Hard drives to go the way of the dodo

5/5/2007

In a few years, the hard drive as we know it today will not be as commonly used. Magnetic platter hard drives (The kind we use today) will remain around for a while in niches, but especially in portable applications they will become rare. Why?

The answer is simple, solid state drives (SSD) have come of age. They are still quite expensive, but this year is the first year I can confidently say they will start to make a real entrance. SSD's are faster (currently about 6 times faster), more reliable, are not susceptible to motion shock, use less power, and can operate at lower pressurizations (important for amateur pilots). In short, they are better than traditional hard drives in nearly every way.

Comparison from Samsung website

If they are so much better, why are they not used everywhere today? Because of the only major disadvantage, cost per megabyte. Currently a 32 GB SSD costs about $350, while for about $100 you can but 500 GB as a traditional hard drive. The price difference is very large, but as volumes increase and manufacturing technology improves, prices will drop. The first SSD I saw was basically hacked together card with a battery and a bunch of RAM. SSD's have come a long way since then. While SSD's are still costly, they are becoming of great interest in portable applications, and as prices drop they will become more so.

Traditional disks will remain king for a while in desktop and server applications, and lets not forget that traditional hard disk technology is not sitting still either. It is also getting cheaper and faster. Where SSD is likely to be used in desktops is for caching. Hybrid hard disks already exist, and I can see a configuration where a desktop has two independent disks, an SSD for primary and caching (as SSD's become cheaper than actual RAM) and a traditional disk for extended storage.

Portable Devices

In most computers, the disk has always been the bottleneck. That is why in my powerful portable I used RAID 0. I recently purchased a tablet, the Motion Computing LS800. It is a wonderful device, and of course the disk again is the bottleneck. When the Samsung 64 GB model ships, I will upgrade it and I expect to see a speed improvement of a factor 2 - 4 times for most functions. In fact some companies are already doing upgrades to the LS800 with existing SSD's. The LS800 is over 2 years old though, I expect in the next year or so Motion Computing will ship a replacement for it, maybe they will include SSD as an option.

Resources

• Samsung Announces 64 GB Solid State Drive
• SAMSUNG Introduces 1.8” - Type 64GB Flash-based Solid State Drive
• Bringing Solid State Drive Benefits to Computer Notebook Users (PDF)
• SanDisk SSD product brochure (PDF)
  

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