Solid State Will Match HDD Prices, Samsung Says

CNET ^ | March 15, 2009 8:30 AM PDT | by Brooke Crothers

[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.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The total storage capacity was 400 million bytes or 800 million decimal digits. Up to eight 2321s could be attached to the IBM 2841 control unit, allowing an overall capacity of over 3GB. Reportedly the Data Cell required 23 liters of motor oil.

Average access times for selection of a strip range from 175 to 600 milliseconds; average rotational delay one a strip is on the drum is 25 milliseconds; access time to another cylinder averages 95 milliseconds.

[John Valentine]

Looks like making it spin faster adds quite a bit to the cost.

Looks like making it spin faster adds quite a bit to the price.

Supply and demand is what's at play here. People obviously will pay substantially more for a 10,000 rpm drive. I have a friend who populated his computer with 4 200 some-odd gig 10,000 rpm drives. I populated my identical computer with four 750 gig Western Digital 7500 rpm drives. I wasn't interested in paying the premium for the marginal improvement in data transfer rate; he was.

Neither of us was "ripped off".

[Tarpon]

I can see the OS on a 32 GB SSD and the data stored on HDs. I have a system like that, but you are much better off just cranking up the main memory size from my tests. Boot from bios ROM.

Ah the DataCell, when drives were huge, and men were men. Nothing can replace the roar of the fans and rumble of the bits going round and round. Sends a shiver up the pant leg from the underfloor cooling.

I long for times gone by. At the university space science research center where I worked on our solar wind experiments, we actually had twin tape drives for storage. Full cabinets each.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Sends a shiver up the pant leg from the underfloor cooling.

I spent as much time as possible there in the summer time.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The followon to the Data Cell:

IBM 3850 mass storage system

******************************EXCERPT*************************

IBM 3850 Mass Storage System

• IBM 3850 Mass Storage System announced October 9, 1974
  
  
• IBM 3851 Mass Storage Facility Models A1-A4 and B1-B4 announced October 9, 1974 and withdrawn August 5, 1986
  
  
• IBM 3851 Mass Storage Facility Models B11-B13, B21, B22 and B31 announced March 6, 1980 and withdrawn August 5, 1986

Beginning in the late-1960s, IBM engineers in Boulder, Colorado, began development of a low-cost mass storage system based on magnetic tape in cartridges. By 1970, the proposed device was code named "Comanche" and described as an online tape library to provide computer-controlled access to stored information. Numerous marketing studies and design changes were made during the early 1970s, and finally Comanche was announced as the IBM 3850 Mass Storage System (MSS) in October 1974.

The components of the 3850 were new data cartridges, one or two units of the IBM 3851 Mass Storage Facility, the new IBM 3830 Storage Control Model 3, and the widely-used 3330-series disk subsystem.

The data cartridges were circular cylinders, two inches in diameter and four inches long, each holding a spool holding 770 inches of tape. Cartridges were stored in a two-dimensional array of bins, which were hexagonal, rather than square, to save space.

The 3850's honeycomb storage compartments

During its development, Comanche evolved in concept and design from a tape library to a means for storing infrequently-used information that otherwise would reside on disk storage. Information under control of the MSS was stored in Direct Access Storage Device (DASD) format images on the low-cost cartridge tape.

[Future Snake Eater]

That’s my plan for the next computer I build. I’ll throw a VelociRaptor (or something similar) in as my “application” drive, and use a 1.5-2TB drive as my storage. I also have an HP EX485 home server as a backup for data. :-)

[ken in texas]

Ah, yes... the good old days.

Brings back many memories... some quite fond, and others not so.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Well it put bread on the table at my house.

[Political Junkie Too]

Those picture can't be real... they didn't have women in IT back then, did they?

-PJ

[AFreeBird]

Believe it when I see it.

You will. Mechanical drives are on their way out. It does not mean that mechanicals are not still viable; I just picked up a WD USB "Book" for $120 (1TB) that should last a while. But when SSD comes down, I will be replacing my aging internal mechanicals with them. Energy saving, speed, quietness are all appealing benefits.

So, count on it.

[Paladin2]

Whoa, babies. Why don’t I see that in my computer lab at home?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

There were a few....

[amchugh]

I thought they were up to a Million writes now? I think they tend to fail much more gracefully than HDDs as well, since they fail on write rather than read (controller should verify write I hope). If the number of writes is insufficient for your application you’d almost certainly put in a DRAM SSD instead of / in addition to a flash one.

[Future Snake Eater]

As I understood it, SSD technology has improved dramatically over the past year or two, but several FReepers are telling me otherwise. Either way, I won’t be using them in my home PC yet—far too expensive.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Interesting subject - but why don't they provide Moore's Law semilog curves showing the geometric rate of decrease of cost per byte of storage of flash memory, and of magnetic disk memory?

That would tell the tale . . .

[r9etb]

Looks like making it spin faster adds quite a bit to the cost. Either that or we're being ripped

There'd be a cost impact for the higher-speed read/write aspects of the drive, but once you've achieved the speed there would be very little additional cost associated with adding storage capacity; and most of the underlying hardware would be identical regardless of speed.