SSDs (Solid State Drives) to become cost effective by 2011
Happy with your super spacious 320GB hard disc? Wait till SSDs really start to come. At the moment they have fast read/write speeds, but that’s about it. You have to wrestle with limited capacities and prices that can instead get you some really nice tech goodies.
For laptop companies, SSDs are something like a godsend as they prolong battery life and take crash prone hard discs out of the reliability equation. According to Crave, while Toshiba currently offers capacities up to 128GB, it plans 512GB SSDs as soon as 2009. Overall, SSDs are expected to become cost effective by 2011. There is two driving forces behind SSD technology:
- Falling costs: If cost falls by 50% annually, SSDs will stop being an ultra-expensive option (that can on its own buy a new laptop) and by 2011 it is expected that their price performance ratio will make them competitive to conventional hard discs.
- Technological advances: Conventional hard discs might be dirt cheap but the truth is that in terms of read/write speeds they have reached the limits of the mechanical components on which they rely on. On the other hand, SSDs get as fast as their circuitry goes, in other words, like CPUs they have huge margins of improvement thanks to continuously shrinking size -soon to go below 40nm- and MLC (Multi-Level Cell) technology -as opposed to the current SLC (Single-Level Cell) technology.
This small storage revolution is making computer and device manufacturers very excited. In the next five years SSDs will be pushed in the market very very hard, the reasons for this will be explored in a separate post.
Link 1: Crave
Link 2: Toshiba SSD page
[...] (continued) [...]
April 27th, 2008 at 11:52[...] recently wrote a post about how SSDs are expected to become ubiquitous and cost competitive by 2011. At the end of the post, I mentioned that it is not just a matter of technological development [...]
April 30th, 2008 at 12:18[...] by Dimitrios Matsoulis on April 30, 2008 I recently wrote a post about how SSDs are expected to become ubiquitous and cost competitive by 2011. At the end of the post, I mentioned that it is not just a matter of technological development [...]
April 30th, 2008 at 12:27[...] The good thing is that they incorporate the newer MLC (Multi-Level Cell) technology. As previously mentioned, MLC technology is one of the technical features that will propel SSD drives to widespread [...]
May 8th, 2008 at 13:04[...] ElectronRun – SSDs (Solid State Drives) to become cost effective by 2011 [...]
May 26th, 2008 at 13:44