Seni (seniike@hotmail.com) on 12/20/11 wrote:
---------------------------
[snip helpful comments]
>It's practical if you're willing to accept it being slower
>than a conventional hard drive. Maybe if netbooks make a
>comeback.

It seems that a lot of wait time for a laptop is read
dominated (admittedly much of it sequential read), so the
very bad write behavior might be somewhat tolerable. The
reduction in access latency would provide a small increase
in read bandwidth for modest-sized (bursty) reads.

(It might actually be possible to exploit such with better
scheduling of application loading. Such optimizations do
not make much sense for disks--which benefit much more
from sequential reads--, but could be useful for flash.
However, it does not seem that extensive software
optimization would be attractive or even cost effective
currently.)

One problem that I have with netbooks is the small display
and keyboard. Of course, I represent a niche of a niche
(of a niche?), being rather cheap and style-challenged and
mostly a home-body.

Thank you for the information and insights.