Comments on: Eying solid-state drives, Seagate tries to quell fears

The largest hard-disk drive maker in the world is turning its attention for the first time to solid-state drives. Of course, it faces plenty of competition in the SSD market.

[Mr. Dee]

Well, I don't see SSDs in any of my future desktop or notebook purchases for the next 10 years. Why? Capacity, I prefer to have large amounts of storage over small improvements in reliability. When you consider the fact that the average laptop mechanical hard disk will mushroom to 1 TB by 2010 while an SSD hard disk will probably reach about 320 GB by then, it just does make any relevant sense for my personal needs and I presume for others too. Not to mention the cost which needs to come down dramatically before I can call it worthy. As for 3.5 inch desktop hard disk, those will be hitting 5 TB in 2010, 5000 GBs vs 320 GBs, come on, thats an easy choice right there.

[The1egend]

10 years? Really? I'd be more willing to bet that you will have a SSD alongside a HDD, with your programs and OS on the SSD, and your media on the HDD. You really don't understand the performance increases that you will benefit from with the SSD.

[Lerianis]

Uh...... how much are you storing on your computer at one time, Mr. Dee? Now, I will admit: I have about..... 120GB's of stuff on my computer. However, 70% or more of that is stuff that I am just WAITING until external hard drives drop a LITTLE more in price (around Christmastime) that I will move that stuff to an external hard drive.

Then, I will have a grand total, including my games (which some take up 4GB's or more!) of about 50GB's on my computer or even less. For me, a 320GB solid state is GREAT! Why? No 'you drop it and it damaged' problems (no moving parts!) and they can last a VERY long time.

[zyberwoof]

I doubt that is the case. If you look at the trends for Flash and traditional hard drives, you will see that your numbers probably won't work out.

Traditional Hard drives seem to be increasing by less than 50% every year. I think it was 15+ months between 1TB and 1.5TB drives being released. Flash media, on the other hand, seems to be doubling every 9 to 12 months. 128 GB drives are out now and 256 GB are just a few months away. By the end of 2010, I'd guess that we will be seeing between 1 and 2 TB solid state drives.

Also, don't forget that Solid state drives seem to be increasing in speed nearly as quickly as they are increasing in capacity.

Unless flash memory stops progressing at its current rate, my guess is that within 3 years you will will have a solid state drive along side your platter based drive(s). Within 6 years, solid state drives will have larger capacities and be several times faster.

[Crunchy Doodle]

I put a 60GB SSD in my ASUS C90S notebook PC. Wow! Solid, silent, cool and very very fast. I know that's not the experience with all people who have tried these early SSDs. However, my experience after some weeks of use is just wow! Bring on more capacity and I'll never have another electromechanical HDD again.

[ddanckaert]

I'm concerned about Write Endurance: - The number of write cycles to any block of flash is limited. Once you've used up your quota for that block, the disk can become unreliable.

Also, memory consumption is an issue. If my hard drive spins down, there's no energy being consumed, but the SSD is always using energy.

[Lerianis]

Wrong. If the hard drive spins down, energy is STILL being used for the chipset on the hard drive, to tell it "Hey, start working again!" when you wish to use it. About the same as an SSD drive, to be honest.

Even when a mechanical hard drive is spun down, there is still that leech of energy for the chips on the hard drive..... but basically, that will be for ANY hard drive: SSD, mechanical, whatever until the end of time.

[fuzbears]

Write endurance is more of an issue with SSD than with mechanical drives only because the issue has not been looked at on a large scale. The standards for hard drives do not look at rotating write areas, and address shifting. However those of us who have memory scanners, or other early solid state drives know that these problems have been overcome in various ways. Where seagate can excel is in formalizing the way you handle these issues, and measuring cost/reliability. IE, is it cheaper to have redundancy and let hardware fail, or have hardware address translation to handle the write endurance issue.

[The1egend]

Intel has addressed the write endurance issue. On their SSDs they have stated that the consumer can write 30GB of data per day for 5 years before seeing any appreciable degradation of data capacity should occur. This is done with write use algorithms and extra capacity that is used when the cells break down. 30GB per day is a LOT of data, especially for 5 years. Also, aside from bad controller issues that plagued some of the early SSDs, they should be much more reliable than HDDs. Higher G tolerances, no spinning plates or moving parts.
Also power consumption? ddannkaert, have you read anything about SSDs and their power consumption? .1mw is not out of the question, and they will only get better as they are chip based. HDDs in desktops always spin, and thus always use power. SSDs are much more power efficient than HDDs.

[alegr]

And if you have a bunch of NAND chips in an SSD, you can power on only some, and keep the rest powered down. Whereas a HDD is either spinning at full speed or not (and takes a few seconds to spinup).

[fdunn3]

30GB a day using snapshots for enterprise backups is nothing.

[Imalittleteapot]

Well we already know SSDs are more durable than a regular drive, but the question was how much more. People need to be assured about the reliability because the problem is/was the price. Everyone knows the HDD is going to fail eventually, but they're cheap to replace. For the launch prices of SSDs they were so expensive that people basically needed a guarantee they would last a decade or so or it just wasn't cost effective at all.

[TheTechKid]

I wonder if Mechanical Hard Disks are going to be tomorrow's tape drive backups...

[mbenedict]

@TheTechKid: enterprises already use hard drives to replace much of their tape backups, as part of their Hierarchical Storage Management strategy (HSM.)

Typically with HSM, data gets archived to a tiered archival layers, with the first tier based on hard drives. As data age, they get moved to subsequent archival tiers, some of which might then involve tapes (for very long term storage, usually 6+ years due to compliance requirements.)

Not all data need to be archived in long term storage, so in many cases the majority of the the archives sit in the hard drive based tiers before they get permanently deleted.

[George Orwellian]

SSDs will make a great boot/swap disk!

[CNET editor's note: prohibited material deleted.]

[markredf150]

Has anyone heard that SSDs are unreliable when it comes to streaming music and video? I read in a review somewhere that for streaming media that HDDs are faster. It was for the MBA with the SSD. Does anyone know why?

[George Orwellian]

"[CNET editor's note: prohibited material deleted.]"

Would you kindly email me as to which TOS item was violated above? I have posted a URL signature at CNet for quite a while now. I am glad to see that HMTL BRs are no longer needed to get line breaks.