Analyst: Returns, technical problems high with flash-based notebooks
Editors' note, March 19, 2008 10:34 AM PDT: Dell has rebutted the claim about return rates, and Avian Securities says it won't challenge Dell's numbers. See "Dell: Flash notebooks are working fine" for more details.
Notebooks with flash-based hard drives cost a lot and, according to managing partner Avi Cohen at Avian Securities, they don't work very well either.
A large computer manufacturer is getting around 20 percent to 30 percent of the flash-based notebooks it is shipping sent back because of failure rates and performance that simply isn't meeting customer expectations, the firm stated in a report on Monday. Avian gathered this information on a recent swing through Asia.
Approximately 10 percent to 20 percent of the flash notebooks shipping from the large manufacturer are coming back because of technical failure, Cohen said, far higher than the 1 percent to 2 percent of notebooks that come back because of technical failure with hard drives.
A Dell Latitude with a flash drive. Is it worth the $900 premium?
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com)"There is an order of magnitude higher in failure rates," he said. (Avian is a research firm that does not have a financial interest in flash companies, Cohen said.)
The rest are coming back because of lackluster performance. Flash-based notebooks can't match notebooks with regular hard drives in terms of applications like video streaming, he said. These notebooks also cost a lot. Inserting a flash-based drive into a notebook adds about $900 to the price or more.
Cohen prefers to say a large computer manufacturer is having these problems. From my own research, I can tell you that Dell is so far the manufacturer that has promoted flash drives in notebooks the most. Dell gets its flash drives from Samsung. Apple just starting shipping flash-based notebooks.
A Dell representative declined to comment on failure rates or returns. However, Dell is admitting that current flash-based drives can exhibit worse performance on some applications where data is exchanged in small packed sizes, and one of those applications is Microsoft Outlook. "An SSD (solid state drive) can be slower than a traditional hard drive" on Outlook, the representative said. But flash drives are superior for random access, the representative added, than regular drives.
To that end, Samsung is coming out with a new type of drive that corrects that issue, the Dell representative said. (Calls are out to Samsung, but no reply yet.)
While the returns are bad news for notebook makers right now, the problems also dim the outlook for the flash industry in general. Flash manufacturers are looking for applications that will suck up the large volume of chips coming out of factories right now. The industry went on a building spree in the last few years. Many hoped that notebooks would accomplish this. Notebook makers currently are inserting flash that can accommodate a single bit per memory cell. Both notebook makers and flash makers want the industry to shift to cheaper flash that can hold two or more bits per cell so the prices of these notebooks can be closer to conventional notebooks.
Multi-bit flash, however, isn't as reliable, so if the industry is having problems with single-cell flash, it's going to be tough to shift to the cheaper type of memory, Cohen said. As a result, the oversupply in flash will linger and prices will continue on their rapid downward descent.
Flash sells for around $3 a GB, about a 50 percent decline from the last quarter of last year, according to Jim Handy of Objective Analysis.
"SLC (single level cell, the name for single cell flash) is just a proof of concept," Avian's Cohen said. Will these problems be solved? Yes, but it will take time, he said. A shift to multi-level cell may not begin until the end of the year. Some flash makers had hoped it might start occurring now.
I can actually back up some of Cohen's comments on application performance. I tried a flash notebook recently. While the silence was great -- the notebook makes no sound -- it was tough to see a marked difference in performance. Or at least one that was worth $900.
/P
Or to put it another way (and the numbers are just made up), lets say you want to write 1 mb of data sequentially, it may take a harddrive 2 milliseconds, a flashdrive 10ms. If you want to write it randomally it may take the harddrive 50 ms but the flashdrive will still take 10 ms.
Again this is my take from how the artical is phrased.
It seems to me that Dell is having problems with Samsung drives.
My Boss's Sony VAIO with a flash drive in it is much faster than a system with a standard drive. Also, look up a review at Anandtech concerning the MTRON 2.5" drives and look at the huge speed differences between the MTRON SSD and Samsung standard and hybrid drives.
Flash is Fast. However not all flash is the same, and according to Anandtech, the chipset also matters in speed.
I know this is just a blog, but this just seemed to be too broad to me.
There isn?t any reason to market an SSD to a home user or put it in a laptop yet. They haven?t reached their promised potential according to this article. Vista made the same mistake. It?s good for things users don?t need, and bad for things they do. Yet again, someone forgot who they were selling the product to.
Most people need lots of slow drive space to store meaningless crap. People that need high disk performance are probably running some type of server. That probably means not a laptop. There is no such thing as someone who doesn?t need lots of disk space. Starting over the gigabyte count isn?t going to melt my heart.
Speed wise they?re like Superman vs. Flash. I don?t care which one is faster. They?re both fast enough for me. As for reliability, most home users get a new computer long before the drive goes bad anyway. At work, I?d rather have a few cheap hard drives on hand in case something crashes because eventually something crashes.
I can get a terabyte of storage for $200, and my computer is plenty fast. How is a 64 gig drive SSD supposed to compete with that?
If you need speed then add more RAM, get a dedicate GPU, and clean install. That?s still going to be true for a long time. You?ll get more speed out that then you will an SSD.
Perhaps if a server requires super man like access times, but I don?t work with any such computer and I never have. I?ll let someone else answer that.
Right now the only difference I can see is the price. So, I hope they work on that. I won?t be having one in my system for a while. I do however hope to see one in everyone else?s system. Once market saturation hits, I?ll get one on eBay cheap.
architecture issue with running a flash drive.
My very brief experience with the MacBook Air a few weeks ago
showed that the system shutdown time is much slower for the
flash drive than the hard drive configuration, but bootup time is
substantially faster, and starting up apps is also much faster for
the flash drive. Overall, the flash drive version was speedier.
It would be nice to hear from a real flash drive MacBook Air user
to see what their experience has been.
Then again, Samsung's memory is not as good as Toshiba's. Micron and Intel is even worse, and Hynix is still stuck in 70nm that it won't make any money selling high capacity stuff like SSD.
If you think it is bad right now, the wear problem in MLC SSD is going to be even worse. Hopefully the controllers and algorithms will mature before it is sold everwhere.
- successful entrepreneurs
- by cool_enyr01 April 3, 2008 11:36 AM PDT
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- by cool_enyr01 April 3, 2008 11:42 AM PDT
- ohh realy how come.
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