Alienware Puts 64GB Solid-State Drives In Desktops

Lucas123 writes "In the face of Seagate's announcement this week of a new hybrid drive, Dell subsidiary Alienware just upped the ante by doubling the capacity of its desktop solid-state disk drives to 64 GB. Dell has remained silent on the solid-state disk front since announcing a 32-GB solid-state option for its Latitude D420 and D629 ATG notebook computers earlier this year. Now, Alienware seems to be telling users to bypass hybrid drives altogether. 'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana, Alienware's product marketing manager 'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'"

Comments

obsolete?

[orionop]

'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.' Call me when either the capacity or price of solid state drives comes close with those obsolete drives, then we will compare...

Re:obsolete?

[morgan_greywolf]

And it won't. 'Economies of scale' don't happen here. Flash memory production already outstrips HDDs. The fact is that the process of manufacturing memory, including flash memory, is expensive.

Why does your computer have a relatively small amount of RAM and huge storage? It's the same economic question we've been facing since the introduction of computing. You need some fast, temporary storage and some slower permanent storage. And the reason has nothing to do with technological barriers -- it boils down to economics. Memory is expensive, hard drives are cheap. That's it. No matter what happens, nothing is going to change that equation anytime soon. SSDs will remain a niche technology for gamers with deep pockets and maybe a few other high-end uses like scientific computing. It will take at least a decade or more before this filters down to the point that the average PC is using SSDs.

Re:obsolete?

[vagabond_gr]

Memory is expensive, hard drives are cheap. That's it. No matter what happens, nothing is going to change that equation anytime soon. You mean *per gigabyte* and that's true. But tape drives are even cheaper, yet few people are using them because 1) access is ridiculously slow 2) nobody needs so much space. Hard drives are taking the same path. I don't need more than 64GB on my laptop, and soon I'll have much more than that. What I do need is to replace my 4200 rpm slug with something faster, without draining my battery. If I can get a 64gb flash disk at the price of a 500gb hdd, I'll do it today.

Eventually

[iknownuttin]

FTFA: ...the flash-based technology's steep price point continues to hamper adoption, analysts say.

Yeah, but as the first adopters and the die hard gamers looking for every advantage they can get buy more of these, we'll see the price drop eventually.

It also means that the extra speed and reliability really isn't worth the high price for most business folks who would be, I guess, the ones to really drive the market in the beginning stages after the first adopters.

Re:Solid first!

[TubeSteak]

"Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state," said Diana. "Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now." Yes hybrid is a Band-Aid, but the wound it is trying to heal is the excessive price for solid state.

Again, for the majority of computer users, swapping to the disk is more of a problem than the ultimate speed of their HD. They'd get more bang for their buck by buying another GB of RAM... which is why I don't really see solid state prices coming down anytime soon.

There isn't a significant need for it in the general consumer market.
Maybe laptops will create enough demand for lower prices... but that remains to be see.

Hybrid is a band-aid?

[AKAImBatman]

'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana

Now there's a misleading quote if I ever heard one. Magnetic drives currently allow for storage of 250GB and up for a cost of $0.50/GB or less. In comparison, Flash Drives are are still measured in dollars per GB. The hybrid drive allows a bit of a tradeoff. A fast storage cache combined with massive space in exchange for a slight increase in price. Thus it's possible to have 1TB or more of storage, but with the performance characteristics of Flash memory under most circumstances.

Mass produce

[p51d007]

As soon as they ramp up production, and cut down on "bad drives" in the production process, the price will come down. Anyone remember buying a 250 megabyte drive back in the mid 90's and paying more for that, than you do for a 250 gigabyte drive today? As with anything "new" (ie: iPhone) the early adopters are going to be paying a price for the "wow" factor. I suspect in less than 24 months, these will become more mainstream.

Not too impressive...

[evilviper]

Okay, for some $1,700+ you get two 64GB SSD drives.

And what do you get for that ridiculous amount of cash? According to Alienware's best PR spin:

"speed up operating system boot and application launch/runtime by up to 2 times." ...and:

"consume up to 50 percent less power than rotating HDDs."

Those specs aren't exactly thrilling, particularly since "up to" tends to mean you'll never get close to either spec.

Seems like a complete joke to me, which oddly fits in quite well with the rest of the Alienware line-up.

Re:Not too impressive...

