Though solid-state drives are in vogue, market forces and technical issues are giving the venerable hard-disk drive new life.
DRAMexchange, a Taipei-based market intelligence firm, said last week that the adoption of solid-state drives by computer vendors has slowed as the price of the NAND chips--the raw material of solid-state drives--has increased. The firm also said that computer makers have been cautious about using solid-state drives because current Windows operating systems are not fully optimized for SSDs.
Numonyx NAND flash chip
(Credit: Numonyx)And the popularity of flash storage is waning in Netbooks. These tiny laptops at one time used solid-state drives almost exclusively. But Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others are moving en masse to configurations with large hard-disk drives in lieu of smaller-capacity solid-state drives.
SSDs typically offer higher performance--often much higher performance--than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts.
While those merits still apply, lingering doubts about the long-term retention of the data in a solid-state drive is making the hard disk look not quite so passé. Ed Doller, the chief technical officer of Numonyx, a flash memory chip maker which was spun off from Intel and STMicroelectronics last year, addressed this issue in a recent phone interview. Numonyx makes two kinds of flash: NOR, used for storing computer programs, and NAND, used widely as a data storage medium in digital cameras, media players, smartphones, and solid-state drives.
"It's if versus when. With a hard drive it's if it's going to fail. With an SSD, it's when is it going to fail," Doller said, who critiques NAND only because his company is looking for a new storage medium--such as phase change memory--that can overcome some of NAND's inherent limitations.
Doller spoke about an epiphany he had after booting up a 20-year-old IBM AT. "I fired that thing up and it actually booted from the hard drive. If that same computer had been built with a solid-state drive, I can almost guarantee you that would not have worked. It would have lost its information over that period of time," Doller said.
... Read moreMemory chip prices shot up on Monday--a welcome bit of news for beleaguered chipmakers, who have been caught in a relentless downward price spiral.
Prices for DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory), the main memory in PCs, shot up as much as 26 percent, according to data posted on DRAMeXchange. A number of reports have attributed this to the bankruptcy of Germany-based chipmaker Qimonda, and seem to indicate that this will relieve some of the pressure on prices caused by oversupply.
The price of certain DDR2 (Double Data Rate, second generation) memory chips rose as much as 28 percent Monday. Flash memory also rose, with 16-gigabit chips rising more than 5 percent.
DRAM chip traders in Asia were returning from a week-long Lunar New Year holiday in China and Taiwan.
"I think it's just the first chance for the markets to respond to the demise of Qimonda," said Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities, which tracks the memory chip market. He also attributed the price rise to "recent commentary from Samsung and others of expected slightly higher DRAM contract pricing."
Last month, Qimonda, which held about a 10 percent DRAM market share in the third quarter of 2008, became the first major memory chipmaker to file for bankruptcy as a result of the decline in memory chip prices and worldwide credit crunch. Economic officials with the German state of Saxony said that talks about finding investors for Qimonda were ongoing but the outcome was uncertain, according to a Reuters report Monday.
Market researcher iSuppli forecast in December that DRAM revenue would drop 19.8 percent in 2008. Among the world's top 10 memory chip suppliers, the largest declines in revenue, according to iSuppli, will be seen by Qimonda, with a plunge of 40.7 percent; Hynix, with a 29.1 percent drop; Taiwan's Nanya Technology Corp., with another 29.1 percent decrease; and Powerchip Semiconductor, also of Taiwan, with a 23.4 percent reduction.
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