Solid State Storage is gaining grounds
The SSD arena seems to be on par if not outperforming Moore’s Law. Moore’s law states that the power of microprocessor technology doubles every 18 months while the cost to produce it is cut in half. Lately in terms of processing power this seems to hold true, not every 18 months but around every 12 months.(See Intel, AMD, & IBM processors).
Technewsworld.com has an article explaining the history, current status, and future of these technologies. SSD NAND drives have matured from tiny 256MB drives in 2002 to 16-32GB units in 2007. Additionally, the prices of these units have dropped dramatically but are still not affordable to the everyday consumer in comparison to regular hard drives. At the time of this writing, Newegg has the Super Talent FSD32GM25M 2.5″ 32GB SATA SSD drive for $569 while a Western Digital Scorpio 160GB 2.5″ SATA drive runs for $79.99.
Performance is another very important factor when it comes to Solid State Storage. Anandtech has a good review of the Super Talent 16GB drive. If you take a look at their performance charts, you’ll notice that these drives are not too shabby in regards to loading times such as operating system boot-up or opening a game. But when it comes to other intensive tasks such as file compression, encoding, or just copying a file they are terrible performers. Almost 300% slower than normal hard drives in some cases. There’s much needed improvements in this sector if these drives are to someday replace standard hard drives.
To help transition to the wonderful domain of Solid State Storage, some hard drive manufacturers have introduced hybrid hard drives. These drives combine the regular hard drives we’re used to with onboard SSD capacity to serve as a buffer for most commonly accessed files. This will help pickup the performance of regular hard drives while decreasing power consumption because the drive doesn’t have to seek for data as much. Samsung has a few of these drives already listed on their website with specifications. Unfortunately they don’t seem to be available at any retailers yet.
Finally, another big concern for these drives are their reliability. SSD devices have limited write-cycles before certain memory addresses are no longer operable. Average flash storage will wear out after 300,000-500,000 write cycles but “higher endurance” devices have been marketed with 1-5 million write cycles. Most of the newer SSD devices come with a 5-year warranty so this issue doesn’t seem to plague the newer drives as it did with older devices. As time goes on this technology becomes more reliable and is approaching the reliability of standard hard drives.
SSD/NAND technology looks promising and the market for them is definitely gaining grounds. More so in the portable devices arena than desktop or server because of their extremely low power consumption. As the market demands more of these units, the more research and development manufacturers will put into reducing the cost of this technology while increasing capacity and performance. Let’s all hope this happens sooner rather than later.