Will SSD replace Hard Drive?

[Peroxyde]

Just curious, would the SSD technology mature enough to replace the traditional hard drive? Pretty much similar to LCD monitors had made the CRT monitor obsolete in a space of about 5 years.

 

[Idontcare]

Yes absolutely and your analogy is spot on.

In 5 years time, I doubt it will take more than 3 yrs though, the traditional spindle-drive will have been relegated to niche applications just as you can still find niche uses for CRT's in the medical industry for instance.

 

[Hacp]

Its going to be tough to match the GB/$ of the spindle drives. My prediction is that in 5 years, you'll see SSDs start to catch up with hard drives in GB/$.

 

[capeconsultant]

2 years. Well, 3 at the most.

 

[Rifter]

I think it will take longer, i mean think about it there is a 2TB spindle drive on the market and you can get a 1TB for under $90, whats the biggest SSD 256GB and it cost what? 500-700 on newegg. Think about how long it took spindles to expand 8 fold, which is what SSD needs to do to catch up in size, and in 4 or 5 years when SSD does hit 2TB spindles will be 6+ by then. I think it willl take a long time for SSD's to catch spindles in price and untill that happens 90% of the market will keep buying spindle because for lots of people the spindle drive performance is good enough for what they do(surf the net, email, facebook etc.) my .02

 

[mpilchfamily]

HDDs are reaching there absolute limit in size while staying inside the current 3.5" format. The only thing really holding SSDs back right now are there price. It really wasn't that long ago that HDDs the size of most of these SSDs where out of reach for most people. In time the price will come down. When it does the SSD will replace the HDD. While SSDs may never reach the $ per GB ration of HDDs the benifit of SSDs will way out weigh that price of HDDs. People already pay allot more for more speed.

 

[JLukas]

The laptop market will be first to switch over because of the lower 2.5" HDD capacity and the other advantages SSD offers like longer battery life and no moving parts.

Samsung 256GB SSD is $670 on Newegg. Figure prices are cut in half each year. In 3 years, the drive is around $80, a 512GB $160, and 1TB $320. What will 2.5" HDD max capacity be by then? 2TB? It seems SSD will be standard and HDDs will be available as an option for those needing cheap mass storage, until a couple more years and they're gone completely.

Desktops will take longer. Any guesses for what the final 3.5" HDD max size will be? What's their current capacity growth rate? As the post above mentioned, there's a question of how much more capacity can be squeezed out. Not to mention companies will throw less R&D at it since it will be a dying format. Using the above 50% cuts: In 5 years, $320 for 4TB SSD. In the time span, it looks like an incredibly easy goal for HDD to reach that capacity and be <$100. In 7 years, $320 for 16TB SSD... Looks like the shift is somewhere in the 5-7 year mark. Anyone else want to throw some numbers out there?

 

[Blain]

SSD and mechanical HDs will be obsolete in 5-10 years.

 

[Glenn]

Don't discount the competition angle. So far most of the players in the SSD mix are not the traditional spindle drive makers. Intel, OCZ, G.Skill, Patriot, etc... etc... are the players in the SSD market right now and as the number of makers grow, aggressive pricing will follow. Especially when we see Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi jump into the mix.

Also, all the major memory manufacturers in the world are really suffering thru some big time red on the bottom line these past few years. Look at memory prices and it's obvious there is a glut of memory on the market so many of those memory fabs are offline currently. With SSDs being a very noticable upgrade to the end user, and the opportunities for profit for the manufacturers, the SSD market is ready to explode. I doubt that we will see the price per gb get to current spindle drive levels but we will see good half gig ssd's in the $200 range by the end of 2010.

 

[Peroxyde]

That's encouraging. I can hang on an old CRT monitor but for hard drive I am very willing to change. SSD doesn't make noise. Personally, for home use, 100 to 250 GB should be enough, for big storage I can always use a traditional external USB drive.

I hope that SSD could grow the same way as flash MP3 players. I paid $150 for a 512 MB player 4 years ago. Now, this price will buy a 8 to 16 GB player.

Originally posted by: Blain
SSD and mechanical HDs will be obsolete in 5-10 years.

There is still a better alternative for mass storage?

 

[ochadd]

It will be less than five years if SSDs keep progressing and prices keep falling at the same rate they are now. 250GB drives cost ~$750 which is what a decent 32GB drive was going for a couple years ago. Terabyte SSDs in the $200 within three years seems a realistic possibility. At that price point the reliability alone for mass storage would be more than worth it imho even if speed never improved.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Peroxyde

Originally posted by: Blain
SSD and mechanical HDs will be obsolete in 5-10 years.

There is still a better alternative for mass storage?

No, not if the reason you are interested in SSD is its performance aspects.

Nothing will beat flash for performance and non-volatility for a long time to come.

 

[Thraxen]

I could see using an SSD for my main PC in my next build, but most of my drive purchases actually go toward my file server. I have basically no need for the extra speed offered by SSDs as traditional HDDs are more than fast enough for this task. I need size and I need it cheap. Switching to SSD would essentially mean switching them all at once... which, at current prices, would be an enourmous expense and a huge loss in capacity for no perceivable benefit other than making transfers to the server faster. But for its day to day duties of streaming files I'd get nothing.

