Comments on: Toshiba to show 512GB solid-state drive at CES

Company plans to unveil a large-capacity solid-state drive at the Consumer Electronics Show next month and begin shipments in the second quarter of 2009.

[assman]

Price is never mentioned. Are they still 10 times the cost of hard disk drives?

[BigGuns149]

If you have to ask, you probably can't afford it. That being said I think that the cost premium gets overstated quite a bit. For less than $200 I can buy a 64GB SSD that in many respects is comparable if not superior to a 74GB 15K SAS drive in virtually every respect. Furthermore, since you can use a standard SATA controller using the drive will probably be MUCH cheaper than a comparable drive with spinning platter.

A lot of people are trying to compare cheap 7200RPM that not only have much higher seek times, but often considerable higher average read and write performance. SSDs for VERY small capacities have already passed HDDs for cost per GiB because HDDs don't scale down well to small capacities. The real issue is SSDs still are FAR more expensive for large capacities typical in desktops and to a lesser degree laptops.

I think that while the current price premium is high that we are ignoring that beyond a certain point most people would prefer performance over capacity. Look at MP3 player market. Virtually all of these devices are now using some form of solid state memory. The current iPod classic may very well be the last generation of HDD that Apple sells because only a very small percentage of the market even needs 120GB, which is why Apple got rid of the 160GB ipod. With falling prices on SSDs I predict that the first flash based MP3 player with 128GB of storage will launch by CES 2010.

Because SSDs have been dropping in price faster than HDDs at some point the price differential will be so small that all, but the most frugal will move to SSDs. If you remember the transition to TFT monitors there were people who said that they wouldn't buy one until the price was the same, but the vast majority of people of monitors sold were TFTs before we ever saw TFTs match CRTs in price. A lot of stores just stopped selling CRTs because there simply wasn't any demand. As SSDs get faster and most people's need for capacity are largely will largely be satisfied with the next generation of SSDs I think most people will start moving to SSDs once they fall below a threshold that people can afford them. While there will be some holdouts that won't buy SSDs till they are either the same price or their are practically forced into buying an SSD I think that will be exception and NOT the rule.

[ktswami]

Pricing? Will the premium for SSDs be coming down from current levels relative to disk drives?

[BigGuns149]

Compared to what types of HDDs? That is an important question to ask. SSDs are a rather modest premium when compared to high end HDDs, but are still a huge premium when compared against consumer 3.5" HDDs.

If we are comparing against say 3.5" enterprise class 15K drives, which most SSDs compare quite favorably with for seek times then the price per GiB is almost identical.

If we are talking against 10K raptors then depending upon the capacity you are talking 2-4 times as expensive per GB.

If we are talking about general consumer HDDs though SSDs are often 10 times more expensive per GiB although for the largest SSDs the ratio can be even greater.

Because SSD prices are dropping faster than HDD prices I think we will see SSDs catch on in the enterprise space quite quicker than in the consumer space where a lot of people find the price premium too high and save for gamers and geeks few people really want to trade off capacity for performance, which is a real issue since SSDs still top off at 256GiB right now, which especially on desktops is much smaller than a lot of people are used to.

If I had to guess I would put a 512GiB SSD at ~$1-2K. A lot of the 128GiB SSDs I saw at CES this year were about that price when they became available. Nevertheless like everything in technology it will cause the prices of all the smaller capacities(128, 64, etc.) to drop, which will bring them closer into the price range that most consumer would consider reasonable. I can say with all honestly that if a 128GiB SSD were selling for ~$100 I would seriously consider using it as a boot drive and just put media files on my HDD. I've found that most average people don't really need much beyond 250GB. The only reason I suggest most people to get more is that as a HDD fills up the transfer speeds go down and seek times go up. With SSDs that advice is irrelevant so there is no reason to buy 2-3 times more space than you will ever reasonably use in the next 3 years.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Data Recovery simply isn't even an option with SSD's crurently. Backing up your data is critical.

[cesium62]

Alternatively, for enterprise and cloud computing, a fair amount of dram is typically used for a disk cache. Replacing 16GB of DRAM on each of 32 machines with a 512GB SSD would save a bunch of money.

[JaquesLenoir]

DRAM throughput is in the order of multi GigaBytes per second. Compare this to the 512GB SSD speed of 240MegaBytes per second. If you need a cache, you need it to be FAST ;-)

[iradi8]

How does a 512GB SSD "come *close* to matching the size of mobile hard-disk drives"?!? I just went on New Egg and confirmed that the largest 2.5" drive you can buy from them is 500GB. Last time I checked 512GB EXCEEDS 500GB!

Are you perhaps thinking of DESKTOP hard drives which are 3.5" and come in capacities over 1TB now?

Seriously how hard is it to do a little checking on your stories before you publish them?

[assman]

I agree, I thought that was a little off as well. My pretty current laptop came with a 120GB drive.

[brantf]

Nice Replies BigGuns. Considering that this product release helps place SSDs in more of the mainstream, here's another consideration: When do Microsoft, Apple, the crowds making versions of Unix and other operating systems start to truly exploit the SSD ability to maintain state? Rather than a lengthy startup sequence, developers need to consider pushing all of the cleaning and housekeeping to shutdown (it's already happening to a certain extent). Consider the concept of just putting any system to 'sleep' and doing shutdown functions only on occasion to obtain the elusive 'instant on' ability.

[random truth]

Meh, Instant on off is a bit over-rated but I do agree about using ssds better their is only one (consumer) os's that I think they are working on it in. Open Solaris which has the zfs (or something like that) file system for it.