SSDs Replacing HDDs Soon? Not A Chance
Solid state drives are all the rage recently. But within the hype, the reality of having SSD drives dominate the market is a little far from actuality at this point. Of course, we're all excited about the potential of SSDs and the rate that manufacturers are improving on the technology make them increasingly delicious.
The buzz on the Internet however, is that SSDs will be taking over the internal storage market fairly soon. I'm going to have to go out on a limb here and say that this is just rubbish. Manufacturer marketing aside, traditional magnetic HDD storage will remain the dominant storage solution for a few more years to come--and I'm not talking about a paltry one to two years either.
Would I like to have SSDs in my laptop and my desktop? Absolutely. Would it make financial sense to do so at this point? No.
The fact of the matter is, HDDs have a huge leg up on SSDs in terms of storage and the cost per gigabyte. With 1.5 TB drives selling for less than $150 now, it just makes capacity sense to stay away from SSDs. In terms of size, there's just no comparison. With perpendicular recording technology now in the mainstream, HDDs will continue to get denser at an alarming rate. Manufacturers have stated that HDDs are expected to reach up to 10 TB in the next two to three years.
Right now, SSD drives are sitting typically at 128 GB and 256 GB options. I don't remember the last time drives of this size were popular--obviously too long ago. The race to cram more gigabytes is also escalating. With the cost of current SSDs, the technology remains out of the hands of most people. This however, is understandable and occurs with most new emerging technologies.
We took a quick look online to see what we could get for $150--nowadays a lot of green to pony up on storage. What we found was that a Transcend TS16GSSD25-S-J 16 GB drive was available for roughly that price. For about $30 less though, we're able to run off with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5 TB HDD.
For archiving purposes, HDD storage capacities and prices beat SDDs hands down. There's absolutely no contest. While companies like Toshiba have announced 512 GB drives, they no doubt will cost both your arms and legs. Intel's zippy 32 GB SSDSA2SH032G1 X25-E Extreme costs a whopping $720.
They still made and had demand for (still do) CRTs long after it was the 'year of the LCD'.
C'mon, the year of the SSD is when they start making sense as a primary drive for many enthusiasts, not as a dump/data bulk drive for joe know-nuttin' who would buy a 4KRPM drive if he could to save $5 on his DELL build. The point at which people start thinking of getting an SSD as their primary drive (even if they have an HDD as their data drive), that's the year of the SSD. Heck the netbooks have started the opposite end of the trend along with devices like ipods/iphone, flash equipped smart devices, the era of the SSD is well under way.
And with the number of SDHC HD camcorders increasing and the demand for 32GB and 64GB cards increasing (*fixed M/GB typo), don't be surprised if slow (relative to others, 40MB/s isn't THAT slow) SSDs don't also start showing up to take the role of those large capacity external HDDs that usually already choke at 30MB/s due to the usual USB interface they are connected to. I suspect 2009 will be the last year for the HDD camcorders and the flash drives are the only thing left in 2010. SSDs replacing HDDs anytime soon? They already have. Just not all of them.
That HDDs relegate themselves to large storage roles makes it no less the year of the SSD than the continued presence of RJ-45/ethernet inhibits it being the era of wireless.
Don't forget there are plenty of people out there still using PCs with drives of 20GB or even less anyway, and they're not exactly suffering. For most people 500GB is far more than they want or need.
And organisations don't want large amounts of data on their laptops either - they want PCs with small disks so that their users are FORCED to store the data in their document management systems or at least their big beefy central servers... which, yes, shockingly enough, will be running on HDDs for some time yet...
1.5 TB not GB?
And why do you discount using SSD as a system/program drive for fast boot/load times while using the HDD as a "data" drive. I see this as a common theme in the early years especially if MS makes it easy to move all 'write-likely' files to a seperate volume (ie: registry, log files, inf's, cache's...). If the SSD is getting little work in the 'write-cycle' mode it will last a very long time.
1) The reliability issue of using an SSD for OS & programs for 5+ years at heavy usage
2) Price comparison between different SSDs, velicoraptors, and different raid and scsi configurations
3) SSD speed vs running cheap raid 0 striping configurations (I use 2 Hitatchi HDT725032vla's 320 gb for under $50 a piece on a 780i nforce board and I'm pretty satisfied) and more expensive raid setups such as with scsis, velicorpaters, and cheetahs
4) The difference between the two main types of ssds
I think this would make a great article.
If a reliable ssd of ~64 GB for under $200 could be had and would beat out raid configurations of similar prices, then I believe it would prove worthwhile. So the question really remains, for program and OS usage, can we use SSDs for superior performance at reasonable prices. We can even consider store temp folders and the paging file off on another HDD. And of course, if you need your movies, you put them on one of these massive 1-1.5 TB HDDs for under $150. Thanks and I'd love to see something like this!