[Rolgar]

If the price continues at its current 50% drop per year, we'll be looking at 2TB drives below $200 in 8 years or so. You might be able to get a 5-8TB magnetic drive for the same money in that time frame.

Right now, few people will be able to afford this, but there do exist people with too much money who will over spend for the slightest gain in performance, namely battery life, now. For business travelers, some companies might see it as justified for their employee to be able to work on his laptop on the plane for an extra hour or two before he runs out of power. If they rate the extra time that the laptop is functional against the extra work the user will be able to do while using the laptop (figured as the hourly wage of the user), the hard drive would pay for itself once it had extended the battery operation of the device by 30 hours. That is, $900/$30/hr since a business machine only one of these drives (we just got brand new XP computers with 80GB hard drives, and even that is overkill for business use). So, while it is still years from being a good buy for home use, they should be ready for the rest of us in 8-10, unless flash cost hits a tipping point sooner that causes the prices to drop even faster.

Actually

[samael]

Flash costs seem to be halving each year at the moment, while hard drive capacity is going up by a smaller amount.

Flash may eventually max out, still more expensive than hard drive space, or it may eventually overtake it. I'm not convinced that there's anything inherently more expensive about flash construction techniques in the long term.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[roscocoltran]

and what are you trying to prove now ? That the ss drive built 6 years ago were crap ? I agree, but in 6 years, the industry has changed. So did the ss drives. It would be interesting that you redo this experiment and post your results in 3 months.

Re:No problem! -- It was in my experience

[WillAdams]

Interesting datapoint --- however, how full were the 512 MB cards?

Did you compare their lifetime w/ 1 GB cards w/ the same data (but much more empty space)?

William

Re:Crash recovery

[SamTheButcher]

This was actually my question, but seriously.

DriveSavers can crack open a drive and read each platter. What are the options, if any, with solid state/flash drives?

Backup software would see a huge spike if there's no recourse from a dead drive.

shock

[Verte]

How often were you writing the MBR? That's a very strange place to get a failure like this.

Re:Solid first!

[poetmatt]

Remains to be seen? laptops already represent significant consumer demand for solid state for almost 2 years and that would indeed be on a consumer level. Hybrid has ways of long term potential but solid state has far more long term potential (less moving parts as well).

I agree ram does more for performance for the time being, if and only if you don't meet a minimum level of said performance, but at this point if you are a gamer/programmer/autocad user/etc you're going to want to look at a solid state drive in the next 3 years anyway. Since 30 or 60 gigs of ram isn't *THAT* cheap yet, although that day will probably come as well but be at a relatively similar percentage of storage as it is now (since all data will likely increase in size/complexity). Unless we all get 500GB ram drives anytime soon, which I'd estimate to be an easy 5 years + away.

Examples: Autocad - Want to load a 3GB design/drawing/etc? I'm pretty sure solid state would be a lot nicer for things that big. Working on many big drawings/designs/etc? I'm pretty sure that'll save more than a few minutes almost instantly.

Gaming - Played Fury lately, or Team Fortress 2? Newer games are starting to have significant load times even with Sata2. Fury even on fast computers take 30+secs to load between maps, minimum. And that represents the new Unreal engine 3.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[neophytepwner]

Not to mention the real problem lies with the RAM. We really need to get MRAM on the way to enable faster reboot and faster transfer of information through the motherboard. Sure increasing HDD efficiency will help run a system faster but as far as productivity RAM needs some serious advances.

Re:Until they notice the throughput

[llZENll]

That may be true with a homebrew SSD, but when you are controlling each chip directly without having to go through a RAID or USB interface, you can simply multiplex the reads and writes over 10s or 100s of memory chips, increasing throughput speeds to whatever you want, 1MB/s to 1GB/s, you name it.

Re:Solid first!

[los furtive]

Again, for the majority of computer users, swapping to the disk is more of a problem than the ultimate speed of their HD. They'd get more bang for their buck by buying another GB of RAM

You forgot notebooks!

Anyone who's trying to breath new life into a notebook that already has as much RAM as possible will get an awesome collection of performance boosts by switching to solid state:

• a speed upgrade that in some ways is more noticeable than a CPU upgrade
• savings in battery life
• cooler temperatures
• lighter weight
• less likely loss of data when dropped
• faster boot/resume times
• quieter operation

These are all features that pretty much every notebook out there can benefit from. The only remaining obstacle is cost.