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SSD Won't Make Sense In Laptops For Two Years

Posted by timothy on from the no-not-that-avi-cohen dept.

kgagne writes "While solid state disk drives can vastly improve random read performance and are perfectly suited to most mobile devices, many operations are sequential in laptops and desktops and involve writes where SSDs most often lose to magnetic hard disk drives in performance. While introducing multi-channel flash memory controllers and interleaving the NAND flash chips increases performance, it will still be about two years before the cost versus benefit ratio will make sense to install SSD in your laptop or desktop PC, according to a Computerworld story. '"I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200, and that's going to happen around 2010. Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage," says Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner Inc.'"

3 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Losing out on performance by subStance · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The comment about sequential reads causing the SSD to lose on performance compared with magnetic drives caught my attention. Isn't this highly dependent on the filesystem you use and its strategy for block allocation ?

    Wouldn't it be possible to design the block allocation algorithm to favour SSDs the same way previous generations of filesystems tried to put the next block on the disk to be the one under the head at the current moment (or whatever it was they did) ?

    --
    Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
  2. More for less is an easy sale... by Manip · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It will be easy to sell the concept of SSD to pretty much anyone, particularly for a laptop. Here is the short list:
    - Faster Reads
    - Potentially faster to wake up from sleep
    - More durable
    - Less chance of sudden and complete data loss (e.g. A smaller portion of the drive would fail instead of a complete drive failure as with a magnetic disk)
    - Consumes less power
    - Quieter
    - Cooler (also a power saving feature due to less fan running time)

    SSD drives are very cool pieces of technology and I for one can't wait to be able to buy a superthin laptop with no magnetic disk.

  3. Geeks Should Understand Latency by StCredZero · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Time to burn some Karma...

    On a "News for Nerds" site, moderators should understand the sources of disk latency. Rotating Hard Drives have latency from the time it takes to move the head across the platter, and for the platter to rotate under the head. SSDs do not have these sources of latency.

    One of the big problems is that current flash is just slow on writes. Some of them don't do DMA properly. If there are problems with block sizes, this can be adjusted easily. But the underlying technology has to improve, or manufacturers need to build SSDs with more parallelism and better features. Perhaps very parallel SSD architectures might need filesystems optimized for large block sizes.

    One of the big potential benefits of flash is reliability. Imagine highly modular flash drives for servers with hardware RAID 5? Instead of a disk failure, you get a notification that a module needs replacing. In fact, you could build versions with an extra slot for a failover spare in-place!

    Also, with wear leveling, there's the potential for hard drives that can warn you several days before they fail!