Nanotech - The Circuits Blog

Will 2009 be the year that solid-state drives take off? Maybe not. The speedy drives are catching on, but wider acceptance will take time--and the bad economy isn't helping.

Costs are still high for these drives, which typically outdo--and in some cases blow away--hard disks in performance. "2010-2011...that's when we think the price points for the SSD market get attractive enough to really drive stronger growth," Sanjay Mehrotra, president and chief operating officer of SanDisk, said this week during SanDisk's third-quarter earnings conference call.

Samsung is the leading supplier of solid-state drives.

(Credit: Samsung)

Indeed, there is still a wide price gap between hard-disk drives and solid-state drives. The difference, for example, between a 120GB hard-disk drive and 128GB solid-state drive--essentially the same capacity--on the new Apple MacBooks is $500. That's a deal-breaker for a lot of consumers. (On a Dell XPS M1530 notebook, the difference in price between a 250GB 5400rpm hard disk drive and a "Ultra Performance" 128GB solid-state drive is also $500.)

"On the mainstream notebook side we agree with SanDisk that the price points are too high and the added benefits received by customers from SSDs are just not worth the added expense," said Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities. "We expect the transition in notebooks to take a long time and will probably require Microsoft to change the OS in order to jumpstart this transition," Cohen said, citing the need for Microsoft to make Windows Vista and Windows 7 more SSD-friendly.

Eli Harari, chairman and CEO of SanDisk, believes that solid-state drives will have to wait a little longer yet for their breakthrough.

"It's still a very young market, and 2009 is not the year that it really takes off," he said during SanDisk's earnings call. In addition, solid-state drive demand will not be enough to siphon off the flash memory oversupply that is plaguing the flash memory industry, he said. "I don't believe...that 2009 inventory overhang is going to be solved through solid-state disks."

Nor does Intel--which just started shipping its first high-capacity solid-state drives this fall--see the market really taking off for a couple of years in laptops.

"I believe within in two years when the economies of scale come into play and the prices hit the right point, it will not only be in the more expensive systems but go down to mainstream (laptops)," Mooley Eden, Intel's general manager of mobile platforms, said in Taipei on Tuesday. Intel is shipping 80GB drives now and will ship a 160GB solid-state drive later this quarter.

Seagate, the largest hard-disk drive supplier, plans to enter the market in 2009 but sees "price as an inhibitor right now," according to Rich Vignes, senior manager of market development at the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company. He also says standards work needs to get completed to make enterprise customers comfortable and "overcome endurance fears."

Beyond that, enterprise customers are showing resistance to accelerated adoption of solid-state drives as the economy worsens. "Conditions across technology are awful," said Avian Securities' Cohen. "On the enterprise SSD side, where we thought it made the most sense for the transition to occur...we have seen a slowdown in momentum for this shift as CTOs and CFOs look to conserve cash and slow new adoption programs."

Dell is taking steps to promote Alienware PCs on its Web site as the PC maker tries to collaborate more--rather than compete outright--with its Alienware unit.

Dell has added the Area-51 m9750 to its gaming laptop Web site, according to a Dell company blog.

Dell Web page features new Alienware game notebooks

(Credit: Dell)

"The Alien invasion has continued, with the addition of the Area-51 m9750 to the Dell gaming laptop Web site lineup," according to the post. The 17-inch notebook offers two 512MB GeForce 8700m GT cards as an option.

The blog also notes: "It was never really in the cards to do away with the XPS gaming products early, but instead to integrate the development teams from both Alienware and XPS...The XPS isn't going away, though it may go in new directions as hinted by the XPS One and the slimline XPS m1330."

A Wall Street Journal report had stated that Dell would quickly kill off its XPS line, which Dell later denied.

The starting prices for two featured Dell XPS M1730 notebooks are about $600 and $1,100 more than the starting prices for two featured Alienware systems on Dell's notebook gaming page.

An Area-51 m9750, for example, starts at $1,399. But add a 17-inch WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 screen, an Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 2.33GHz processor, another gigabyte of memory (for a total of 2GB), and a 160GB 7200 RPM hard disk drive, and the price jumps to $2,524.

This brings the Alienware notebook a lot closer to the Dell 17-inch XPS M1730 World of Warcraft Edition in price ($2,599) and features. Interestingly, the Alienware m9750 notebook is not available with 45-nanometer Intel T8300, T9300, T9500 (or X9000 Extreme) processors. Dell does offer these processors.

Dell issued a statement on Tuesday night, saying the XPS brand will live on but that more resources will go into Alienware.

Part of Dell's statement takes issue with a Wall Street Journal report.

"Dell XPS and Alienware are both great brands...and both will live on," spokeswoman Anne Camden said in a blog. "But we are going to expand our focus on Alienware. We are going to invest like crazy in product development, design, and engineering to propel Alienware as the premier gaming brand in the future."

Camden emphasized that XPS is a premium, cutting-edge brand--beyond just a game PC label. "XPS remains an important Dell brand with its heritage of premium performance...In the last year, XPS has expanded well beyond a gaming brand--look at the XPS One, our first entry into the all-in-one market, the XPS M1330, an industry leading ultraportable or the XPS 420 desktop, designed for multimedia activities."

