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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.
I own an Asus Eee PC, which has a 4GB SSD. I take it with me everywhere and, being a butter-fingered oaf, I tend to drop it everywhere too. If the Eee had a conventional HDD I'm sure it would have given up the ghost long ago. But the Eee bounces along quite happily with no damage to the SSD. Solid state is great, especially for children and folk like me!
Just like the iPods suddenly being introduced as solid state units, things for SSD's will soon pass the threshold where it's suddenly viable for everyone. Only Samsung knows exactly when, but it seems clear that in the next six to eighteen months widespread SSD availability will trickle down from elite systems to mid-range.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
The question should be "is this the year that SSDs will be price competitive with hard drives?" Until that day comes, SSDs will only sell in small quantities.
Money. HDD's will keep getting cheaper. I'm betting on 2010.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
will come likely before the year of the linux desktop.
It will be phased out (by Windows 7 or something similar) before XP will be phased out, so why bother.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I prefer reliability.
With good wear-leveling algorithms, the life expectancy of an SSD is comparable or even higher than a standard magnetic HD. The area for wear leveling increases as the HD gets larger as the relative part of the HD that is constantly written gets smaller and more areas are only read. If an area is "close to death", the algorithm can move these less written files there and use their less used areas for files which are written more.
The SSD knows when one of its cells is about to go bad and can mark it unusable. Compare that to a random bit dying on your HD and the only way to know is through a scandisk of sorts.
Sure SSDs might have a life expectancy of 10 years, but by that time the only thing you'd want to do with it is copy its contents to your 64TB SSD and throw it away.
^_^
When comparing two computers, consumers go for the one with best numbers most of the time. They have no clue what harddrive throughput is, and even less clue about seek time. Capitalism provides the goods that sell, not the best-engineered goods (unless they sell better.. )
I bet the worldwide consumerist harddisk space utilization is about 15%, but most people don't realize this. Unless people have magically wised up, we won't see widespread SSD in laptops until they catch up pricewise.
Stop the brainwash
How many people need (or even have) 250GB+ in their laptops?!
In capacities from 30-60gb there is overlap in price ranges between SSD and HDD. Below that you can't get an HD drive, but SSD drives are available. SSD pricing has nowhere to go but down. HDD can drop relative prices, but only by adding more and more GB relative to your dollar.
That will keep HDDs alive for awhile in higher capacity drives, but the low low end is already ruled by SSDs (4GB, 8GB, etc as only options for netbooks). As time goes on SSD will move up from there, out-competing larger and larger capacity HDD until "boom" - they are produced more cheaply per GB regardless of total capacity.
I think that "boom" mark is sometime in 2010, but certainly the GP's point about laptops stands. Unless you are the rare person who needs a large capacity laptop drive, there is no reason not to have an SSD in your laptop now.
In the mid 1990s 'disk doubler' programs were popular, compressing data on the fly as it was saved to disk. After a few years, however, disk sizes increased sharply and the relationship between price and disk size is much steeper than linear (a 1Gibyte disk does not cost twice as much as a 500Gibyte disk). So hardly anyone bothers with dynamic compression any more. It is much easier to spend $40 more and get a drive that's twice as big.
However, with SSDs, even when the price falls, there is still an almost linear relationship between capacity and cost (since to get twice the capacity you need twice as many flash memory chips). And while the transfer speed is fast, it's still not keeping pace with the increase in CPU speeds. Compressing on-disk data with a fast compression scheme such as LZO is often faster than reading or writing to disk uncompressed. With SSDs you need much less complexity in the filesystem to get good performance, since minimizing seek time is no longer as important. Perhaps, then, adding file compression can be done more straightforwardly than the earlier compressed filesystems designed for rotating disks.
It won't do anything for your movie collection, but for virtual machine images and other bloat we put on our disks nowadays it could make quite a difference.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It's not all about the cost per byte. A lot of people are willing to pay that sort of money for the benefits. People already spend big on RAID and fast disks because they need the performance. Others probably want silence and battery life, or resistance to bumps and other movements, and (probably, not sure) lower or more predictable failure rates. Whatever the reason, I'm sure there are plenty of people who will buy them. $700 is "affordable" even though it's a lot of money. And once these early adopters buy them, they will be cheaper and better for us the next year.