-Chris
I was going to build myself a NAS server to offload all my data onto rather than having it on various hard drives, tapes and optical disks, but pretty soon realised that 3TB of RAID just wasn't enough to be worthwhile. At 4-8GB per DVD, and 13GB per DV tape, a terabyte vanishes pretty damn fast.
Sure, not everyone needs that much storage, but once you have the ability to put so much of your digital data onto one system -- and, more importantly, never having to delete anything -- you start to wonder how you ever lived without it. And with video sizes ever increasing, 10TB won't seem so large by the time it hits the market; I've been looking at the new low-end Red camera, which burns through about 100GB per hour.
currently over 600gb of stuff on my 1tb drive (with another as a backup), and theres always new stuff to put on them which i add to pretty much every day.
i somehow think hdd's will be around for a little while yet, until ssd come down in price and increase in capacity on at least a level with hdd or close to it the hdd will win.
just need the pcie ssd boards to go mainstream now.
It seems like every time I read an article here on Toms Hardware its about some fellow rebelling against having an SSD in their computer system because of its performance, or capacity, or current state of technology. SSD's right now have a niche market, meaning netbook systems and other devices that are limited in size but want to carry on-board storage. Nothing more. Although I agree that this technology does need more time to mature, it eventually will become the norm (example, price cost of DVD's compared to initial price point of thumb/flash drives).
My point: I like reading about SSD's. I don't like reading about how Joe Blow won't convert to the next best thing because the technology is in its infancy. Find something else that no one else has discussed related to SSD's, you'll draw a bigger crowd.
Really? So you think SSDs will kill the HDDs in 2009 huh?
I'd love to see that too. But that's not going to be happening.
The point of my article is to refute some of the claims made online on various other publications that state that SSDs are putting the final nail on the HDD's coffin.
It may do that, but it isn't going to be anytime soon. HDDs will continue to be vastly more affordable and larger than SSDs for a long time to come. The point is, if you want the best of both, use an SSD for boot and HDD for storage. That's what I said. But that just proves the point that HDDs are not being replaced.
How is this concept other world-like?
On my main PC drive, it's only 160gigs (RAID0). I never fill it. Ever. I run Vista x64 Ultimate. I keep 4 or 5 games installed. I record with Fraps often. I have my apps installed. I download a lot of things. But you know what? I move things off my primary drive to other places if I'm keeping it long term. I have external drives for that. I have several 1tb eSATA drives. I filled a few already. I filled them with DVDs. I use them with my HTPC. I like having two little boxes serve up hundreds of DVDs rather than having binders of discs everywhere.
SSD would be fine for me. Again, I don't store it all on my big capacity drives. My primary system could go to a 128g SSD and it wouldn't affect me other than speed things up. For those of us using RAID, we can get a few 64g SSD's and RAID them for retarded performance. And those SSD's are not expensive so much, in the $70~120 ranges right now.
I agree with the author of this article that SSD will not `dominate' the market soon. But, it is going to be IN the market fast, just like how Bluray is all over the place and consumers ARE buying it, even though DVD is still the largest portion of that market. SSD is already in pre-made systems. It's getting out there. Folk are buying them online. But I don't agree with the author's slow snail pace on how fast the SSD will take over. I think it'll be only the next year before you easily see double capacity and less price. You have to think about the tech and how fast our tech advances. HDD's haven't changed in over a decade. Same tech. SSD's have been around for decades too, just not in this consumer form. The SSD is now going to advance rapidly. Announcements of the 512g's are already there. That's half a tb. People already buy 320, 500, etc drives. An SSD in that range will dominate if the price comes down--which it will, as the manufacturing goes up, the price will come down considerably.
And as for me, as the prices come down on the big ones, I'm more excited to see the price come down on the little ones. Because I'll RAID 4 of those things for disgusting performance. 4 little 32g or 64g drives in RAID0. I don't need a single 500+g drive even on my primary machine. So SSD will be fine for me, and fine for a lot of other people. We can still store long term stuff on older tech platter drives.
The author needs to think outside of the box more.
Very best,
Tech is not a black & white issue. It's one SSD -or- HDD. It's both, there will be a few years of cross coverage. This article lightly touched on it and hinted towards it being used that way. But then focuses on saying, "But SSD will not dominate! Not for a long time!" Get off the box. No one expects the SSD to utterly 100% replace HDD's. You didn't even consider or talk about the business vs. consumer side of things.
So much left out. Can't take it seriously, other than someone whining about the internet on Tom's.
Very best,
I am configuring a new server for my company, and the OS will rest on a 32 gig SSD.
Your title "SSDs Replacing HDDs Soon? Not A Chance : Poor capacities"
Is not accurate. I can tell you first hand that my company will be using SSD's over standard HD's at every possible juncture that SSD's are feasible.
The migration has ALREADY begun--and any IT guy worth his salt will be migrating from HD's to SSD's the moment it is a good option.
Here is the near future: HD's for backup, SSD's for daily operation.
I think 2009 will be the year that SSD's make a definite impact on the storage market.