Report: SSDs Can't Replace HDDs

Who says we cant have both?

So the only issues are the limited number of writes, and capacity?

Capacity of SSDs have been increasing pretty quickly, so I don't see how that will be a concern for long. Not sure about limited writes, but I'm sure that's being worked on.

"Any plan to replace magnetic hard drives is doomed to failure."

I love it when people try to completely discredit something while it's still in its infancy. SSDs have made great improvements in a very short period of time, and there is much more to come. No sense putting your foot in your mouth this early.

Are they claiming that SSDs are fundamentally limited to 128 bit AES? wtf?
Anyway, for pretty much any security scenario, 128 bit aes will not be your weakest link.

Modern Science (1952) -

The abacus will never be replaced by calculators.
/joke

I`d go with an SSD for the win swap file and/or games or other stuff that need fast read. Then put 2 1Tb drives for storage .

Maybe even 2 SSDs, can they go in Raid or something?

No duh! If it reaches 1tb and cost $100 by the end of the year then no, it won't replace HDD anytime soon. Even the 256gb cost an arm. I rather use the funds to upgrade my graphic card/CPU then SSD.

So, um, TDK basically announced they made a line of SSDs that can compete with HDDs from about 10 years ago in capacity and performance, but with the brand new (read: 6-yera old) SATA interface that every other SDD already uses?

Is the revelation here supposed to be that TDK is supporting extended SATA features such as hot-swap, etc... that other SDDs don't yet support? I'm sort of confused, because there is no such thing as SATA II.

It must be my ignorance, but other than the hardware security these sound like pretty mediocre drives (down right pathetic when capacity is taken into account).

Cordial is full of dumb4sses.
Incryption can be increased it doesn't have to be 128bit.
Capacities will increase.
Prices will decrease.
The housing can be made more durable.
All of thier arguements are shortsighted and seemingly against SSD like they have a bias opinion.

OOOH the security isn't good enough.. well I don't keep top secret information on my PC and the average joe can hack 128bit. Sure if you work for the secret service or FBI perhaps higher incryption will be important but NOT FOR MOST USERS!!

BOTTOM LINE:
All of these things are just the way they are because solid state is still new to the PC markets and still hasn't hit the big time with lower prices and higher capacities but that is only a matter of time. Cordial... what the h3ll were you thinking say some BS like that? NEWS FLASH: YOU'RE WRONG! SSD will become the primary drive in the majority of computers in the future.

This "specialist" really dropped the ball on this one, that is his explanation. SSDs are PERFECT for laptops and netbooks. It is a native 2.5" device that weighs less, consumes less power, produces less heat, and is more durable than hard drives. Those are all welcome improvements over hard drives especially in mobile devices. If you drop your laptop or netbook, there is a good chance your magnetic hard drive is toast. At least with an SSD, losing your saved information is about the least of your worries. The only thing that SSDs lack still is: Capacity, price, and optimization for current operating systems. Windows 7 is planning to fix the later.

I'm not concerned about capacity, that's rising quickly and the prices will eventually drop, making SSDs ideal for backup purposes with their fast reads and limited writes. The problem that would prevent them from mainstream use would be a permanent solution to lousy/limited writes. It seems like most of the solutions are just temporary fixes, and solutions that cripple performance in other areas, such as killing buffers and caches.

I wouldn't say it can replace traditional hard drives until about 2012-2015 when the technology is a lot more matured and have higher capacity.

It's not going to overtake magnetic HDDs anytime soon but saying they are "Doomed to failure" is going too far. While I would never replace my magnetic HDDs with the current SSDs (Mostly because I can't afford the $50,000 it would cost to replace the TBs of HDDs) I will definently be putting 2 of them in Raid0 in my Media Center for faster boot speeds!

Yeah, like the man said, they have their place....in the same computer. As everyone else has said on this post, us as primary HDD for install programs and OS. Use a secondary magnetic storage for swap space, personal document storage, backups, and anything that you know gets written to a lot. This will give you the best of both worlds. And if your 1 TB secondary storage speed is too slow, add second or third 1 TB and raid them to improve read times.

P.S. And in the future after we get 512 GB SSD's for $100 with 1 million writes, and 5 year warranties this same guy will say that crystal matrix storage will fail at replacing SSD.

Heh from a 64mb pen drive to 80gb SSD to 512gb - it will make it beyond the classic HDD in no time without a doubt.

Years back HDD's started, inreasing a couple of MB, then GB, now TB but with performance verry slowly increasing - the only way up soon is with a technology change - SSD.

Limited writes? New tech = more storage, less space - it can be traded to be less storage, more writes (replacement sectors) - and its not as if HDD's dont get bad sectors and/or fail (they also have "spares" - write reallocate), how many decent Intel SSD's do you hear about having issues? dont count the other little "amateur" companies.

Over 33% of HDD's within 1 year develop bad sectors - mostly becuase of too much crap running on the system "thrashing" the HDD, or because its poorly cooled causing more friction on the heads/platters (above 50ºc its whole life).

