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.

Comments

I think SSD will take off

[thetoadwarrior]

For laptops at least. There is no reason to not to have an SSD in your laptop.

Re:I think SSD will take off

[theaveng]

Riiiight. And the Playstation 4 and Nintendo Wii part 2 will abandon discs in favor of cartridges again. Just our of curiosity I looked-up how much it would cost to replace my standard disk drive:

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. Discs are simpler and therefore cheaper.

Re:I think SSD will take off

[shirai]

Using an SSD in a desktop is an affordable fantastic upgrade if you configure it like this:

* A small 32 GB SSD as your main drive for software
* A larger (perhaps terabyte) hard drive as your data drive
* Configure My Documents (or your home directory) to the terabyte drive.

I found a good performing MOBI SSD driving for $220 for 32 GB. My computer boots in 30 seconds from power on. Everything is snappier and starts faster (especially Eclipse) and as a bonus, my data drive is nice and clean.

As a bonus, OS reinstalls can be done without affecting any of your data because it sits on a separate drive. This wasn't the intended reason for splitting the data but it has a nice organizational side effect.

Actually, I've only used around 14 GB of space on my SSD but I wanted at least 32 GB so I didn't have to worry about it.

One thing I did notice though was that writes were slower. The specs on the drive didn't show that to be the case but for some reason my database writes happened at half the speed during my test units. Random reads on the other hand (e.g. bootup and software loading) happen incredibly fast. For this reason, the split between installed software and data makes even more sense since loading software is made mostly of random reads and no writes.

Re:define price competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

If by "price competitive" you mean "equal $/GB," that day is far off. But if you mean "reasonable size and comparable write speed for less than $200," then that day will come in 2009 or 2010 for a lot of people, since many of us can get by fine with only 128GB.

Re:No, they won't

[bob8766]

It won't be long before SSD drives are cheaper than conventional drives. An SSD drive is mostly a bunch of memory sandwiched together. A conventional drive has complex precision moving parts with motors, platters, heads, etc. Manufacturing costs on SSDs will be almost nothing when the scales get a bit smaller and they go into mass production.

Doesn't Solve Problems

[DynaSoar]

When the helical fluorescent tubes that screw into regular lamp sockets came out, they were a flop. They cost $15 to $20. Despite being longer lasting than the equivalent dollar amount of incandescent bulbs, people didn't see them as a significant improvement. In one study group, a subject gave a remark that summed up their reticence: "This solves a problem I don't have."

So it is with SSD. It'll have to be enough cheaper than magentic storage and appear to be long lived enough so that people can overcome their unwillingness to switch from something that works just fine. Specs don't matter to the average user. Not getting stuck with an orphan matters far more. That point remains unproven. Thus SSDs do not solve a problem, but present one of their own. If and when both of these change, they'll be accepted.