Solid state drives on their way

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You know, I remember seeing an anandtech review of an add in card that took old standard SDRAM and made it into a hard drive. I also remember that installing windows on to that made relatively little difference in boot times.

Yes but that could well be due to the limitations of the hard drive controller (ie transfer rate) rather than the SDRAM itself.

Of course, it is possible that instant load times will not significantly speed up all apps because some of them may need to do considerable work even after being loaded into memory. But most apps should get a noticeable speed boost.

NAND/NOR flash can only be written to so many times before it fails. For things like transfering files and the like, where writes are relatively few and far between, that's no big deal. For something like a windows page file....well, it's a problem.

The article said that the new drives will be able to be rewritten at least 10,000 times - which will actually give them greater longevity than conventional hard disks.