2011 Flash Memory Summit Recap: Tom's Hardware Represents
Jumping On The SSD Bandwagon
Many manufacturers don't seem to give their customers much credit. There's this idea that all we need is more education, and once everyone understands the benefits of SSD caching, hybrid drives, and standalone SSDs, they'll be more willing to embrace the higher cost of solid-state storage.
We don't necessarily agree. You don't have to be an enthusiast to know that SSDs offer a significantly different experience than hard drives. The New York Times recently interviewed our editor-in-chief Chris Angelini for a story on solid-state storage. Assuredly, this is not a fringe technology misunderstood by the mainstream.
The issue, really, is cost. As many of our readers pointed out in a recent poll, they purposely pick mobile technology with conventional storage. It's not that they aren’t interested in the performance benefits of an SSD. Rather, there's a limit to how much most people are willing to spend on a more responsive storage subsystem. And as you can see in the chart below, very few folks are willing to sacrifice another feature to fit an SSD in a given budget.
This same poll was also conducted back in 2006 by IDC, and the results are largely the same. It’s very clear that most people are only willing to accept a 10% price premium for a notebook with an SSD. A majority of those who don't cap the expenditure at 20%.
When it comes to mobility, most folks seem to agree that durability is a nice benefit. However, it's clearly not the primary motivator behind SSD purchases.
Everyone at the conference seemed to agree that SSDs won’t replace hard drives as a result of the cost factor. The price you pay per gigabyte of solid-state memory is significantly higher than magnetic storage, and may always be. Since that constant isn't expected to change any time soon, we spent some time discussing a few other peripheral issues.
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.