Although many vendors are claiming a remarkable speed-up in their Solid State Drives (SSDs), still the industry has to mature to offer the right kind of products, in terms of price, capacity, form factor, speed and interface. Thus, for a few years ahead Hard Disk Drives will continue to retain its indispensability in the market. However, there is tremendous potential for the SSDs.
In a recent report, John Chen, senior director of TrendFocus, a known supplier of data storage market intelligence, has pointed out, As flash costs fall and SSD designs improve, the battle between HDDs and SSDs for market leadership will last for years.
The report further points out, 2 HDD market segments are exposed to future SSD incursion enterprise and mobile PCs. SSDs in enterprise systems and servers achieve high IOPS (I/O per second) at low power consumption. Due to the high displacement ratio of one SSD to multiple HDDs, a modest penetration of SSDs as forecasted may cause enterprise HDD growth to peak within four years. HDDs will not be completely displaced from enterprise systems as higher capacity, cheaper HDDs will still be needed.
Already laptop vendors like ASUS and Del have announced their products with SSDs. And the trend is likely to continue. To quote Chen, SSD invasion of the notebook PC space would have a profound effect on the HDD market. According to TrendFocus, Notebook PCs used in the corporate environment and a new class of low-cost, minimal function entry-level notebooks typically need lower storage capacities and are therefore a target market for SSDs.
According to their estimate, at this moment SSDs can cost 10 times more per gigabyte than HDDs, so the price premium must fall dramatically. Chen recalls, Early-generation SSDs have not wowed users prices are too high and performance advantages have been minimal.
However, while commenting on the future possibility, he says, The maturation of SSD designs and controllers, along with a clear NAND flash development roadmap, lays the foundation for SSDs to be a mainstream mass storage device. With aggressive adoption, we could see the HDD market erode by well over 50 million units yearly by 2012.
The discussion remains incomplete if we do not focus on any SSD manufacturer’s view. Recently in Computex 2008, Taipei, SanDisk has launched a line of flash memory-based solid-state drives (SSDs). According to the company, those are designed for an emerging new category of portable consumer electronics called Ultra Low-Cost PCs (ULCPC) or netbooks.
SanDisk claims these devices allow users to surf the Internet using wireless communication. The SanDisk pSSD (Parallel ATA solid state drive) eliminates the need for a hard disk drive, and can store both the operating system and application data for these new devices.
Then what are they up to? The company is now making SSD modules in 4-, 8- and 16-GB capacities, with a streaming read speed of 39 MB per second, and a streaming write performance of 17MB/s. The products will support both Linux and Microsoft Windows XP operating systems. SanDisk’s pSSD solid state drives are expected to be available from August. The company is targeting the emerging Ultra Low Cost PCs (ULCPCs market).
Thus, it can be concluded that although not immediately, HDDs will have to stand aside in a few years. That is we are on the way to a new era, wherein with the transition we will be relieved from the troubles of heating and extra power consumption.