14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives are having a field day as more and more high end products like laptops and notebooks are using them as upgrade options as they have no moving parts and so are more resilient to shocks while providing faster data transferring speeds than typical hard disk drives at lower power costs. The main drawback of the solid state drives remains their very high price and that only if users are willing to disconsider the fact that most SSDs are coming with storage capabilities far inferior to the boasted hard disk drives.
Alienware, a high end computer manufacturing company recently acquired by Dell, has the reputation of building desktop and mobile computer systems without backing away from using the most expensive and the newest hardware components available on the market. Keeping up with that tradition, Alienware now offers the possibility to purchase an Area-51 m9750 gaming notebook which comes with not one but two solid state drives of 64Gb each that are arrayed in a RAID 0 configuration. Users not wanting to spend so much on the storage department could also opt for a single solid state drive of 64GB and pair it with a 200GB hard disk drive.
This comes as no big surprise as this is not the first use of solid state drive on Alienware gaming machines, the manufacturing company having already released a line of laptops that were using a pair of 32GB solid state drive in a RAID 0 configuration sometime ago. While the SSDs are coming with a long series of benefits for the potential buyer, most customers will most likely stay away as the price tag for those upgraded systems is very high. Users upgrading from a single 80GB hard disk drive configuration to the pair of 64GB SSD and 200GB 7,200rpm drive will have to pay an additional $1,400, while keeping the 80GB hard disk drive and adding the RAID 0 2x64GB SSD option will mean an additional cost of $2,000.
''Alienware has achieved another milestone in mobile storage by being the first to deliver a dual 64GB SSD RAID 0 configuration and the first to combine a single 64GB SSD with a second larger capacity hard drive,'' said Bryan de Zayas, Alienware's associate director of marketing, in a press release, and he was cited by the news site digitaltrends. ''This gives Alienware notebook users unprecedented data access and storage flexibility and allows them to take advantage of rapid performance, rugged reliability, and maximum power efficiency all at once.'' The 2x64GB solid state drive RAID 0 configuration has a price tag which starts at $4,099; the 64 GB SSD with a 200 GB hard disk drive comes for a mere $3,499, while the single 64 GB SSD option runs $3,199, a price that does not includes the cost of a traditional hard disk drive. Apart from the SSD options, the Alienware m9750 laptops are available with a wide selection of additional hardware components options, including high resolution 17-inch widescreen displays, some of the latest Intel Core 2 Duo central processing units, a TV tuner, dual-layer DVD burners and so on.