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Will 2009 Be the Turning Point For SSDs?
Iddo Genuth writes "Since first entering the consumer market about two years ago, solid state drives (SSDs) have improved significantly. While prices remain substantially higher than conventional magnetic storage, it is predicted that in 2009 SSDs will finally make an impact on both the consumer and business markets bringing blazing fast speeds at reasonable prices for the first time — will it finally happen?"
It seems likely, as Samsung began mass-producing both 128GB and 256GB SSDs this year. Intel and Micron have also posted recent breakthroughs which will help to bring the technology into the mainstream.
Actually, HDDs also have limited writes.
300 GB disk drive - I spent $90.
256 GB solid state - $7,426 to $9,125 online
Ouch.
This is why Nintendo 64 and Nintendo DS cartridges never grew larger than 0.3 gigabytes, and why for the Cube and Wii they abandoned the solid state cartridge in favor of discs.
Nintendo cartridges were ROM chips. I don't think they have much relation to SSDs.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling
If only something like that came with the OS that would be so convenient.
I'd love to see a block-based HSM device-mapper layer. Keep copies of frequently accessed blocks in flash, and migrate stuff in and out as needed.
ZFS will do that quite nicely.
"It won't be long before SSD drives are cheaper than conventional drives."
The current evidence doesn't support this idea. For the next year or two, it looks like shops are adding far more cost to SSD, plus all flash memory chips are far higher cost than HDD costs. (Plus give it 3 or more years and Flash is also likely to be made obsolite).
Cost per byte of all flash based memory is far higher than cost per byte of all HDD, so HDD will get a lot of the sales.
For example, (Im just picking example HDD and memory chips)
1.0TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
cost about $120
So thats $0.12 per Gb
Compare that HDD cost per byte with the following example costs...
OCZ SSD SATA II 64GB
Cost about $250
so thats $3.9 per Gb (32.5 times more expensive than example HDD)
Kingston DataTraveler USB 8GB Flash Drive
Cost about $12
So thats $1.5 per Gb (12.5 times more expensive than example HDD)
These are just quick googled examples. But it shows very clearly how HDD are so much cheaper per byte than any flash chip based memory.
(These prices also show the current very high extra markup cost for SSD even compared with USB flash drives).
When were you looking? I do not dispute that SSDs cost more than regular HDDs, but your quoted prices are way too high. For instance, the OCZ 250GB SSD costs US$699 (less than a tenth of your lowest price)
That's unfair for two reasons:
-hard drives grew like crazy earlier this decade, but that growth has dramatically slowed lately, with 750GB being the largest in 2006, 1TB early in 2007, and 1.5 late in 2008
-looking up 256GB solid state disks now is like looking for 2TB regular drives, if you find any, they'll be crazy expensive as they aren't mass produced yet
-that said, on pricewatch, a 64GB and 128GB ssd is going for $136 and $328 respectively. Not so bad, eh? I suspect SSDs will take over within 5 years on notebooks and spinning platters will become more as a archive
You're missing the point. I don't need (or even really want) 250+ GB in my notebook. I'm running an Asus EEE 900A these days. I replaced the internal 4GB mini PCI-E SSD with a 16GB drive manufactured by a company called runcore for about ~$70 shipped. Even this is expense I wouldn't have bothered with except that 4GB is a little too slim, even for me. If I need hundreds of GB of storage, I use a 2.5" USB or my desktop beast at home or at the office.
When? About 1 minute prior to posting my message I did a search for costs. I'm glad to see there's now a $700 option, but that's still about ten times more expensive than the $90 disk drive I bought last year.
Nowadays I can buy a 1000 gigabyte disk drive for around $250. Can I buy a flash solid-state drive for the same cost? No.
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Disk doublers were much more effective in the 1990s because a lower percentage of the data was already compressed. Disk doublers will do little but add overhead if you are storing movies, music, and pictures. Even some executable code is stored with compression now (JARs come to mind).
Disk doublers were much more effective in the 1990s because a lower percentage of the data was already compressed.
Not to mention that all modern OSes can do file system compression by themselves nowadays...
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"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
You want to think about this exponentially not linearly. Take logs and look at the trends.
Um, you can get a 1TB drive for around $90, your prices are off.
http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/sata_1tb.htm
But the analysis also ignoring general trends in SSD.
Tom's Hardware reports that hard disks can still be more power efficient than SSDs. The good news is that SSDs are more efficient under load, and their idle power consumption is improving also.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
It is true that software is always growing, but the main driver is actually the fast internet speeds that let users to download big video files and/or music or whatever trash. Most people, even programmers, do not download eclipse in a daily basis (nor need to store all the downloaded past versions.)
BTW, for computing geeks IMHO the big factor is the virtualization facilities that let you quickly install lots of test operating systems and snapshoots.
I was about to buy a netbook (mini 9) from Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled, but just provide up to 32 GB SSD (the base model just provide 4Gb), so I'll wait the next year... maybe they come with a more power efficient chipset too.