But the statement also takes issue with aspects of The Wall Street Journal report. "XPS gaming systems will remain an important part of our gaming product portfolio. We don't plan an early phase-out of these systems, as the WSJ incorrectly stated, and in fact will continue to refresh them to keep them on the front edge of gaming," Camden said.

"We want to lead in this market. Simple, really. So that's why we're investing so much in the gaming systems of the future--we want those on an Alienware or XPS to reign supreme."

So Dell appears committed to XPS laptops, even those that excel at gaming.

Dell will offer an Nvidia dual graphics chip upgrade for 17-inch XPS M1730 gaming notebook owners--but stepping up won't be a cakewalk for MediaDirect users.

Dell XPS M1730 notebook with Nvdia 8800M GTX

(Credit: Dell)

The upgrade from the Nvidia dual 8700M GT to dual 8800M GTX graphics is in the works and will likely be released later this month, according to Dell.

Some users were upset when Dell upgraded the graphics in newer models of the M1730 to the 8800M GTX. The XPS 1730 with the 8800M GTX earned a score of almost 13,500 in 3Dmark06--which is about a 49 percent performance gain over two 8700M GT cards in the same notebook.

"In other words, games like Crysis, BioShock, Far Cry 2 and Age of Conan will scream," Dell said.

There will be two options. One will be done with an "installation package" and the other will be a "do-it-yourself kit."

"Considering the number of screws holding this beast together, most people will probably want the installation," Dell said.

There is one gotcha though. "MediaDirect 3.3 is not compatible with the driver for the (new) Nvida card," Dell said. MediaDirect is a Dell technology that enables a user to watch DVD movies, slideshows, or listen to music without having to boot the complete XP operating system. MediaDirect is installed in a special partition on the hard disk drive. When the computer is off, pressing the MediaDirect button will boot the MediaDirect partition instead of XP.

Dell said that the MediaDirect "incompatibility means that the MediaDirect software needs to be upgraded. Unfortunately, the upgrade will require a reformat and reinstallation. Beyond that, it will also require you to repartition the hard disk to make room for the new version of MediaDirect, which is a bit larger. Data loss has been a major concern for the engineers working on a solution. At this point, it would appear that there's really no way around wiping the drive to make the upgrade work with every feature."

UPDATE: Dell Inc. will begin phasing out its line of XPS desktop game machines, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Alienware gaming system: Dell XPS game PC line ate into Alienware sales

(Credit: Alienware)

(Note: Dell made a statement Tuesday night--after this article was posted--explaining how Dell's XPS line and Alienware systems will coexist.)

This will effectively leave Alienware as the sole high-end PC game offering from Dell which acquired the Miami-based game system maker in 2006.

Dell's XPS game PC line "ate into" Alienware sales, according to the report.

Alienware competes with brands such as Hewlett-Packard's Vodoo PC line and Falcon Northwest.

Alienware is also expected to bring out redesigned systems based on new materials that go beyond the longstanding Alienware design (photo), according to the report.

Game PCs can cost as little as $1,000 but typically range from $2,000 to $5,000 and feature high-end Intel and AMD quad-core processors and graphics chips from Nvidia and ATI Technologies.

Dell's XPS M1330 uses the Penryn chip.

(Credit: Dell Computer)

Dell is in the process of updating its notebook line with Intel's newest 45-nanometer mobile processors. As reported earlier this week, Dell indicated it would refresh its lineup with Intel "Penryn" processors.

This comes as Dell moves much of its AMD-based lineup to retail stores such as Wal-Mart and Staples.

Dell will offer the Penryn processors in its Inspiron and XPS lines, according to a Dell spokesperson. One of the first U.S. models is already available online. The XPS M1330 can be configured with a Core 2 Duo T9500 (2.6GHz, 6MB cache), 2GB of memory, Intel X3100 graphics, and a 120GB hard drive. The system is priced at $1,674. The same basic configuration with a T8300 chip (2.4GHz, 3MB cache), drops the price to $1,274.

Dell, in the coming weeks, will also offer Inspiron models with the new Intel processor.

Though announced in early January, Penryn-based mobile systems are just now starting to hit the market in volume. For example, Toshiba announced this week a 4.6-pound, 13-inch form-factor model, the U305-S2816, that uses the Penryn T8100 (2.1GHz, 3MB cache). It starts at $1,349.99. And Hewlett-Packard bulked up its consumer notebook lines with Penryn-based models last week.

The simultaneous introduction of new Penryn-based models and the repositioning of some AMD-based notebooks from Dell's online store to retailers such as Wal-Mart and Staples is coincidence and not related, said Anne Camden, a Dell spokesperson. She also said that models in the Inspiron, Vostro, and Latitude notebook lines are available currently with AMD processors.

At retail, at least, AMD has a strong presence. For instance, of the seven Dell systems and package deals listed on Wal-Mart's Web site, only one of them is Intel-based. The rest are AMD. The question is whether a retail-heavy presence--where profit margins are typically thin--bodes well for AMD or not.