Well, it won't be the same price - it requires a more complex fab process - but yeah. Consumer MLC drives have proven themselves to be robust and reliable, for the most part. TLC still seems to be a bridge a little too far.

I'd like to see Tech Report re-run their endurance test with current drive models. The only "problem" is that drives are so good now that by the time the best model fails and we get the final score, none of them will be on the market any more.

A huge proportion of computing is moving to the cloud. Conventional disk storage is a nightmare for cloud services because there's such a huge disparity between sequential I/O and random I/O performance. CPU, memory, and network bandwidth all divide up nicely, but as soon as you have contention for disk I/O, it all falls apart.

This is known as the "noisy neighbour" problem. You might be happy and fine on your cheap VPS for months, and then the next day it collapses in a heap, even though you're getting the same allocation of resources you always have. It takes a lot of complex engineering and expert management to keep noisy neighbours at bay.

SSDs eliminate this, because SSD performance on multi-threaded random I/O is not far short of even their best-case sequential performance. Which means that every cloud provider wants to move to pure SSD. Exabytes worth of it. I work for a relatively small company, and we have 1.5PB of disk that we'd love to convert to SSD.

That SSD needs to be dense and reliable. Smaller process nodes improved density at a cost of write cycles. 3D flash gives us improved density and increased write cycles at a cost of more complex fabrication.

The market is there, all right.

They rotate around a common center of gravity. But that center of gravity is inside the Earth. Or to put it another way, no.

They do. This equivalent is known as "money".

You only get crevasses in iceberg lettuce.

WTF?

What kind of "Libertarians" do you know?

And what does the GOP have to do with anything in this context?

Consumption tax doesn't have to be regressive. Look into the FairTax plan. It provides each household a "prebate" on the taxes they will pay on their necessities each month.

Agreed. Also it is too easy for businesses to avoid taxation, even after this change.

If Comcast is your only broadband choice (which, BTW, it almost certainly isn't, since there are usually DSL, satellite, and cell options) it is due to them having enjoyed a government-created monopoly.

Any sufficiently profound stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

No, really, I've done it. Loaded up a 4GB ultrabook with lots of applications and Chrome tabs and a couple of Virtualbox CentOS instances, over 6GB in active use. Switching apps initially took a couple of seconds as it settled down to a realistic working set, but after than that you couldn't tell that it was swapping at all.

I've done it on spinning disk too, of course, and that couple of seconds was closer to a minute.

As long as you're not actively thrashing - as long as your working set still fits in RAM - swapping to SSD is pretty much painless.

Yes. I've done exactly this, on both cheap ultrabooks with 4GB ram and huge Linux servers with 512GB of RAM. (We have a 2.5TB Redis cluster that was running out of space waiting for additional nodes to be commissioned.)

It works. It works well. It's not a panacea, but it's an enormous improvement over swapping to spinning disk. Night and day.