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Are Consumer Hard Drives Headed Into History?

Posted by timothy on from the yes-but-at-what-pace dept.

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."

7 of 681 comments (clear)

  1. Steve Jobs has clout by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    He has enough clout to push about 8% of consumers to buy overpriced hardware.

    1. Re:Steve Jobs has clout by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually I'd say those numbers are probably declining except for the diehard Mac users. Why do I say that? Because I live next to a college that traditionally has been HEAVY Mac territory. in fact just 5 years ago I bet I could have counted the non Macs I'd see when I walked upon campus with one hand. What is it now, and as far as the eye can see? Netbooks. Nothing but small thin light easy to carry and cheap netbooks as far as the eye can see. While Steve has usually been good at getting ahead of the curve with consumers I think he missed the boat with this one, as the most popular models I'm seeing, and this is on a campus with a LOT of old and new money, and can certainly afford MBA if they want, is the 7-10 inch mini netbooks. Talking to the kids, which since my oldest is now attending I get to quite often, is the size and weight makes them just too handy for classes, and more and more the average folks are jumping on as well. You'd be surprised how many times I've seen women pull out mini-netbooks while waiting in some office somewhere.

      So while I wish old Steve nothing but luck and give him credit for taking a company the Pepsi guy had all but killed and bringing them back from the dead, I really think the Macs are gonna be shrinking and going back to what they were pre-hype, which is a tool for graphics designers. i just don't see the wealthy carrying them anymore. Old Steve don't have to worry though, because the iPhone will more than make up for that, but the days of hipsters carrying around Macbooks seems to be ending. Now all I see is mini-netbooks with custom graphics covers everywhere.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    2. Re:Steve Jobs has clout by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The reason there's resistance to SSDs is that they're JUST TOO EXPENSIVE.

      I'm still waiting on the long-term failure data. The takes-years-to-collect-real-life data, not the "how many read-write cycles in a laboratory" data.

    3. Re:Steve Jobs has clout by MudflapSoftware · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My experience differs. My employer does on-campus interviews at around 50 schools nationwide, and over 70% of the potential recruits were equipped with macs.... according to the web logs from a site they were required to visit individually.... Our public web site has seen a marked increase in 'mac' traffic as well.... averaging around 10%, up from 3% a couple of years ago.

  2. No kidding by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In the long term? Yes I'm sure flash, or some other solid state, based storage will replace magnetic disks. It is just plain faster, not to mention other benefits. Our storage subsystem is by far the slowest thing we've got, improvements would be welcome.

    In the short term? Hell no. SSDs are useful in special cases, but not for general use and not showing any signs of reaching a crossover soon.

    I mean if I wanted to meet my storage needs with SSDs only, I'd have to spend on the order of $10,000. Granted, my needs for storage exceed most users, but still. It costs me all of about $500 to get them met with HDDs. Even if I left backups to magnetic media and just went with SSDs for primary storage I'd still be out about $4000. I could replace every component in my system, including my professional NEC monitor, for less than that.

    Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to have SSDs, but they have to come down in price a shitload before they are realistic for the regular desktop. Right now, SSDs have 3 uses:

    1) Systems that don't need a lot of storage and space/power are a premium. The Air is a good example. If you can live with 64GB of storage, then flash is ok price wise. Still expensive per GB, but since you have few GBs it isn't bad. If all you are doing is running basic apps then that works fine. You can't hold much media or large games or whatnot, but not all systems need that.

    2) Systems where performance beyond what reasonable HDD solutions can offer is needed. Audio production sees this. New virtual instruments are getting extremely complex. Tons and tons of samples played back in heavy layers. You can't load them all in RAM (without amazing amounts of RAM) and they just overload disks when you try to stream it all. SSDs can be useful here. While a $10,000-20,000 fiber channel array would probably do the trick, a $4000 SSD will also do the trick and not only cost less but be easier to deal with.

    3) Ultra high end storage solutions that need performance beyond anything HDDs can offer. With databases, you can run in to this. Heck they had SSDs back before they were popular. Expensive, expensive devils, but tons of performance. You need this to reach certain performance levels, no amount of disks can handle the IOPs you need. This is where cost just isn't an issue, performance is.

    That's pretty much it. For cheap systems, HDDs reign supreme. They cost less than flash and that is that. For higher end systems, you end up needing more storage than flash can provide at a reasonable cost.

    Before we see flash replace HDDs we will probably see augmentation. Intel, Adaptec, LSI, all are supporting SSDs as a cache for HDDs on various RAID controllers. If this comes down to consumer price levels, could be useful. 1TB of storage for $100 and then $100 more for some flash cache would be doable for many people.

    It'll be a long time before SSDs are the way most people go, however. It is too bad, I want solid state storage now, but there is a big, BIG price gap that has to be covered.

  3. Re:Disk life and data permanence by Dravik · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When SSDs fail, they are still readable. So the friend of a friend's uncle wont lose his entire porn collection (life's work). He just won't be able to save that new clip he downloaded.

    --
    The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
  4. lying with statistics by t2t10 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "US consumer retail market" means people walking into a store and buying a piece of hardware, and it's expressed in terms of money, not units, and people spend a lot more for their Macs than for their PCs. It probably also includes iPhone, iPad, and iPod, and accessories sales, since it refers to Apple share, not Mac share. In terms of units, their share is still around 4-5% at most.