COMING SOON
Regular readers have long known my enthusiasm for solid state drives and their potential. While the costs of these drives today vs. mechanical hard drives is still substantial and the relative benefits still incremental, there are some big improvements on the horizon. This ComputerWorld piece explains:
"As solid-state disk (SSD) technology closes in
on hard disk drive (HDD) capacity and price, experts say it may not be
long before spinning disks are a thing of the past and a computer's
storage resides in flash memory on the motherboard.
By making the drive part of a system's core architecture -- instead of a peripheral device -- data I/O performance could initially double, quadruple or more, according to Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at market research firm In-Stat..."
"According to In-Stat, SSD prices have been dropping 60% year over year. Currently, the price of consumer-grade SSD costs from $2 to $3.45 per gigabyte, with hard drives going for about 38 cents per gigabyte, according to Gartner Inc. and iSuppli Corp.
"Two years ago, SSDs cost $17.50 per gigabyte, so it's obvious that consumer NAND flash memory will soon be a true contender to hard disk drives -- it's just not there yet," Gartner analyst Joseph Unsworth said. "I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200, and that's going to happen around 2010. Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage."
Klein argued that using an SSD in its native state, as NAND chips on a board without an enclosure, will reduce cost, weight, power use and space."
The whole piece is worth reading, especially for those interested in some of the technical details. The rest can just sit back and wait for the real benefits of solid state storage to show up in force not too long from now.
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