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Are Consumer Hard Drives Headed Into History?
Lucas123 writes "With NAND flash fabricators ramping up production, per GB prices of solid state drives are expected to drop by more than half by this time next year to about 50 cents. Even so, consumers still look at three things when purchasing a computer: CPU power, memory size, and drive capacity, giving spinning disk the edge. SSD manufacturers like Samsung and SanDisk have tried but failed to change consumer attitudes toward choosing SSDs for their performance, durability and lower power use. But, with the release of the new MacBook Air (sans hard disk drive), Steve Jobs has joined the marketing push and may have the clout to shift the market away from hard drives, even if they're still an order of magnitude cheaper."
Even if the Per GB price dropped by 80 or 90% SSD's would still be more expensive and have a lot shorter life expectancy than current HDD's, we are many many years before the possibility of SSD's fully replacing HDD's becomes even conceivable
I tend to hold on to my tech for years. With the finite number of read/writes to flash memory, I don't want to be forced to part with a computer because it uses a proprietary flash storage system or be forced to purchase a proprietary replacement storage module.
Things like iPods, smart phones, and PDAs are cheaper and easily replaced in whole, but I wouldn't want to face a replacement cost for a laptop.
I would cringe to do secure erases (writing zeroes) to a flash memory drive (solid state drives or Apple's flash "drive" module in the new Airs), knowing I was prematurely killing my storage life. Platter-based disks with sudden motion sensors will still be my huckleberry for a few more years...
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
$0.50 per GB is still about five times the cost of a magnetic drive. Put another way, each user has the choice between paying $50 and $250 for the same amount of storage. Does anyone think there is a real competition here?
And of course, that's by next year. How much denser/cheaper will magnetic drives be by then? Please stop with these "year of the flash drive" posts.
Why would I switch to SSD? I've had 1 drive go bad in my lifetime. They've lasted in some cases 20+ years. Plus they are cheaper. Why would I bother buying SSD's when they have a known failure point at after given number of writes?
This is very much like the blue-ray issue. It's not surprising folks aren't interested in jumping on board because, frankly, there is no real reason to run out and BUY it.
CD's and DVD's had huge adoption because you saw a large improvement on your existing hardware. Bluerays required a new TV to see that improvement - and it was a very expensive TV at the time.
Once people have purchased new TV's (it will probably take another 5-10 years for the older TV's to all fail so that the mom and pops of the world HAVE to go buy a new one) blue-rays will have come way down in price and they'll finally replace the DVD.
Likewise the SSD. I'm sure many other folks are as tired as I am regarding these silly... strike that... STUPID press releases trying to push their sale.
They will be bought when there is a need. There is none at this point, except in very specific applications, like the high-vibration atmosphere at manufacturing plants.
Shame on Slashdot's editors for continuing to run this hokey marketing BS, and shame on the people who continue to send articles like this. It's quite silly, frankly.
The ssd is already a good value for the function of the boot drive - the place where you host the OS, applications and games. There is no need to approach terabyte territory to hold all this stuff. And my collection of ripped DVDs, etc., wouldn't benefit from being on an ssd. These two technologies make sense in parallel and will continue to do so for so long as the per-terabyte prices keep falling at the present rate.
So from a sample size of 1, you can conclusively prove that SSDs are less reliable than hard drives?
He described his personal experience ("I have had the opposite experience"). He made no claim that it was a representative sample. He did not claim to have proven anything.
... sheesh. Trigger-happy much?
I know that some people make claims they have no ability to back up and pretend they are universal truths. But the GP didn't do that. So
Occasionally manufacturers do make defective products. It's just not possible to have quality control that is 100% perfect on all counts. Assuming his personal experience was not a quality-control issue, it's not possible to ensure that no damage occurred during shipping after the drive left the factory. In other words, shit happens and what he's saying is not some terribly unbelievable story. I would hope that such a product which fails after only 2 months would be covered by warranty. That's the only relevant information the GP did not share with us.
If the manufacturer of his failing SSD offers no reasonable warranty because they are unwilling to stand behind the quality of its products, I'd like to know what company it is so I can avoid buying from them.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Back when CD-Rs were new, we were hearing how they'd last for well over 50 years. Now we're finding that CD-Rs last only 3 to 5 years, and that's when they're stored in conditions that are near-perfect.
It's pointless to take media lifespans measured in decades as anything other than marketing bullshit, especially given that the computer industry itself has only been around for about 65 years.
It's not only the bigger size and lower price that makes HDDs attractive. The worst case random write time, for example, is generally far worse for SSDs, and if you absolutely need to commit within a guaranteed time frame, SSDs might not be an option even if they're much faster on average, and orders of magnitudes faster for random reads.
Don't underestimate the power of a rack of short-stroked 15k rpm drives.
I've got 4 Macs in the household. Not one of them runs Safari. That's what Firefox is for. Safari, like most Apple software (Aperture,iTunes, iLife) is fine for some people but I find it bizarre, limiting and generally annoying.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
How come IE doesn't have 90%+ share? 90%+ of the PCs of the world run Windows ...
See what I did there?
We're not hating. We're just tired of getting a story every time Jobs farts.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
OK, wait a second. No, just no. USB came out in 1996, and the iMac in 1998. PCs didn't have USB "for a few years". USB stuff just happened to start coming out because there were enough computers with USB. I remember 1998, pal. I bought a SCSI scanner then, USB scanners were still unheard of, where I live (Argentina) anyway. And even today, it's still hard to find an USB keyboard here. I was surprised that a local computer store had about 10 different PS/2 keyboards and just one USB. Most motherboards still come with PS2 and serial anyway.
Motherboards DON'T have "that damn space" bullshit you said. For the last 15 years it's been built into a single chip (the super IO), and the ATX connector space has lots of space for the legacy ports. And manufacturers. And here's one you might like: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121388&Tpk=dp55wb
What's next? Ditching Java apps just because Apple deprecated their JVM? EWWWW legacy? deprecated? Sounds to me like OLD. Who wants old stuff in their shiny new computer? Not me, I have a Mac. It's not a computer, it's a lifestyle, a fashion statement.
Try to stay away out of the RDF, buddy.
NPD is a reputable source, but I'd like to see the actual study myself, rather than hearsay.
Note that it's 20% of the "consumer retail" market share. That is to say, individual people buying boxed computers from a shop. A rather large percentage of computers on the internet are purchased by companies and either (1) installed at their offices and then used by employees for personal purposes during their breaks or (2) loaned to employees to take home. This happens very rarely with Macs; in my 15 years as an IT consultant I've worked with precisely one company that installed Macs. A smaller, but still nontrivial, percentage of the sales of computers is in markets that aren't typically classified as retail: all those people who either buy components and self build, or buy from local "we sell to trade only, honest" shops, or from computer fairs are probably not included in these stats.
Also, market share != installed base. Note that if the average Mac user changes their machine every 3 years, while the average PC user only bothers upgrading every 6, that will double the market share of Macs relative to their installed base.