You still gotta hand it to the normal HHDs which can survive (as in some info can be still recovered) pretty bad events like fire etc. But just saying SSDs are bound to fail is pathetic and LOLable.

what a load of BS, they are doomed to fail because they don't have enough capacity? like capacity will never go up? and who cares about encryption!! they are faster, have no noise or vibration, they don't damage as easily when knocked around. they do have the ability to use less power per MB/s. the only place they fall down in is with the limited writes, but most drives come with a warranty and MTBF matching normal HDDs anyway.

Predicting the future is difficult. Especially when it comes to technology.

I remember in the 70's that scientists were suggesting that we cover the polar ice caps with ash or soot to prevent global cooling. This would absorb the sun's energy instead of reflect it. ( No joke here )

Anybody commenting with absolutes is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

I don't understand- SSD's have been used for a good time in business-class notebooks, and actually a pretty good time in netbooks.

It would bother me to buy a device with limited write capacity, but I don't know how that works out in reality. Sure there are lots of files that don't get rewritten frequently, but the FAT is written to constantly. I don't know how that is managed with an SSD. Surely this aspect of the drives will be improved with time.

Lots of people don't need huge hard drives. My 5.5 year old Dell laptop came with a 30GB drive and it took me 5 years to fill it up.

I'm hoping the IBM 'racetrack' technology or whatever it is called will result in SSD's with no re-write issues and truly massive capacities.

I have had over 10 HDDs fail in 7 years.. SSDs for me from now.

How on earth does that guy think..
"...but cannot replace the flexibility and longevity that magnetic drives..."
could be true.

i rather get 2 7200rpm 16MB cache 2.5" SATA II HDD and put them on RAID 0

ssd's are particularly superior in laptops because laptops are almost never on a gyroscopic plane... working at a place that repairs pc's shows that people mostly lose data because they drop or just flat out USE their laptops.... ssd's are great for this... limited capacity wouldn't be an issue in the mainstream considering MOST of my laptop owning customers owned anywhere from 20-60 gig HDD's... pathetic really for this day in age, but there's always external storage solutions for people that NEED massive amounts of data storage.

I'm of the opinion that given time SSD's will eventually replace HDD. As time goes on the processing to make SSD's will keep getting smaller and cheaper. HDD's from what I gather are coming to a period where if they go any smaller the data becomes more and more unstable. Were just in a period of time of transition just like we were when Floppy Disks changed over to CD's. More like when we went from the huge Floppy Disks to the small ones.
Here is how I see it and I might just be wrong but I don't think I am.
Right now HDD's give a lot of bang for your buck. You can get a 1 TB HDD for under a $100 but there is some risk for that Storage. Not a lot of risk but it is there.
SSD's on the other hand are still fairly expensive. Not expensive like one year ago expensive but still a fair amount. It's still in it's infant stage so kind of risky also. Storage Wise it's still pretty small. Energy use is less, no moving parts so less heat, and durable. Think the biggest SSD is 250 GB's but average is around 64 GB's. Still, unknown about long term wear and tear.
There isn't a HDD that can meet the speeds of a decent SSD and with the cost almost at the consumer level I can see Desktop Computers begining to become a Hybrid of sorts. OS on a SSD and Media Storage on HDD's is what I'm looking at and if I'm looking at it then I know others are too.
Pretty cool all in all if you ask me.

SSDs are definetly not for swap files. That is a big no no.

The two biggest downfalls of SSDs are cost and lifespan. Cost will go down slowly but surely. I'm not sure about lifespan.

I do tech support for a company that just released new laptops with SSDs. We are not allowed to run a chkdsk on them as that will add a tremendous amount of wear on them.

This is good technology if they can get the lifespan part right. I think I will wait for next generation SSDs before spending more on one than a GPU or CPU. I want it to be an OS install and right now they suck for that purpose due to the constant writes that will reduce the lifespan to a couple of years at most.

We have over 5k of them deployed right now. I'll give you an update if I see any trends.

"use single/multi-layer cell"
that should be s/m-level-c, at it refers to how many (as a power of 2) discrete level bands are used in a single storage cell

"128-bit AES encryption that has been officially registered with the US government (FIPS PUB 197)"
back-door anyone?

I think its Andy Cordial who is "doomed to failure", especially when in 24 months time SSD drives will cover 50% of all notebooks being sold.

You, sir, are a bloody idiot... along with whoever gives you your paycheck!

If you think you are going to crack 128bit AES without seti@home behind you, you have another things coming.

I don't recall the numbers but I recall one estimate that if it were written to non-stop you wouldn't get to the mtbf number for 10 years. I imagine that was calculated at 100MB/s or something so ymmv depending on drive specs.

What a bunch of misinformation, I wonder who's paying them? On top of what has already been commented here, the number of write cycles mentioned is very misleading.

That 50k-100k is per FLASH IC sector, but there's something that goes on inside these drives called wear leveling which moves often written data (like the FAT) to less written sectors so they don't wear our a single sector. For example if the 16GB SSD is made up of 128kB sectors then it has 125,000 sectors each with 50k-100k write cycles, so in theory you can do 125,000 sectors x 50,000 cycles = 6.25 billion write cycles. This isn't just theory, I've tested longevity on 128MB Compact FLASH cards and even they were able to endure millions of writes to the same ATA logical sector.

So SSDs may not replace every laptop application out there as few technologies can, but they will replace most in a very short time.

I'd take a scorpio black over this ssd any day. A tad faster, but much more space (320gb) and probably cheaper.