Is the SSD Ever Going to Take Off?
Solid state disks. Those hard drives without moving parts, that we commonly call SSDs. We started hearing a couple of years ago that standard spinning hard drives were soon to be a distant memory. The SSD would replace hard drives in notebooks first, and then follow onto the desktop. The SSD is faster, runs cooler, is gentler on batteries and can fit in smaller spaces than the old-school counterpart. Costs would soon come down to the point that the SSD would the only viable option for computers. Fast forward to the present and this hasn’t happened. The standard hard drive (HDD) is still the primary storage on most everything sold currently, with SSDs relegated to pricey options for those who are willing to pay a premium. So what happened?
I remember sitting with a friend in a local coffee shop two years ago, and the topic of discussion was the HDD vs. SSD debate. My friend worked for Western Digital, a major supplier of hard disks for computers. I was predicting the death of the HDD, and warned him that his company better be prepared for the rise of the SSD. Western Digital didn’t make or sell SSDs back then, and my concern for his job is what led to the discussion. I remember clearly my friend looking at me and telling me that I was crazy, the HDD was too cheap and would remain so for the foreseeable future.
My friend was right. It’s two years later and still my prediction has failed to come true. That is further evident by a report out of Asia that a major supplier of SSDs for the computing industry is now predicting it will be another two years before the SSD will take off. This is what I was hearing two years ago. The reason it is still two years away is the same as my friend told me two years ago. Price. The flash memory used in the SSD is still much more expensive than the components used in standard spinning HDDs. It’s as if nothing has changed in the two years that has passed since my conversation with my friend. Will pricing for SSDs ever drop low enough to make it a serious threat to HDDs? I’m not so sure anymore.
Image credit: OCZ and Western Digital
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No doubt about it, cost is an issue with them taking over, but that said I spent good money on my Patriot Memory SSD, and I will never look back at HDD’s on any system I own. My Windows 7 boots up from cold start to desktop in under 30 seconds, and everything I click loads within a second (save for Adobe apps that take 2 seconds).
I have a theory. Yes, SSDs are too expensive now. However, when netbooks and other devices came along, they brought the mentality that computers have to be cheap. How many times have you heard “I won’t buy that until it’s below $500!”? Well, how is a new premium technology supposed to get into such devices? It can’t, just like your friend said.
Furthermore, many people (though perhaps not many of us here) have this mentality that they NEED 200, 300, 500gb of space on their computers. They think they have to carry around ALL of their media library with them. The fact is, a 64gb is about as much as most people need for an OS and their applications with a bit of room left for media. 80-100gb is the sweet spot in my opinion, and SSDs in the sub-100gb range are not too unreasonable. Beyond that, media should be stored on cheap large capacity external drives. That’s not a problem for the tech savvy, but the average consumer… well, they’re probably still upset that netbooks don’t have DVD drives.
While I am in agreement with Ben I wonder why no one seems to have taken a 3.5 inch chassis dropped a large 2.5 inch HDD drive into it and added say a 64G SSD. The OS and often used (and temp) files could reside on the SSD and the HDD could handled archived files. This 2 in 1 solution would negate the need for an external HDD while not increasing the space needed in the desktop world. The HDD side could remain powered down until it is needed thus saving precious wattage. Actually as I think more on this there is no reason it couldn’t be executed in a 2.5 chassis.
The problem is that consumers just don’t care. 640GB or things like that are marketable to the general public that has no clue what they’re buying. 32/64GB just isn’t.
Someone needs to market SSDs for durability reasons for laptops, though. Yes, I know, technically SSDs have a shorter lifetime than a hard drive. However, most people just don’t realize how bad it is for a hard drive to be moving around so much while the computer’s on, and then are surprised when the drive dies in the first year or two. If they really want to sell SSDs, they should start pushing this as the biggest selling point. Speed only matters to people like us.
Even computers that have an SSD still need HDD for backup. SSD isn’t reliable enough, long term, to be the only place you keep your data.
A small SSD for OS, apps & data will dramatically speed up the computer. If you have a large library of music & movies, SSD will remain 10x the price of HDD per GB and won’t be a viable replacement for at least 5-8 more years.
At some point, though, people just won’t need the biggest hard drive available. Only movie pirates need a 2TB HDD, let alone the 20TB that’ll be available by the time a 256GB SSD comes down from $700 to $70.
The interesting question is more like, will people still be using notebook computers in ten years, or will the iPad grow up into something that replaces them for most people (or merge somehow with the notebook category)? Because the iPad already doesn’t have an HDD.
