Price drops ahead for solid-state drives

Solid-state drives are still going to be somewhat hard to find and expensive in 2008, but mass production, cheaper flash, and tech advances will start to change that in 2009 and 2010.

Micron Technology, the Boise, Idaho-based maker of DRAM and flash memory, this week unveiled plans to come out with solid-state drives. The drives function like regular hard drives. But instead of storing data on spinning disks, solid-state drives store it on NAND memory chips--the kind found in cameras and MP3 players.

Micron will start mass-producing solid-state drives in the first quarter of 2008. The first drives will hold either 32GB or 64GB of memory. While that's less than half the capacity of the average notebook drive today, it's actually more storage than most business users need, said Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron. Plus, solid-state notebooks can come out of deep sleep or launch applications far more rapidly.

"60GB to 80GB is the sweet spot for the notebook market," he said.

Micron didn't talk pricing, but the drives will likely cost a few hundred dollars, a stumbling block. For example, swapping out a 160GB standard hard drive for a 64GB solid-state drive (from Samsung) on a Dell XPS 1330 notebook costs an additional $950. Considering that the notebook with the 160GB drive already costs $1,599, the solid-state drives aren't exactly economical.

Nonetheless, the magic of Moore's Law and the ability of memory makers to take it on the chin are going to make these drives more affordable. The first thing that will happen is that toward the end of 2008, solid-state drive makers will start to incorporate multilevel cell flash chips in the drives, Klein said. Manufacturers currently use single-level cell flash.

Multilevel cell chips hold two (and soon four) bits of data per cell. The chips aren't as reliable as single-level cell memory, but the error rates are small enough to make these types of drives more than adequate for the notebook market, he added.

In addition, multilevel cell chips will enable drive makers to increase the capacity of their drives, driving down the price. At equal capacities, multilevel cell chips could cut the price of making a drive by roughly 40 percent, estimated Frankie Roohparvar, vice president of NAND development at Micron.

Meanwhile, the world is swimming in NAND flash, leading to drastic price declines. NAND prices are set to drop 57 percent this year and 52 percent next year, said Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner.

Put those two factors together, and it could be possible to come out with a 64GB solid-state drive for close to $300 toward the end of 2008, Unsworth speculated. That's still high. He estimates that only 8 million solid-state drives will get shipped in all of '08.

But after that, the industry should begin to be able to show the benefits of these kinds of drives, the Micron executives predict. Think about it. Even if price declines begin to slow, 64GB drives will likely move toward the $200 range by late 2009 and then drop to sub-$100 about 18 months after that. Hard-drive makers will continue to increase the density of their products at the same time, of course, but competition between the two technologies will become tighter.

It happened in MP3 players, after all. Most upscale players came with 1.8-inch drives. The industry, however, at one point abruptly switched to flash.

Unsworth said the flash makers are going to have to tout the supposed benefits of having a flash drive with less capacity than a spinning disk (better battery life, can withstand a drop from a table better, you may not need all that storage, etc.).

He added that notebook makers will have to cooperate by making smaller laptops that showcase the features of flash. Flash takes up less space and, because it doesn't radiate as much heat, you can eliminate a fan. Currently, the notebooks that contain flash are basically the same size as the hard-drive models.

"With MP3 players, it was easy. You just turn it sideways and quote the battery life," Unsworth said.

[inachu]

This will be fun!

Just think!

No more running chkdsk or at least in theory we will no longer need chkdsk as there is no read and write head. Only time will tell if data still gets distorted on solid state drives.

Defrag will go a lot faster too.
Raaa!

[The_Decider]

Problems with solid state

They have a fairly short life span in terms of number of writes.

[SteveCherry]

Need..more...capacity, Jim

This indeed sounds like a lot of fun, but I am holding my breath (and my wallet) for better capacity...much better capacity than 64G. As digital camera sensors increase in resolution, those of us using laptops for use in photography, for instance, are going to want these to meet our current spinning disk capacity - at a minimum before spending that kind of dough for a drive and the associated installation fees.

Also - laptop users typically fit the travel-intensive demographic, and they want things like stored video to keep them entertained while they wait for lightning storms to pass at DFW.

Here's hoping that competition from names like SanDisk will infuse some speed into Moore's law.

Best e-gards,
Steve Cherry
dailyframe.com

[Jon N.]

