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 recentbreakthroughs which will help to bring the technology into the mainstream.
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.
"It won't be long before SSD drives are cheaper than conventional drives."
The current evidence doesn't support this idea. For the next year or two, it looks like shops are adding far more cost to SSD, plus all flash memory chips are far higher cost than HDD costs. (Plus give it 3 or more years and Flash is also likely to be made obsolite).
Cost per byte of all flash based memory is far higher than cost per byte of all HDD, so HDD will get a lot of the sales.
For example, (Im just picking example HDD and memor
You're right. If you need 1 TB of storage, you won't be buying an SSD soon.
Last I looked, programs were still getting bigger, not smaller. A download of java, eclipse and all the available plugins runs ~2 gigs. That's a serious chunk of real estate out of a 64g SSD, but peanuts for a 500g laptop hd at the same price. Plus, when the disk gets full, you can always pop it out, buy another 500g drive, reinstall your fav. distros' latest release, and you still have all your data intact, and your previous rele
It is true that software is always growing, but the main driver is actually the fast internet speeds that let users to download big video files and/or music or whatever trash. Most people, even programmers, do not download eclipse in a daily basis (nor need to store all the downloaded past versions.)
BTW, for computing geeks IMHO the big factor is the virtualization facilities that let you quickly install lots of test operating systems and snapshoots.
I was about to buy a netbook (mini 9) from Dell with Ubunt
My money (longer term in say 3-5 years) is on Memristors winning over flash. Memristors can be made very small, they are also easy to design with and easy to make (on existing production lines) and they have better speed and better lifespan than Flash.
Memristors, the components that are less than a year old? The ones that there are probably less than a thousand of in existence?
Something tells me we might need to wait and see a little bit(no pun intended) before knowing that they are faster and have a better lifespan than flash, which lasts longer than solid state memristors have existed.
Good odds of that happening in 2009 actually, 2010 at latest. 250G SSD's that are faster than 5400rpm laptop drives are available now at NZD1600, and prices are projected to fall at least 4x in 2009, which gets you within spitting distance of your NZD 150 price. 2010 is almost a certainty to reach that price.
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.
If you want to bring up games you should also bring up the fact that the PSX generation was really the only generation to see any real benefit in cost by using discs. Game prices have already made their way back up to N64 costs. Just because you can save in one area doesn't mean another area won't bring the price back up.
The reason an N64 cart cost $20-$25 was the fact that Nintendo and their developers were the only ones using them and most games sold in small numbers. SSDs have the ability to potential
You know, I wouldn't be too upset if they went to using USB drives. I would let my kids and friends handle USB drives. Extra double bonus if the games would work through a standard USB hub. That way, you don't even have to worry about the socket on the game system breaking. you just have your kids plug into the hub. Plus, you could put the game system up high or hidden away, and only have the USB hub down low and visible.
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. -- Find your ip address [ipfinding.com]
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 [newegg.com] costs US$699 (less than a tenth of your lowest price)
Disclaimer; I'm not an SSD fanboy- I still prefer the bytes-for-your-buck that traditional HDDs give at present. However, I dislike misleading statements like this:-
Well the SSD proponents ignore the trend of hard drives.
On the contrary, you're the one that's selectively ignoring trends. Hard drives certainly continue to grow; I recently noted that there was 18 months between the first 1TB HDD and the first 1.5TB model.
A 1.5x increase every 18 months sounds good until you consider that flash memory is currently increasing at a rate of at least 2.5x if not fast
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 bu
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday December 13 2008, @07:08AM (#26101829)
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.
-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
You're missing the point. I don't need (or even really want) 250+ GB in my notebook. I'm running an Asus EEE 900A these days. I replaced the internal 4GB mini PCI-E SSD with a 16GB drive manufactured by a company called runcore for about ~$70 shipped. Even this is expense I wouldn't have bothered with except that 4GB is a little too slim, even for me. If I need hundreds of GB of storage, I use a 2.5" USB or my desktop beast at home or at the office.
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.
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.
Disk doublers were much more effective in the 1990s because a lower percentage of the data was already compressed. Disk doublers will do little but add overhead if you are storing movies, music, and pictures. Even some executable code is stored with compression now (JARs come to mind).
