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quaiky on 20 July 2008
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ssd is not the solution for all problems yet. while ssd beats harddisks on seek times, they still lack transferspeeds. the fastest ssd currently can reach max transfer speeds in the area of 100mb/sec for read operations the cheaper ssd drives usually end up at half to 3rd of this. Also flash is still considerably slower at writing than reading often less than 40% write speed.
for hds 100mb/sec for read and write is what a average 7200 rpm disk can easily reach, the top disks for transfer rates like the velociraptor can reach nearly the double values of that.
That also means that current SATAII standard is fast enough for ssds cause it can transfer up 300mb/sec which no disk (harddisk or flash based) has reached yet. and tghe next sata standard which will again double rates is allready finished and might enter the market over the next 2 years i think.

So for now ssd's are excellent for all applications where seek time is most important like most server applications that have to deliver low amounts of data very fast (database, webserver). But for applications where its all about transferrate or write speed standard harddisks are still a lot faster.
In most tests that i have seen about ssd where tehy tested them in pcs on typical games or typical non seerver apps the advanatge of them over standard 7200rpm sata hd drives was minimal or non existant, sometimes the transfer speed even gave the hd drives the upper hand.

also the problem with flash is that while price is slowly coming down there is no real way to accelerate this process, the cost of them is based on the cost of the silicon wafer they are made on, and on their die size. First thing doesn't change much, and the die sizes shrink very slowly (a process shrink usually reduces sizes by 30-50% but happens only every 1.5-2 years).

Flash based media for game distribution is also quite unrealistic for next gen:
Right now you can find the cheapest flash based media at ~2 euro per GB in europe if you are looking at 16gb models which currently have the ebst price per gb ratio (so my guess is that manufactoring cost for this is still more than 1$ per gb). so if you would want to replace a single layer bluray with flash you are taking about at least 25$ production cost per media compared to 1$ or less for the blu ray (depending on production numbers, you have a high initial cost in optical media production but a cheap reproduction cost).
being optimistic for flash it will come down by 60-70% in the next 3-4 years before next gen consoles come out to market, which would still leave a 25gb media at more than 7.5$ and a 25GB media will probably be not big enough for next gen so you might have to double the media saze which doubles the price again.

So its very obvious that for next gen the distribution media will most likely be optical again, the only alternative to it would be a streaming based download distribution (loads about 10-15% of game at start, then you allready can start playing while it keeps downloading in background) but if that works will depend a lot on what the standard isp price models will be in 3-4 years. if a 20-50gb download would still excess your download limits in most contracts this will be no real option.