We were invited to speak on two panels at this year's 2011 Flash Memory Summit. Now that the conference is over, we wanted to circle back with some thoughts on what we saw and provide an explanation as to why we test SSDs the way that we do.
The Flash Memory Summit, which was in Santa Clara from August 9th-11th, isn’t the sort of event that we usually attend because it’s a place for manufacturers to discuss design and development. Personally, I always find these conferences fascinating, but if you were there, you had to expect workshops filled with engineers and product managers delving into technical minutia. This would basically be cruel and unusual punishment for anyone who used to fall asleep in the back of Physics 101 (Ed.: it was Physics 1A at UCLA, and yes, I did).
Someone's sleeping in the back....
That’s why we tend to report from trade shows like Computex and CES. Those are the consumer-oriented events where we get to present the efforts of all of that engineering work. Flash storage is really starting to take center stage, though. So, for the first time, we were invited to speak on two different panels at this year's 2011 Flash Memory Summit, covering benchmarking and SSD adoption.
The conference wanted someone to pass along the perspectives of consumer and enterprise end users. Of course, if you follow us on Facebook, none of this should come as a surprise. We've been peppering the page with polls on SSD technology to make sure we were best representing your thoughts during the conference.
With the show now over, we wanted to share some of what we heard from the manufacturing side and provide our own responses.
lastly, wanting to upgrade will mean having to upgrade both, instead of one. I think this is one of the reasons why the XT was never so popular...
O.T - nice read. It did feel a bit as though it was stopped in the middle..
That was exactly what I was thinking. I was looking for the "next page" button but couldn't find it. I was like wtf? went back to the first page to look at the index finding it really ended there
LOL me too!!!
For me personally I am willing to drop up to $120 on a SSD but that is the breaking poing for me and I am not willing to settle for anything less than 120GB due to the performance drop in smaller SSD's and also how much space I need for my OS and other apps (and no I am not counting data like movies or pics).
The main thing holding me off on purchasing a SSD right now is the lack of confidence in reliability. The bugs in Intel, Sandforce, and whatever controller crucial uses in the m4 makes me worried. Just looking at articles here and user reviews on NewEgg was enough for me to get gun shy and wait. There are few things I hate more than having to setup my system and even though I can ghost my boot drive there will always be some loss in a drive failure and that is just something I want to avoid if I can. Unfortunately it just seems like owning a SSD right now leaves too high a risk of drive failure. Plus it does not help reading how manufacturers refuse to comment or give any real hard data on reliability.
When prices and size ratio meet this price standards then I would take a serious look into SSD's.
Have in mind that current 2TB hard drives are under $100 dollars (true they are green drives). But when a SSD per GB cost 10 to 20 times as much a hard drive is just not right to me.
It's no different than spending $200+ on the latest Sandy Bridge CPU instead of $100 on a perfectly capable Phenom. Or spending more than twice as much for performance RAM over value RAM (even though the speed benefits of performance RAM are practically non-existent compared to the difference between an SSD and an HDD). Or getting a dGPU rather than using the iGPU that comes with your CPU.
Plus, the value of an SSD climbs when you consider that you're almost guaranteed to be able to carry it over to your next build, and the one after that. Probably even the one after that.
I personally think that the SSDs will become really attractive when a 120GB SSD costs about $150, though i think 1$/GB should be the target. Reliability too. I'm holding off a SSD purchase for a 2 or 3 years, when their statistics would be more developed and their price and bugs would be lowered.
The minimum size for me is 120-128 Gb but that is still tight with my current system and programs, so the right size would be 256 Gb which costs as much as whole Desktop.