Posted on 03/16/2009 1:35:39 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips.
Solid-state drives, which use flash memory chips as the storage medium, typically offer much better performance than hard-disk drives. But they cost more. Currently, opting for an SSD instead of a hard-disk drive will add anywhere between $100 and $600 to the cost of a laptop, depending on the capacity of the SSD.
In a phone interview, Brian Beard, flash marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor, said reaching price parity with hard-disk drives is just a matter of time. "Flash memory in the last five years has come down 40, 50, 60 percent per year," he said. "Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years." Samsung makes both SSDs and HDDs.
Beard explained why a cost gap persists between solid-state drives and hard-disk drives. "The difference in cost is fundamentally very different. A hard drive has a fixed cost of $40 or $50 for the spindle, the motors, the PCB (printed circuit board), the cables," he said. "To make the hard drive spin faster (increase speed) or to add capacity doesn't really add a lot of incremental cost to the drive." (The price for most laptop-class hard-disk drives on the market is between $60 and $100 at retail, Beard said.)
"When you contrast this with SSDs, they also have a fixed cost for the PCB and the case and the controller, which is lower than the fixed cost of a hard drive," according to Beard. "But as you scale the capacity of the SSD up, the cost scales linearly.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.cnet.com ...
fyi
Believe it when I see it.
Have they worked out the problems yet of the memory sectors only being able to be written to so many times and then that sector becomes inoperable??
Still a few humps in the road. The ability to rewrite numerous times is limited. The cheaper MLC is slower than the less capacity SLC.
Vertical recording may surprise those waiting for this to happen soon, but hey, it’s a semiconductor company, what did you expect them to say.
The sky high SSD prices today will stop all but the most well heeled or needy servers from making the plunge.
No ... still trying.
Hmmm...according to Newegg.com, the WD 300GB Velociraptor is $230 and a there's a WD 1TB for $105. Looks like making it spin faster adds quite a bit to the cost. Either that or we're being ripped off.
As I understand it, that still is an issue, but only after 100,000+ writes, and they've been developing algorithms so the writes are spread all around the drive rather than in the same places repeatedly. Supposedly they can last far longer than the average standard hard drive now.
The proper technical term is ...
Inevitable
The changes so far are pretty remarkable. I remember IBM 340 meg microdrives costing several hundred. Now a multiple gig compact flash or smart media card is almost an impulse purchase.
Still, the SSD seems like a good fit for static content storage needs. X-rays and such.
Solid state HDD can’t come too soon for me. I already use CF and USB flash for O/S and program S/W. Data is baceked up to Flash. The only valid use for spinning media is swap.
They are already more cost-competitve than hard drives of several years ago. All we need is for hard drives to hit a capacity wall and SSDs will catch up. My SWAG is that hard drives have already milked 80% of the perpendicular recording tech that hit a few years ago and let us go to terabyte-plus.
HD seem to go up in capacity and remain mostly constant in price. It's the way they are built that determines price, so cramming the most on a platter is the never ending foot race. I just bought a 500 GB SATA high speed drive for $60.
At the last juncture, people said conventional recording had pooped out. Then came vertical recording. We were doing vertical recording way back in the early 80s.
Is suppose if you want to archive store, the optical is what you may want, especially if you want it portable.
I worked on a SSD project with IBM and an Israeli company back in late 92, early 93. We had a client in NYC who was going to be the guinea pig for this.
The day we scheduled to go in and set up shop, the first WTC bombing happened.
Not true about the longevity. In high use situations they won't last long. It might be fine for use where speed is absolute, and the SSDs can be swapped out frequently, but other than that the costs and low capacity are prohibited.
Google has amassed some of the best data on drive longevity and they rotate them out in years. I was told by a google server vendor it was three years use and out they go.
When google starts using SSDs then they are ready for consumers. Some day ... But don't can't on the drive folks sitting still and waiting for them to catch up. This chase has been going on for decades. When I started and it was 10mb per drive, and SSDs were just around the corner. It depends on what you need to accomplish.
I would say that Seagate sees something coming also....
I could see having a system with the operating system on SSD and a spinning Large drive for user Data.......
Kind of like what we did on the mainframes years ago...
Anybody remeber the IBM DataCell??
I remember, two friends were on the Boston flight ...
9/11 rearranged the tech side of wallstreet big time. No longer was archiving a simple thing. We had a huge installation for service and repair in the towers.
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