Surely I'm not the only one in this situation? I'd need to see SSDs reach sizes of 1TB at prices less than $150, perferably less than $100, before the benefit becomes remotely appealing.

 

[TemjinGold]

HDD -> SSD is kind of like VHS -> DVD imo. By the way, any ideas why people don't make a 3.5" SSD for desktop folks?

 

[ochadd]

Originally posted by: TemjinGold
HDD -> SSD is kind of like VHS -> DVD imo. By the way, any ideas why people don't make a 3.5" SSD for desktop folks?

I would guess the amount of flash it would take to fill a 3.5" drive would be impossibly expensive. Wish they would include 2:1 adapter brackets with them though.

 

[magreen]

Guess we'll start seeing new desktop cases with 2.5" drive bays in them!

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: magreen
Guess we'll start seeing new desktop cases with 2.5" drive bays in them!

One can only hope.

I cannot wait to be able to pack 10+ SSDs into cases easily.

2.5" drives are so much easier to work with due to their nice size vs. 3.5"

 

[Rubycon]

Eventually they will shrink to 1.8 then 1.0 then eventually everyone will be carrying their stuff around on a card that's also their license to drive, has their payment logs, everything! Ok that may be a little far fetched but some governments would love to do just that. TOAST (Terabytes On A STick)

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Rifterut
I think it will take longer, i mean think about it there is a 2TB spindle drive on the market and you can get a 1TB for under $90, whats the biggest SSD 256GB and it cost what? 500-700 on newegg. Think about how long it took spindles to expand 8 fold, which is what SSD needs to do to catch up in size, and in 4 or 5 years when SSD does hit 2TB spindles will be 6+ by then. I think it willl take a long time for SSD's to catch spindles in price and untill that happens 90% of the market will keep buying spindle because for lots of people the spindle drive performance is good enough for what they do(surf the net, email, facebook etc.) my .02

SSDs already have the tech to expand 8 fold, its just a matter of cost, and cost is going to sharply decrease, right now its expensive because its new, not because the technology is inherently more expensive.

A perfect example is oled tech, it is supposed to be several times CHEAPER than LCD, but due to being so new its much more expensive at the moment. but as production ramps up it will fall into predicted costs, it is not terribly difficult to predict the cost to manufacture something in bulk.

 

[ArizonaSteve]

At what point will memristor based drives start taking over? I expect these to offer another one or two orders of magnitude decrease in access times, and remove the issues associated with wear leveling since each cell with be able to be written billions of times.

 

[Kraeoss]

Originally posted by: Rubycon
Eventually they will shrink to 1.8 then 1.0 then eventually everyone will be carrying their stuff around on a card that's also their license to drive, has their payment logs, everything! Ok that may be a little far fetched but some governments would love to do just that. TOAST (Terabytes On A STick)

lol sounds like total recall...

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: ArizonaSteve
At what point will memristor based drives start taking over? I expect these to offer another one or two orders of magnitude decrease in access times, and remove the issues associated with wear leveling since each cell with be able to be written billions of times.

Memristor tech lags at least a decade behind other competitive memory technologies such as mram, fram, and phase-change to name a few. It has a LOT of catching up to do before the reliability and production worthiness of Gb density IC's can be fielded.

Originally posted by: Thraxen
Surely I'm not the only one in this situation? I'd need to see SSDs reach sizes of 1TB at prices less than $150, perferably less than $100, before the benefit becomes remotely appealing.

As with CRT's there was a delayed transition in the >19" market because of the cost of LCD's of that size but what people found out is that once LCD's took over the <17" market (where the production volume was) the prices for CRT's >19" actually started increasing because the manufacturing costs for supporting the smaller volume larger CRT market was being subsidized by the volume production of those cheap 14" CRT's.

So my expectation is that once the small capacity spindle drive market is consumed by cheap low capacity SSD's we will reach a point where we find the >1TB drives (or >2TB at that time) could actually start to rise in cost because of the lower volume higher manufacturing costs that will be associated with them. And as the $-volume goes, so too does the R&D investments for the next iteration (as was the case with CRT's) and eventually investments into creating new spindle drives (regardless of capacity) will simply cease.

 

[Thraxen]

Originally posted by: Idontcare
So my expectation is that once the small capacity spindle drive market is consumed by cheap low capacity SSD's we will reach a point where we find the >1TB drives (or >2TB at that time) could actually start to rise in cost because of the lower volume higher manufacturing costs that will be associated with them. And as the $-volume goes, so too does the R&D investments for the next iteration (as was the case with CRT's) and eventually investments into creating new spindle drives (regardless of capacity) will simply cease.

I just hope the transition doesn't take too long. I'm not against SSDs as I firmly believe that solid state drives are the future, I've just gotten used to the luxury of enourmous storage capacities and do not want to have to backpeddle in storage capacity and pay ridiculous prices at the same time. The trade offs just aren't worth it for something like a home file server since the benefits are minimal at best.

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

I'm still worried about SSD's reliability. I read that the cells degrade. Then there is SLC vs MLC. I read that once SLC's are filled they again degrade in performance. Spindle drives are proven and have been around a long time.

 

[AshPhoenix]

I think SSDs will be quite affordable in 2010, of course they will be more expensive than HDDs but the benefits of SSDs are worth it.