I’d posted before about my interest in picking up a low-capacity SSD card for my laptop, to drastically speed up disk access. (This actually has nothing to do with my recent posts about slow hard drives…)

Newegg seems to have a 64 GB SSD, 2.5″ SATA disk for $240 after rebate. Interestingly, from the specs, it seems as if not only are the seek times nill (on account of being solid-state), but the throughput exceeds that of your average hard disk. It won’t be released for four days, however. (Found via FatWallet, which also links to a review here.)

For those who aren’t major geeks, SSD is short for “solid-state disk.” Your ordinary hard drive is a bunch of spinning platters, whereas solid-state is the technology you see in a USB thumb drive or the like: no moving parts. The major benefit of SSDs thus far has been seek time: with a normal hard disk, the disk has to find the right spot on the disk and read it. Seek times average 8-10ms on most normal drives, but that adds up quickly with fragmentation or concurrent I/O. With an SSD, there are no moving parts, so “seek time” is pretty much non-existent: files are ready instantly. Early SSDs seemed to not be capable of moving as much data (in terms of MB/sec), though, meaing that SSDs were great for lots of small “random” access, but not so hot for handling big, contiguous files. Now, it’s looking as if OCZ has made SSDs kick butt over normal hard drives, and somehow offered the product at a fraction of what it normally costs. (This 64GB SSD is more normally-priced, to give you an idea of why they haven’t caught on so quickly.)

Incidentally, today I came across deals on two different notebooks for about $700, both of which have 4GB RAM, but 1280×800-pixel screens. The RAM is incredible, as are most of the other specs (though it’s 5400RPM drives), but I think you can do much better on the resolution.