I was at my local Fry’s Electronics on Wednesday evening and am still surprised by the street level pricing of some components. I know it is not news to most people, and this is probably the “old fart” side of me showing, but 2TB hard drives for less than $180 and Patriot 128GB SSD for $350 is really quite amazing. I still remember the days…

Two weeks ago I picked up a 16GB USB drive no bigger than my thumb nail for $25. Last week I snagged two 32GB USB drives for $50 each. This week, a duo of Patriot TORQX 128GB SSDs at $350 each. The Patriot drives will go in my workstation in a RAID 0 configuration, replacing the dual 10K RPM drives it currently houses, which are also RAID 0. I am currently investigating a decent SSD for my IBM Thinkpad X61 to replace the 5400 RPM 160GB drive that it currently houses.

I am expecting both machines, once upgraded, to get eerily quiet and considerably faster.

Originally when I was investigating SSD drives I was leaning towards the rather pricey, at this time, Intel X-25 G2 128GB SSD drives, which are currently listed for $466 each. Including tax that would have driven the storage upgrade to over $1,000 for a pair of them in RAID 0 configuration.

It is time for a new operating system re-install anyway, as the current Vista operating system has been humming along quietly for two years now but it has begun to grow carbuncles what with all the software I install and uninstall on an almost weekly basis.

Windows 7 is available on my MSDN subscription so I thought, “why the hell not?” I’ll probably live to regret it but at least I can get to see what all the fuss is about.

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