I’m guessing you’re posing this question James as someone who doesn’t own or use a desktop system. Intel’s V series SSD has been a huge seller of recent, selling out fast on many online stores. The easy ability to RAID 0 two of these on motherboards for an OS drive, coupled with their impressive performance, has made this particular SSD an affordable top pick now for system builders and enthusiasts. Prices definitely won’t be getting higher, especially when 25nm SKU’s begin to ship in H2.
But for notebooks and mobile devices, I tend to agree with you – SSD has still yet to come down in price to make it affordable first time. If it came to replacing an existing notebook HDD though, I would more than likely compare the pricing on an SSD.
Keep in mind as well, in 2008 the economy had yet to tank – the number of products flying off the shelves may not have met expectations, or consumers simply took a second thought on how they were spending their money.
I’m happy to see though that many manufacturers such as HP offer customization options for SSD drives on a few of their notebooks today and even their netbooks.
Last time I checked I was using a SSD in my phone and in my Digital SLR, both using the FAT file system. The truth is SSD’s have already taken off in many applications. The next PC I build will used SSD’s for OS and application storage and raided HDD’s for data storage.
The issue I have with this post is Kendrick doesn’t defined the market context.
I’ve considered an SSD to liven up my Gateway E-295C, but they’re rather expensive for the storage you get, as you mentioned. Also, this notebook/tablet doesn’t support SATA II/3 Gbps, so the speed advantage will be a bit limited. (Practically nonexistent seek times would still help a lot, though, and if it means more battery life and less heat…)
Using SSDs in my desktop is a no-go at current price-to-storage rates, though-not unless you’re going to give me lots and lots of high-capacity ones totaling at least 1 TB in RAID 0. Without even bringing music or videos into the equation, my PC game collection alone is probably taking up around 200-250 GB out of my almost-300 GB OS partition on my 500 GB drive, and it’s certainly not getting any smaller! (The backup data partition taking up the rest of the space is almost full as well…)
I think you are right that it won’t be anytime soon when SSD’s become mainstream. In fact, I think this might not even happen at all because it will never be possible to beat the cost of a traditional hard disk.
I see the biggest advantages in scenario’s where an SSD is used as system disk and an HDD is used for storage.
I wouldn’t be surprised if hybrid drives were going to be in fashion very soon. This way there would not be the marketing issue of selling small expensive drives, but you would have a huge disk with a added fast SSD storage that would be reserved for the OS. Problem solved :)
I would love to go all SSD in my desktop. Problem is as a gamer the cheaper SSD’s are too small and the larger SSD’s are too costly. Right now I have 3×500 gig drives and they are full. One is all data but the other two are OS and games. And with some games taking upwards of 18+ gigs to install multiplied by the number of games I play, well I am stuck with regular hard drives.
It’s a game of chicken among computer vendors. Most of the bigger ones now have the option to add an SSD or have it be the primary drive–for a price of course–but very few computers have the option to only have an SSD system. Early netbooks with 4 and 8gb flash drives were fleeting and soon replaced by the legions of 1.7 Atom 160gb hdd standard.
What slowed down the adoption and inevitable move to SSDs? In a word, “Econoclusterfucktastrophe”.
The size of the SSDs 16/32gb is too small but affordable and move to 64/128 is almost here. With soo many tablets coming on the market there is no doubt that it will become the system drive or the OS drive of choice if you like. (iPad and Viliv are the prime examples)
As for the storage in general, and replacement of the mechanical clunkers… more and more the cloud is replacing the need for the general crowd to buy them and there is a potential that by the time the prices for SSDs comes down significantly it would become largely irrelevant.
SSD will catch HDD soon enough. Because they are silicon based they enjoy Moore’s Law. For instance current Intel SSD MLC come in 80/160/320 Gigabyte sizes. Later this year Intel & Micron will partner on a new 25 nanometer process tech that doubles the storage. So now Intel SSD sizing will jump to 160/320/600 Gigabytes.
So SSD are closing the gap quickly in size. The next step will be pricing. Consumers need to look at SSD a bit differently IMO. SSD present such a potentially large performance & reliability advance, the premium is well deserved
Rather than talk about SSD adoption, why don’t we discuss cloud adoption? I mean, you tech bloggers talk about the cloud like if everyone’s using it. When the reality is that it’s a lot more likely more people are using SSDs than people who are using the cloud. We should have a SSD VS. Cloud Storage Adoption Report, maybe it could be posted on Giga Om Pro. Preferably here though. :)