device
that holds up to 8 DDR2 DIMMS (up to 8G per DIMM) and appears to the
system as a SATA drive (or a pair of SATA drives that you can RAID-0 to
get past the 300MB/s SATA bottleneck)
the best review I've seen only ran it on windows (and a relativly old
hardware platform at that), I suspect it's performance would be even
better under linux and with a top-notch controller card (especially with
the RAID option)
it has a battery backup (good for 4 hours or so) and a CF cardslot that it
can back the ram up to (~20 min to save 32G and 15 min to restore, so not
something you really want to make use of, but a good safety net)
the review also includes the Intel X-25E and X-25M drives (along with a
variety of SCSI and SATA drives)
http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255/1
equipped with 16G the street price should be ~$550, with 32G it should be
~$1200 with 64G even more expensive, but the performance is very good.
there are times when the X-25E matches it or edges it out in these tests,
so there is room for additional improvement, but as I noted above it may
do better with a better controller and non-windows OS.
power consumption is slightly higher than normal hard drives at about 12w
(_much_ higher than the X-25)
they also have a review of the X-25E vs the X-25M
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15931/1
one thing that both of these reviews show is that if you are doing a
significant amount of writing the X-25M is no better than a normal hard
drive (and much of the time in the middle to bottom of the pack compared
to normal hard drives)
David Lang