512GB SSDs by 2009
One year ago, IT analyst predicted that SSDs won’t be posing much of a threat for the good ol’ HDDs sooner than 2011, but looks like somebody underestimated Toshiba and its powers. Toshiba is one of the first SSD makers that sought to improve capacities and cut down prices and they sure know what they are doing as they recently announced some competitive plans for their upcoming SSD lineup.
Toshiba thinks it can quadruple the capacity of its solid-state drives by 2009, and at the same time cut the production costs. Toshiba semiconductor chief Shozo Saito claims that process refinements will let the improved SSDs store up to four data bits per memory cell and shrink the chip-making process to 30 nanometers by the end of 2009, allowing the company to offer a 512GB drive in that timeframe.
Having SSDs that can store that much info is one thing, but knowing that a 128GB solid-state drive is currently priced around $1,000, what would Toshiba do in order to make the bigger drives more affordable? The Japanese are confident that by fitting more data into a given space, they will also be reducing the cost of making flash memory itself. Moreover, Saito points out that the company can reduce the price of making SSDs by as much as 40 to 50 percent every year, resulting in far less expensive drives at greater storage levels.
While I’m happy to hear SSDs will soon reach 1TB capacities, I can’t really figure out the prices for such storage devices. Sure we need more and more storage space, but we also want these devices to cost as low as the current HDDs and that won’t be happening sooner than analysts previously predicted.
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Comments
This is very interesting. I remember hearing somewhere that a concern with SSDs is that the number of times you can write and rewrite data to a SSD is significantly less than HDDs… Am I wrong? If not, is this still a concern?
This really doesn’t suggest they’re going to pose a threat to HDDs any sooner than projected. Reaching 512MB by next year seems perfectly reasonable, but they’ll do so at best with prices comparable to the current largest SSDs. It will be easily a couple of years after that before the prices are low enough for them to be a genuinely feasible option. Capacity and availability are not as important as cost.
Some may argue that the cost isn’t an issue to large businesses who would benefit from this, but outside of CEOs buying their own notebooks, businesses are as price-conscious as consumers, and buy based on corporate discounts, bulk deals, sales, and downgrading the specs requested by their employees. Such a frill as a $1,000 SSD would be one of the first things to go out the window.
Jason: The very definition of an SSD generally is a replacement for a hard drive form factor. They don’t generally refer to USB flash drives or camera memory cards as SSDs.
Tyler: From what I’m aware, you are quite correct. This is an issue that’s constantly swept under the rug. Assuming no mechanical failure, a standard hard drive can easily outlast one of these under ideal conditions. SSDs merely have an advantage when it comes to physical durability (no moving parts means better shock resistance), not longevity. Speed is still arguable, too, as in real-world applications the advantage is frequently minor, and occasionally reversed. HDDs still perform better on sustained read/write operations (single large files). There are some techniques for balancing out where the data is written, though, to help decrease these longevity issues. People very rarely manage to wear out flash drives, so with some effort put in to counter these issues, SSDs should do all right. But I wouldn’t rely on one without a backup.
My optimum would be a small SSD just for my boot partition, then a large hard drive for the rest of my data. Then as long as the boot partition’s backed up regularly, I’m comfortable.
An SSD boot partition is actually a good idea. It really speeds up the OS startup, but you also have to seriously consider backing it up nonetheless due to all those rewrite problems. Hopefully, they’ll fix this issue later this year.
Very nice, but regular HDDs will survive for quite a while. By that time, a 1.5TB HDD will probably cost about $150 - and I really doubt the 512GB SSD will be any less than, what, $850?
SSDs are the future, when it comes to speed. For raw storage, magnetic media is far from dead.
I agree with TurboFull, having two hard drives, one SSD and one regular HD would be the best solution - if used on a desktop computer only. Why? Because that basically means that mainstream laptops will never be the size of a MBA or smaller.
Imagine the possibilities of a high-capacity SSD on a cellphone. That would be awesome, and it wouldn’t surprise me if phones with multi-terabyte hard drives appear within the next 5-10 years.
I wonder if it will be more of a USB type drive, camera card, or a hard drive for a computer.