My old XP editing station boots in 17 seconds. My OSX editor boots in 8 (Although the 15,000 rpm SATA drives are expensive as hell, it makes that old G5 faster than hell)
When SSD can touch the speeds of the 10,000 and 15,000 RPM drives.... I'll pay attention.
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.
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.
A) Most computers dont need a lot of storage. At least compared to that fact that the smallest HDs now would be 160Gbyte (only one side of one platter used). There is just no way to reduce costs with HD beyond that point, you always get a 20-30$ minimum. While with SSDs, you can scale down very far (a $5 drive would not be impossible).
B) Tiered Storage will be the future, imho. There is just too much a discripancy between the storage needed for media and for OS/Programms/etc. While i cannot see the first going SSD anytime soon, the latter is already well within reach, if you sensibly seperate.
There is just no way to reduce costs with HD beyond that point
Well, you can split them and boot machines over PXE/iSCSI and/or virtualize. I'll admit tho, if I hadn't taken the pain to learn and setup such an environment several years ago, today I would most likely have chosen to implement flash based systems for simplicity.
Tiered Storage will be the future, imho.
I'd love to see a block-based HSM device-mapper layer. Keep copies of frequently accessed blocks in flash, and migrate stuff in and out as needed.
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday December 13 2008, @06:00AM (#26101623)
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.
Agreed - especially given the current economic climate, the price issue will be an even bigger factor than normal... All those people who don't know whether their jobs will still be there at the end of 2009 won't be too likely to spend an extra US$100 or more on something like a smaller SSD over a larger harddrive...
So, the question is:
Will 2009 Be the Turning Point For SSDs -- or will we, 12 months from now, see the new post 'Will 2010 Be the Turning Point For SSDs?'...?;-)
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.
Oh sure, but when one type of media wears out after 6 months of 24/7 writes and the other still keeps happily writing along after 5-10 years of 24/7 writes, I'll go with the latter, thank you very much.
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.
I think SSD will take off (Score:3, Interesting)
No, they won't (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:No, they won't (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"It won't be long before SSD drives are cheaper than conventional drives."
The current evidence doesn't support this idea. For the next year or two, it looks like shops are adding far more cost to SSD, plus all flash memory chips are far higher cost than HDD costs. (Plus give it 3 or more years and Flash is also likely to be made obsolite).
Cost per byte of all flash based memory is far higher than cost per byte of all HDD, so HDD will get a lot of the sales.
For example, (Im just picking example HDD and memor
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Last I looked, programs were still getting bigger, not smaller. A download of java, eclipse and all the available plugins runs ~2 gigs. That's a serious chunk of real estate out of a 64g SSD, but peanuts for a 500g laptop hd at the same price. Plus, when the disk gets full, you can always pop it out, buy another 500g drive, reinstall your fav. distros' latest release, and you still have all your data intact, and your previous rele
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It is true that software is always growing, but the main driver is actually the fast internet speeds that let users to download big video files and/or music or whatever trash. Most people, even programmers, do not download eclipse in a daily basis (nor need to store all the downloaded past versions.)
BTW, for computing geeks IMHO the big factor is the virtualization facilities that let you quickly install lots of test operating systems and snapshoots.
I was about to buy a netbook (mini 9) from Dell with Ubunt
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My money (longer term in say 3-5 years) is on Memristors winning over flash. Memristors can be made very small, they are also easy to design with and easy to make (on existing production lines) and they have better speed and better lifespan than Flash.
Memristors, the components that are less than a year old? The ones that there are probably less than a thousand of in existence?
Something tells me we might need to wait and see a little bit(no pun intended) before knowing that they are faster and have a better lifespan than flash, which lasts longer than solid state memristors have existed.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Good odds of that happening in 2009 actually, 2010 at latest. 250G SSD's that are faster than 5400rpm laptop drives are available now at NZD1600, and prices are projected to fall at least 4x in 2009, which gets you within spitting distance of your NZD 150 price. 2010 is almost a certainty to reach that price.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
The reason an N64 cart cost $20-$25 was the fact that Nintendo and their developers were the only ones using them and most games sold in small numbers. SSDs have the ability to potential
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I think SSD will take off (Score:5, Informative)
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.
--
Find your ip address [ipfinding.com]
Parent
Re:I think SSD will take off (Score:5, Informative)
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 [newegg.com] costs US$699 (less than a tenth of your lowest price)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Um, you can get a 1TB drive for around $90, your prices are off.
http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/sata_1tb.htm [pricewatch.com]
But the analysis also ignoring general trends in SSD.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well the SSD proponents ignore the trend of hard drives.
