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SSD Prices On Parity With High-End HDD By 2011

Posted by kdawson on from the at-least-it's-not-five-years-out dept.

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.

2 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. The Future is Solid State by Bananatree3 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Spinning disk hard drives are the mode, median and mean today. You can grab a 1TB platter hard drive for under 200 bucks. It may not last as long as a SSD, but at that price you can certainly buy a bunch of backup drives for a lot cheaper than a 1TB Solid State drive.

    However, SSD is the future wave, as it Just Works better than platter drives. A high quality, high density, low priced SSD would knock the socks off any platter drives today if it were available. Platter drives will be the mainstream market for a while because of cost and size availability. However as SSDs become cheaper and hold more space, the WILL push platter drives out.

  2. Re:Yeah, Right by Courageous · · Score: 3, Interesting


    Well. These drives (FC, SCSI, SAS) are 10% of the market, very lucrative, and quite important for data center operations, server rooms, and so forth.

    Projected lifetime for modern SSD drives is now getting to the point where they are more likely to be discarded due to technological obsolescence than they are to significantly deteriorate, BTW.

    The projected intersection curve is further than six years out for SATA SSD price parity. That's an eternity in technological time, which is to say, there is no predicting it.

    Price per unit of storage is by far not the only deciding factor, even in the consumer market. Flash can scale up performance much more quickly than spinning media. You can expect flash performance to more than double annually from here on out, I would say. You would of course be right to be wondering how the SATA and SAS busses will keep up.

    Look at FusionIO (http://www.fusionio.com) to see how flash will accelerate in performance. These devices have 160 internal channels in order to make the bytes flow at the rate they do. You can think of it as a sort of 160-wide RAID-0 striping mechanism.

    $2400 for one card is of course way out of consumer space. However, point: 1) the cost of the flash in the system will drop to a fraction of its current price within two years, and 2) the ASICs on board this device will be "paid for" within the same period, allowing them to charge only a small fraction of their current price.

    Expect other similar products to develop soon.

    When FusionIO proves out the market for these devices--and mark my words, they will--competitors will follow in their footsteps, like bees drawn to honey.

    C//