Solid State Drives...nice, but...

Its all very good for us that technology is getting to the point where we can start ditching motorized storage...but wait! Isn't this the calculation? Every year, the price of this kind of tech goes down 50%. So the price for a 64GB next year should be $475. Still to high a cost for too little storage. At this rate we won't see viable, cost-efficient solid state drives in the rage of 120GB-240GB for another 5-10 years. We have already reached the 1 Terabyte level with motorized drives. A S.S.D.(Solid State Drive)this size could increase our wait even further into the future. Seagate, are you listening?

[chash360]

It can't happen soon enough

I have been waiting, asking and begging for 100% solid state computers for quite sometime. Even at the expensive price there are niche markets that can really benefit from such devices. Particularly in the Broadcast and Recording industries where you need a noiseless computer (no fan, no spinning disks). Random access that really speeds things up, instant sleep, and wakeup modes, lower power consumption, less heat. I would argue the 'no moving parts to wear out', but of course they have not fixed the wearout problem with flash either, but it still can rival spinning disks in longevity.
Back in the late 80's or early 90's HP made an omnibook laptop that could be setup all solid state, and the system memory was static RAM (similar to flash) you could sleep and wakeup instantly, no rebooting, or even loading needed (serious it was as fast as turning your TV On and Off, maybe faster). Way better than the M$ implementation of any of its suspended modes (and about half a dozen years earlier). I can't wait to have a new computer with these capabilities, 64GB is more than enough for a laptop (M$ OS's will require some debloating, but what else is new) if you need more send it over the wire or air to a storage system.

[zroth]

Shockproof

I sometimes work in areas where the equipment takes a beating from heavy shocks and vibrations. Normal hard drives don't last long in such an environment.

So, I'm really looking forward to a time when SSDs are easy available to the general public. The lack of moving parts should ensure that they will withstand shocks much better.

[Source00]

Hybrid approach will bring success...

So I see the major benefit of this for notebooks is using a hybrid approach... at least in the short term. Traditional hard drives seem like they will always outpace flash based hard drives on capacity density and price, so why not use a hybrid approach... Flash based drives for working memory in the <100 GB range, traditional storage for archival and long term storage (1-2 TB+ range). My first reaction to this story was that a 64 GB drive is way too small... then I looked at my computer which is stuffed full of things I rarely, if ever, use or look at. A less efficient but cheaper storage device would be a great place for all that stuff... whereas I want my performance to be as quick and efficient as possible for my day to day work and 64 GB is more than enough to manage that...

[Michael00360]

Solid State Drives

There is now way that I could use a solid state drive until it reaches into the hundreds of gigabytes and comes down to current hard drive prices. Hopefully by then, they will be even better .

I just hope that doesn't take to long.

[lingsun]

I want a 32 gig Nano!

I want a 32 gig Nano! I'll settle for a 16.

[inachu]

My only wish for solid state drives is.....

they are produced in IDE and SATA formats.

[timber2005]

Speed

As you are well aware, there are may speeds to IDE and SATA.

Mainly, IDE is 100/133, SATA is 150/300.
Now 133 to 150 isn't much of a change, but if you consider that flash based drives can constantly use that full 150, and be a bottleneck... you want to go for the fastest conneciton available. Harddrives are one of the biggest bottlenecks of the system. Else we wouldn't need RAM to make up for the drives slowness, or CPU cache to make up for ram slowness. Imagine one day if we can make a SSD as fast as ram. And here you want ide :p
IDE is going away for a faster, stable technology. Even in external devices, and CD/DVD type medias (aka, blu-ray and HD DVD)

[jgargano03]

Why don't they just put the OS on a ROM chip? Like they did for the Commodore 64? Imagine vista loading in 1 second. I envisioned SSD's since 1998. I'm not in any rush to go to SSD until they fix all the kinks.

[SpiritWater]

...or Apple

Either one has the tech clout to make solid state drives mainstream.

Looking forward to seeing a ZunePhone from Microsoft with some 32Gb flash. ;-)

Break the Wedge!
www.breakthewedge.com

[rsatter]

Drivers?!

Drivers are not needed. Flash driver are just like hard drives so the only driver is for the controller which the drive connects. The connector is IDE or SATA. You can literally drop in replacement SSD for your laptop.