On the contrary, you're the one that's selectively ignoring trends. Hard drives certainly continue to grow; I recently noted that there was 18 months between the first 1TB HDD and the first 1.5TB model.
A 1.5x increase every 18 months sounds good until you consider that flash memory is currently increasing at a rate of at least 2.5x if not fast
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I think SSD will take off (Score:5, Funny)
Are you posting from the past?
Parent
-1, Disingenuous (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:I think SSD will take off (Score:5, Informative)
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
Parent
Re:I think SSD will take off (Score:5, Informative)
You want to think about this exponentially not linearly. Take logs and look at the trends.
Parent
Re:I think SSD will take off (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It's the year of SSDs on the desktop.
Re:I think SSD will take off (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Will we see the return of Stacker? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Will we see the return of Stacker? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Disk doublers were much more effective in the 1990s because a lower percentage of the data was already compressed.
Not to mention that all modern OSes can do file system compression by themselves nowadays...
np: Surf City - Canned Food (Surf City)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Try using 10,000 or 15,000 rpm drives.
My old XP editing station boots in 17 seconds. My OSX editor boots in 8 (Although the 15,000 rpm SATA drives are expensive as hell, it makes that old G5 faster than hell)
When SSD can touch the speeds of the 10,000 and 15,000 RPM drives.... I'll pay attention.
Re:I think SSD will take off (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:I think SSD will take off (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
yes, but still there is no reason to use Vista (Score:4, Insightful)
It will be phased out (by Windows 7 or something similar) before XP will be phased out, so why bother.
Parent
SSDs are great for clumsy fools (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SSDs are great for clumsy fools (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
When it happens, it'll be quick (Score:5, Insightful)
Not this year either (Score:5, Funny)
No no no, people have too big an investment in Windows to switch over to Linu.... what? SSD? Sorry, carry on...
Wrong question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong question (Score:5, Insightful)
You are thinking to monolithical.
There are two aspects to consider:
A) Most computers dont need a lot of storage. At least compared to that fact that the smallest HDs now would be 160Gbyte (only one side of one platter used). There is just no way to reduce costs with HD beyond that point, you always get a 20-30$ minimum. While with SSDs, you can scale down very far (a $5 drive would not be impossible).
B) Tiered Storage will be the future, imho. There is just too much a discripancy between the storage needed for media and for OS/Programms/etc. While i cannot see the first going SSD anytime soon, the latter is already well within reach, if you sensibly seperate.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
There is just no way to reduce costs with HD beyond that point
Well, you can split them and boot machines over PXE/iSCSI and/or virtualize. I'll admit tho, if I hadn't taken the pain to learn and setup such an environment several years ago, today I would most likely have chosen to implement flash based systems for simplicity.
Tiered Storage will be the future, imho.
I'd love to see a block-based HSM device-mapper layer. Keep copies of frequently accessed blocks in flash, and migrate stuff in and out as needed.
Re:Wrong question (Score:4, Informative)
I'd love to see a block-based HSM device-mapper layer. Keep copies of frequently accessed blocks in flash, and migrate stuff in and out as needed.
ZFS will do that quite nicely.
Parent
Most people go for bigger numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:define price competitive (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed - especially given the current economic climate, the price issue will be an even bigger factor than normal... All those people who don't know whether their jobs will still be there at the end of 2009 won't be too likely to spend an extra US$100 or more on something like a smaller SSD over a larger harddrive...
So, the question is:
Will 2009 Be the Turning Point For SSDs -- or will we, 12 months from now, see the new post 'Will 2010 Be the Turning Point For SSDs?'...? ;-)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
the year of the ssd hard drives... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think I've heard this one before... (Score:4, Funny)
Doesn't Solve Problems (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, HDDs also have limited writes.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, HDDs also have limited writes.
Oh sure, but when one type of media wears out after 6 months of 24/7 writes and the other still keeps happily writing along after 5-10 years of 24/7 writes, I'll go with the latter, thank you very much.
Re:Limited writes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
that myth needs to die already (Score:2, Informative)
it's not a problem anymore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why??
RAM is far faster. simply pump your system up to 4-16 Gigs of ram and call it done. Why do you want a kludge like a second drive?