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

The Future is Solid State

[Bananatree3]

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.

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: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.

Re:Yeah, Right

[Courageous]

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//

Re:What about filesystems...

[tooyoung]

Given that many filesystems are designed specifically with the spinning magnetic disk in mind, what open source filesystems are out there that will work to the advantages of solid state storage? Has anyone started thinking about that one as something to address before the major switches start taking place?

No, no one has even considered that yet. I'll alert the academic world while you clue in the industry.

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:What about filesystems...

[kesuki]

When NAND memory fails, it can fail in such a way as to make the ENTIRE flash memory device unreadable... this is from real world NAND memory devices failing from real world use, all of a sudden not wear leveling seems like a suicidal mode of wear... if the entire chip can short out from a single block failing. There's 0 reason for a properly designed flash device to fail like that due to wear, leveling or not. That's just shitty engineering. "Tunnel injection is the quantum tunneling effect, also called Fowler-Nordheim tunnel injection, when charge carriers are injected to an electric conductor through a thin layer of an electric insulator."

you should have said 'IANAEE' for i am not an electrical engineer. because the way NAND ram works it is entirely possible for failure to be a complete and total failure of the device, or at least 512 blocks of the device, if it doesn't create a short that prevents the whole device from working.

first today's flash memory is NAND memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

NAND memory is written with tunnel injection, which causes charge carriers to be injected into a conductor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_injection

Charge carriers "In semiconductor physics, the traveling vacancies in the valence-band electron population (holes) are treated as charge carriers"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_carrier

So we're using an electric charge, to fill, and create 'electron holes' in a conductor. what could POSSIBLY go wrong, in the real world, rapidly changing if a conductor has electron holes or not, by forcing the electrons in or out of the material ...

so trying to intentionally wear out a NAND memory chip can cause a severe problem whereby instead of creating an electron hole, you've created a short circuit. "A short circuit (sometimes abbreviated to short or s/c) allows a current to flow along a different path from the one intended." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_circuit