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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?
No no no, people have too big an investment in Windows to switch over to Linu.... what? SSD? Sorry, carry on...
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.
...the year of SSD on the desktop.
There's no reason to have Vista on any computer.
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.
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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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.
Sunny
Be my Friend
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
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)
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.
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
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
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.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
You want to think about this exponentially not linearly. Take logs and look at the trends.
Are you posting from the past?
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