SanDisk: SSD will hit mass adoption in one or two generations

[Elitassj4]

The current generation of SSD has a long way to go.MLC flash memory wears out after 10,000 write cycles, as the drive fills up, performance significantly degrades.So the HDD will last much longer than a SSD, but still...i think the SSD is the future, they have to sort some problems but they are on the wright way

 

[mikeusru]

I'm very excited for SSD... have you seen these comparisons?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjCmLJtITK4&feature=related

i mean... boot time alone excited me. Cut down on loading screens for games? yay!
I'll consider investing when 250GB goes for around $100. that's actually the size of my OS drive right now, so I know it'll do.

 

[customcarvin]

I agree with what most are saying here, the price to capacity ratio is way off. Once we can get 500+GB SSD's for $75 then I'll consider buying one. Flash memory is great for things like mobile phones, netbooks, and so on, but for a laptop or desktop I would much rather have a capacious mechanical hard drive, or possibly a hybrid, if the price was right. The thing with NAND memory is, it has really fast READ speeds, but its write speeds suck big ones, especially with small writes; not to mention, as of now, it only has an average life expectancy of 150,000 read/write cycles.

 

[ChrisG683]

When and if SSD becomes as cheap as HDDs, my wallet and I will be waiting

 

[geektastic]

good to hear SSD price going down rapidly. In the market for one soon.

 

[Zackurben]

Does anyone know what the cost behind a SSD is? What makes it so much more than an optical drive?

Also, what its everything stored on? Is it all flash, like a bunch of ram?

 

[zogo]

Hoping the prices will drop very soon. It's nice to have 128Gb SSD for a system particion. I'll gladly purchase one of these.

 

[UT66]

SSD is the future. The distant, distant future. Distant.

 

[oasis789]

i already have an ssd. to play crysis etc.

 

[madboyv1]

The whole hybrid drive comment from Seagate is mostly marketing since last time I checked, they are the only ones with hybrid drives (sure Samsung tried it out a few years back, but don't have any now). Plus their habit of "being first" in each new storage size but being relatively unreliable or low performing drives isn't helping with their reputation, at least for me (the last time I had a seagate drive was back when 18GB was the way to go).

Arguably for now, the concept of SSD main drive + HDD storage is king; you don't particularly need (note, "need" as opposed to "want") a large SSD if your primary purpose is strictly storage. Yes, cost is a huge factor in this as the cost per gigabyte is exorbitant for SSD. But for storage and simple playback (say of images or videos), there is no need for the storage medium to be extremely fast. Even with video/audio/large image editing where fast reads/writes are important, it would be cheaper to buy a small but fast SSD and use it as a dedicated scratch drive, assuming the constant read/writes do not kill the drive sooner than constant gaming like a number of people buy these drives for.

Speaking of gaming, What's the point of keeping games you don't intend to play anymore? It becomes clutter that'll slowly but surely choke the drive in both capacity and performance, and this is true regardless of the type of drive. If you're that nostalgic for them, move them to another drive and update the registry keys associated with said game if necessary (if you're comfortable that).

Personally, when the 120/128GB and/or 250/256GB SSD drives become less expensive and better designed/tested for long term reliability I'll be a very happy camper. Of course I'll welcome the time when 1TB+ SSD become financially viable for the average consumer, but that time will likely not come for a while, unless the NAND overproduction peaks and prices crash...

 

[Scshadow]

SSD should be the near future. If they put it into mass production and put their best heads together on making SSD cheaper to produce, there is no reason SSD can't have mass adoption in a matter of a couple of years. Meanwhile I'm probably going to happily put a SSD in my next build. I'm not really anticipating problems managing a small boot drive.

 

[customcarvin]

Does anyone know what the cost behind a SSD is? What makes it so much more than an optical drive?

Also, what its everything stored on? Is it all flash, like a bunch of ram?

Google is your friend... drink the kool-aid
http://www.micron.com/products/nand_flash/nandcom.html

FYI, an optical drive is like a CD, DVD, Blu-Ray drive; what I think you're asking is why is it more expensive then a mechanical hd? Right?
In one word: Production. SSD are new tech, which means expensive, new fab processes, machines to make parts, engineering, and so on. Theoretically, once things get going, it should be cheaper to produce an SSD in the future than a mechanical hd. Hard drives have glass or alloy plates coated with a magnetic compound that have to hold a ridiculous tolerance, and an electric spindle motor, magneto-resistive mechanical actuator arms, as well as PCB boards with processor(s) and cache memory. SSD's have the processor(s) and cache memory, but silicone memory chips (NAND) to replace the rest.

 

[Zackurben]

Google is your friend... drink the kool-aid


FYI, an optical drive is like a CD, DVD, Blu-Ray drive; what I think you're asking is why is it more expensive then a mechanical hd? Right?
In one word: Production. SSD are new tech, which means expensive, new fab processes, machines to make parts, engineering, and so on. Theoretically, once things get going, it should be cheaper to produce an SSD in the future than a mechanical hd. Hard drives have glass or alloy plates coated with a magnetic compound that have to hold a ridiculous tolerance, and an electric spindle motor, magneto-resistive mechanical actuator arms, as well as PCB boards with processor(s) and cache memory. SSD's have the processor(s) and cache memory, but silicone memory chips (NAND) to replace the rest.

