SSD already poised to take over traditional hard drives

By Aaron Burkhart

A few months back I wrote about the interest in solid state drives coming out of CES 2008. Before Samsung’s recently announced 256GB SSD, the biggest obstacle to widespread adaption seemed to be storage size, but with this large of a size and multi-level cell architecture, SSD solutions are moving ahead faster than expected. In fact, market forecasts for SSD computers from research firm iSuppli predict very dramatic increases starting next year.

The five-year outlook is now better than it was last year, and why not? Solid state drives have so many benefits compared to traditional hard drives; the switch to SSD might be as quick of a switch as it was from floppies to USB flash drives. 

The new drives are supposed to be out the end of this year, so we’ll see if the price will be reasonable enough so as not to slow the adoption process. 

Solid state drives emerging as better (but not cheaper) storage

There are several key factors one looks for when buying a new computer, especially a laptop: Faster, lighter, less energy, less noise.

Well, just making the switch from hard disk drive to solid state drive will accomplish all of that at once.

HP announced last week that by mid-February it planned to have the industry’s first business desktop PC with an SSD available for $1,258, although the press release doesn’t say how big the drive will be. Searching around, it looks like it’ll be 16GB; small, but plenty enough for a business workstation.

According to SanDisk, who had solid state drives up to 72GB at CES 2008, SSDs have no seek or latency time and can speed up OS boot and application launches by up to 2 times. Without moving parts it also uses far less power than a standard hard drive, makes no noise, generates far less heat, is more durable, weighs less and can be a lot smaller. It improves on the hard disk drive in every way.

So what’s the catch? Right now it’s the price. Although the numbers are going down, a 32GB SSD will still be around $1,000, with no pricing information available for larger sizes yet. Storage size is the other issue; those who’ve installed a terabyte or larger in their system will likely scoff at going back to under 100GB, especially at the current prices.

An interesting compromise is found in SanDisk’s Vaulter Disk, a PCIe flash-based card that works to speed up frequently used applications without actually replacing the hard drive. It’ll be at a lower cost than a full SSD, while allowing users to still have a larger hard drive. It obviously won’t have all the benefits of an SSD, since the HDD will still be needed, but it’ll act as a bridge between the two technologies.

As memory cards continue to grow in storage space while dropping in price, expect solid state drives to follow suit.