SSD Prices On Parity With High-End HDD By 2011

kgagne writes "EMC executives were heavily pitching the virtues of solid state disk drives at their annual users conference in Las Vegas, saying that SSD will not only be on price parity with high-end Fibre Channel disk drives by the end of 2010 or early 2011, but that NAND memory will solve all sorts of read/write issues created by spinning disk technology. EMC's CEO and its storage platforms chief said the company will do everything it can to drive SSD prices down, and adoption up, by deploying them in their products. One issue might be that EMC is using SSD from STEC, which is being sued by Seagate for patent infringement." The article also mentions some of the work EMC has been doing to make sure SSD is enterprise-class reliable, such as developing "wear leveling" software.

Comments

SSD from STEC

[quarrel]

> One issue might be that EMC is using SSD from STEC, which is being sued by Seagate for patent infringement.

Why is this an issue? If EMC think the technology is a winner, and they don't have a stake in a particular player (of course they have to choose a supplier, but that hardly indicates a long term commitment) then what do they care who wins?

One of the great things about being in EMCs shoes is that you want these things commoditized.

Either way, as a the sooner SSD is directly competitive the better. They're ICs - you churn them out, and only worry about yield. HDDs are mechanical and will always have their mechanical shortcomings.

--Q

Re:SSD from STEC

[vax]

if seagate has the patent then they better start making some damn SSD drives. (that are actually on the market)

it would be good to have some competition anyway to drive the prices down..

still. I cant wait for 100gb SSD drives.. finally a laptop for gigging that can handle a beating.

really once these are standard in laptops I think you will see more robust laptops on the market since the spinning disks have always been one of the quickest parts to fail (well assuming that the laptop has decent cooling design and isnt running some desktop processor that is melting the damn thing)

Longevity

[Bananatree3]

I agree that high quality platter drives will last a long, long time. The issue is that anything with moving parts is inherently more prone to breakage than a device with no moving parts. A SSD with no rewrite issues would by principal be inherently longer lasting.

Platter drives are here to stay for a while. Once SSDs get the bugs worked out and the price drops to current platter drive levels, there will be a large migration.

Re:Longevity

[hairyfeet]

While I agree that the enterprise users will end up on SSD,simply due to IOPS, I'm not sure if it will end up in consumer rigs other than specialized laptop situations, and what is more I'm not sure I'd want them to be. We all know how the big PC makers end up starving the low end machines for RAM,so how well will a SSD survive say, a Vista Basic machine with 512Mb of RAM pounding the swap to kingdom come? I know they have wear leveling but consumers are a LOT more likely to fill their drives with junk and I bet that having to move the contents of the entire drive to even out the wear would kill any benefits you would see from SSD speed wise.

Also,what about data recovery? If a little Helen Homemaker gets a bug that bones her pc and she loses her pictures I can often get them back due to the fact that HDD drives just don't "erase" when something gets tossed. If the SSD does as I assume they do and actually erases on delete that could mean disaster for these customers that get virus infections, as for some reason lately they seem to hose the My Documents folder about 65% of the time and that is where many keep their pictures and other personal files,without a backup naturally. Can you even recover deleted files off a SSD? Or does the wear leveling software make that an impossibility? Anyway that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, I've had IBM Deathstar* hard drives die in months. Anecdotal evidence does not help the situation, though.

The reality of the matter is that solid state is simply more reliable** than mechanical electronics in most cases.

*IBM Deskstar
** reliable is relative to the usage.

Re:What about filesystems...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only adaptation I can see is trying to minimize wearing on certain blocks, but from the looks of it the SDD's are being designed with wear leveling in mind so I doubt even that will matter to the software. Actually with proper software you'd probably like to do the opposite - try to wear out certain blocks as fast as possible. This way the lossage is more predictable and rest of the disk is kept in a better shape. Point being that bad sectors aren't really a big deal if you're prepared for those.

Re:But when

[pyite]

will they be competitive with mid range priced hard drives? You can get 500GB for $100 these days.

In a few years. Right now SSDs perform incredibly in terms of IOPS (I/O operations Per Second) that enterprise storage type folks are eying them longingly. They just need a little bit more space for the money. Until such time, it's very possible that we'll see more in terms of using SSDs as caching components in front of more antiquated spinning media.

not only price, but density

[fermion]

If we reflect back on the floppy disks days, we see that it was not only cost, but density, that killed the floppy oh so many years ago. A floppy was no longer useful for installing apps. MS often needed upward of 10 disks to ship an app. While 3 MB was big enough to hold most files, we were entering a period in which one could no longer survive with a single 3.5" disk. The CD-R, then the DVD-RW, made sense as they could replace the floppy, though in many ways at a higher costs, due to their higher density. The fact that CD was cheaper than other optical solutions made it a good choice. What did finally kill the floppy was the available of USB drives for the sneaker net. Though expensive, they too had a density benefit, as well as not requiring additional hardware, other than a USB port which initially were scarce on MS Windows machines, and the drivers buggy.

I think that density, not price, is going to drive the SSD market as well. We need space on our small computers, and the mechanical solution is not keeping up. I believe this is why Apple went to flash memory for the iPods, although initially they were dedicated to hard drives. My iPhod mini only has 4 gb, the same as the nano that replaced it. The new nanos have more memory than even the EOL minis. The microdrive, though a good tech, were not scaling. The larger physical size hard disks are now up to 160GB, but that is small for modern times in which many of us have a terabyte sitting on our home machine.

So I think we will pay for SDD prices if they give us more space. The problem right now is that we have more for a SSD drive, and get less space. We pay $1000 to Apple or practically anyone else for 64GB SSD. That is paying money for nothing. Wait until we can buy a Macbook Pro with a terrabyte SSD for $4000, or a Mac Book air with a 250GB SSD for $2000. Then we will be seeing the SSD laptops flying off the shelf.

Of course for low end machines many will stick with HDD for many years, just like people entered the 21st century still storing things on floppy. Of course this will hasten the downfall of HDD, as the cheap unreliable HDD will take an even bigger share of the market than they have today, and, just like today, users will attribute a high failure rate to a problem with the technology, and not that they chose to buy a cheap hard drive. With the last major mechanical part gone, computer will become much more reliable, just like when the stereos, for better or worse, left vacuum tubes behind.

I also hope that DVD drive as a standard goes away soon, and applaud Apple for making the Mac book air drive free. The main reason for a dvd drive, other than installing software, is because we cannot rip out DVDs to a more convinent format. I would much rather carry around a couple Flash Drives than a bag of DVDs. It would seem that in not too many years shipping software on USB dongles would be just as cost effective. Already 4GB flash cost less than $10.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[renoX]

The future is very near!
Sure currently buying a 1TB Solid State drive would be too expensive, but do we need really it?

No: on my HDD, I have two partitions: one of 30 GB for the OS and the software (which has still a lot of free space), and a big one for the data.

Replacing the OS&software partition with a SSD would bring 99% percent of the benefits of having a 'full' SSD: fast boot time, fast application startup, etc.. Especially as we can use a part of the SSD as a cache for the HDD.
So IMHO, we don't really need big SSDs (30-60GB is enough), but fast SSDs should improve the computers' responsivenesscomputers..

So my ideal computer would have: one fast SSD of 60GB (for responsiveness), 1TB of HDD (for bulk storange) plus another external 1TB HDD for backups.