The price of SSDs have dropped to below a buck for a gig price which makes them a viable price to combat HHD technology.
Intel has been offering $80 rebates on their 60GB and 120GB 320 SSDs, taking prices to $80 for the 80GB capacity and $110 for the 120GB capacity. It is also offering a $130 rebate on the 160GB capacity.
While this is a bit of a Black Friday sale, there are signs that the prices are falling across the board. In Blighty you can pick up an 80 GB model SSD for £112.50 on Amazon. It is a price which is down by nearly £70.
Intel SSD 320 has a SATA 3Gb/s interface and can manage a 270 MB/s Read, Up to 220 MB/s Write.
But it does seem that with prices like this starting to appear that HHD's days are numbered. It had been the price of the SSD technology which had managed to keep HHD alive. It had only really appeared in PCs where price was not really a problem, such as Apple gear. With the price being only a little more expensive than an HHD there is really little reason to say no.
While the 80GB drive will undoubtedly make my machine faster, it's not going to take all of my stuff. So it's not really a replacement at this point.
Get the price down another five-fold, so it's only twice the price for an SSD and I'll consider it for storage.
Since only prices for the 320 have been lowered it's fairly safe to assume that they need to clear some inventory before a new model comes.
Koutech IO-PESA234 PCI-Express 2.0 Low Profile SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Dual Channel Controller Card w/ HybridDrive Support.
It is only 5 GB/s in a x1 PCIe slot, but, its Marvell chip will let you build your own "Hybrid Drive".
SSD + HDD (mirrored SAFE mode will let you rebuild to replacement SSDs, or extended mode is like RAID 0)
You can pick and choose by directories what on your cloned Primary bootable system disk that you want accelerated from the SSD.
With the help of True Image Home, I'm booting with a Hybrid paired 600 GB Velociraptor and 256 GB SSD.
Marvell 9130 chip uses an Apache browser based software app to maintenance and optimise the SSD. It is worth it, only if you're postponed to fledging everything in SATA3, or you can't get a big enough capacity SSD for your PC boot partition and you actually have an unused 1x PCIe slot on your motherboard. You need to enable AHCI in Windows 7 and bios, first.