Hahaha too much erroneous crap comes with searches.. Thank you for your time though.

 

[TuesdayExpress]

I sat on the fence for about a year before pulling the trigger on a 160Gb SSD on my latest build. Yes, the price/Gb was higher than I would have liked, but I will never go back to spinning disk...the boot times minimal, but it's the minute-to-minute performance gains that are the most noticeable, especially when firing up Photoshop or other big programs. Fantastic.

Of course, I keep all of my multimedia on a spinning-disk NAS, and likely will for a good long while. Prices may be dropping, but not that fast.

 

[frodough]

i think SSD price and production goes hand in hand. when they mass produce price goes down because competitors will do the same around that time, but first they need mainstream market to adopt it and start ordering them by hundreds of thousands. laptops are already making progress toward it due to its compact nature. but most pc out there are still making a killing off a HDD because dollar/gb is very effective. Acer, Dell, HP & others need to raise their hardware standard and take a leap of faith. without that we will only see a steady drop in SSD price. this is only what i think.. might be wrong, probably wrong.. but as far as i can see. someone needs to step up and start offering PC desktop builds in SSD only and help humanity move quickly to the next phase of super fast computing world.

 

[zenpanda]

Yeah, I completely agree with you Emil. My next computer will definitely use SSDs. Unfortunately, SSDs are still too expensive for me. I will have to wait awhile for prices to fall dramatically. From what I have read about SSDs, they are excellent as a boot drive and for gaming. I don't require hard drives in the terabyte range and I'm pretty sure most people don't need that much storage. I would much rather have one or two speedy SSDs in order to take advantage of my cpu. I read somewhere that a computer's hard drive is typically its bottleneck, in terms of speed.

 

[DryIce]

SSDs will not reach mass adoption until buying one saves people money. Sure there will be persons who prefer performance over price but neither the every day user nor most businesses will be using SSDs until it is cost effective.

 

[Zecias]

I think that most laptops will and should have SSDs, but it'll be a while until they are frequently used in desktops.

 

[Regenweald]

When I can get at least 128gigs with TRIM support in a laptop AT_A_REASONABLE_PRICE, I'd say the SSD's are here. But they are'nt.

 

[pheonixnexus]

In 2000 an 80 gig drive cost 479.99. now prices are $70 or $80 for a terrabyte. so lets see in ten years the price is less than one fifth and more than ten times the size. so if the same happens to SSD then these high prices will not last long and sizes are going too increase as well.

 

[Guest]

You are very right .. the price of SSD is linked to the volume of production. It is inherently cheaper to produce silicon (compare Pressed DVD) than to mFr a Hrd disk (compare recorded VHS). Silicon can and does improve in leaps and bounds 2x the speed 2x the amount in a year versus Hrd disk drives improve gradually. Hard disks are the main bottleneck in today's PC's. All other elements are 1000x times better than 20 years, hard disk just 100x. SSD are especially good in Laptops for ruggedness, size and power-savings. Imagine Intel producing a single chip, (Sandy bridge plus 2 generations) which comprises CPUx8/Gpux4/Ramx10/Storagex200Gb all on one chip, for a fabrication price of less than $10.
(sadly INREL will be 60% owned by the Chinese by then). Follow the commodification of flash drives, now ubiquitous and cheap, sold in Tesco's.ergo SSD's.

 

[ruzveh]

I dont see SSD coming into my system or even any of my friends relatives or clients system for the simple reason that they dont have capacity that other HDD have and also the cost of SSD is 100times more than HDD. So why should i pay for SSD? That price simply dont justify it for me. I am better off using HDD with slower BIOS which i dont mind or loading of OS or applications. BIOS issue will be solved by UEF interface in future. Thereby i go with Seagate in this forum. Hybrid rocks

 

[Recipe7]

Adoption will take place when 120gb SSD can be had for 100 USD. SSD price per GB is not very generous at this time.

 

[Archean]

One or two generations mean 1-2 years, which doesn't really seems to be realistic considering the current prices. Instead, it may take roughly 3-5 years for SSDs to become standard HDD on notebooks, however, if you takeout the price out of equation and simply consider the performance benefits, they already make a lot of sense for not only notebooks but for desktops as well.

 

[Mischief007]

Well SSDs in laptops are great. Recently made the switch from regular HDDs to SSDs in laptops at work. So far so good. We had one laptop come back dropped into a million pieces and the drive was fine. Able to get the information without a problem and re-use the drive. Where I work, people go through hard drives like candy. Replacing the regular HDDs with SSDs cost us the same in the end with the introduction of some newer laptops.

I'm all for SSDs but the prices have got to come down for regular consumers.