When do you think SSD are going to go mainstream?

I am really interested in SSDs as I am sure many people here are. The only bottleneck or weak link in my machine is the hardrive. I new this would be the case, so I bought the lowest hardrive in the hopes of upgrading it. I was planning on getting the the 7K200 Hitachi or the 7K320 WD drive, but now with SSDs hitting the market I think it would be best to go for one due to their huge speed increases.

I am aware the OCZ is selling their SSD now with pretty good reductions, but they are still too expensive for me.

I don't want to pay the huge preimum right now and am trying to wait patiently till capacities increase and prices go down for SSDs. At the same time I don't want to wait years to get a new drive.

My question is when do you folks expect prices to go down significantly and capacity increase to the point where these drives will become more affordable and mainstream? Is it worth waiting for them? I would hate to buy a drive now and then 6 months from now get rid of it for a SSD but at the same time I don't want to wait for years and get to the point where my machine is very old and I don't feel like upgrading it.

 

Well I really don't know but it better be like yesterday, because next year i'm purchasing a new notebook and an SSD will be inside of it. So i'm hoping and guessing by next year this time it would be mainstream...and the storage, i'm not worried about that..[ Click] but as for the prices, it's that i'm worried about..I don't think they will be coming down much anytime soon..so I think i'll have to live w/ that.

Edit: As for is it worth waiting for them?...my simple answer would be yes. IMO it's a matter of what's important to u. From the benchmarks and tests i've seen, there's no way that I would go back to a HDD. Unless it's just for storage.

 

At their current rate, Id say 12-18 months we should be seeing SSD start making their way mainsteam (mainstream = bestbuy laptops etc..).

 

Less than a year .

 

When there is more competition you will have lower prices, so look for multiple brands of SSD's and then expect a lower price.

 

When their storage capacity goes up ALOT they will become mainstream.

90% or more of computer users dont give a crap what kind of hard drive is in their machine. They just want the largest capacity for the cheapest money.

A drive with a 1ms access time isnt going to impress joe schmoe the guy that needs a word processor and internet box that every now and then plays a game of warcraft when it is VERY small in capacity and VERY expensive

Now the realibility factor is a big deal, but with computers being what they are a 100 year life cycle is pretty unimportant really... i mean if a HDD lasts 10 years its more than made ti in my book as i dont own the same hard drive i did 10 years ago... and i bet most people dont either.

I figure hybrid users will become more active in the next year or two. Where they use the SDD for the OS and a traditional drive for their storage needs.

But until SSD's can get a LARGE storage capacity improvement i doubt you'll see the drives main stream. Because to most people it will feel like going backwards.

 

Yeah, when their storage capacity goes up and their price comes down. Sure theres the cheaper versions, but they only have a data retention rate of about 7 years, which isn't really much at all. :/

They just have to get to the point where storage capacities are at least 320GB or at least 80GB within the highest capacity consumer accessible hard drive that is mainstream like the 320GB in Dell, HP, etc.

 

You can read an interesting interview of Seagate's CEO, Bill Watkins here.

According to him "It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with hard drives on price and reliability"
"they won't be in laptops in the next few years"
"Seagate has no plans to release SSD drives for consumers as the high prices could deter them for the next few years"
"If the cost-per-gigabyte comes down to 10 cents, maybe, Seagate will focus on SSD storage for consumers"
"SSDs also have write issues, with cells in the drives deteriorating quickly and reducing storage capacity, a general problem that plagues flash drives."

 

So my text just disappeared...but the gist of it was, SSD's aren't going to be mainstream for three or four years at least. They'll be sort of like Blu-Ray - pretty slow uptake until they hit a critical price point. And even with about 40% lower cost for the same size each year, it'll take several years for them to get there.

Also remember that even if an SSD becomes competitive purely on cost, it'll take longer for them to be competitive on storage as well. Not many people will buy a 64 GB SSD for the same price as a 500 GB hard drive.

Finally, the hard drive companies have been making great strides recently. A year ago, the best you could get was 200 GB, 7200 RPM, or 250 or 320 5400 (320 was just coming out). Now you can get 320/7200 and 500/5400. And by the end of the year you'll be able to get 500/7200. The hard drive manufacturers are doing great; I'd go with a 320/7200 now (huge upgrade from 80/5400) and enjoy it while saving a cool few hundred to few thousand.

Not to mention that fast desktop drives are still faster than SSD's. Or RAID 0/5 in notebooks or desktops - not that you couldn't RAID SSD's, but it's not like that's even remotely affordable.

 

I think it has gotten to the point where we make normal HD so good that there will not be a swich for a few years. And by then most storage will be online and people will need small HDs.

just what I think might happen. Because SSDs just got to 320GB and normal HDs can do 1.5TB

 

And Bill Gates once said in print, "why would anyone need more than 64K of memory in a pc?" LMA

Waves of technology crash on all shores, whether the communities that live on the coast are ready or not...

 

for notebooks, they get mainstream quite soon i'd guess. there, they really help to make a notebook so much faster and snappy, a very good selling point (and the don't care if you drop it - feature).

for desktops, i'd guess not for a long time. in the higher end, they'll put in small ones together with a big tera-disk.

but with the next price-drop, i'll suggest them _everyone_ if they think they pc/nb need an update (or they need a new pc/nb).

 

I think #1 & #2 are there, but #3 is still too high. 64gb OCZ is $239 after rebates.

 

Wow, all very interesting comments. So there are some that say in 3 to 4 years and others that say in roughly a year. I agree, the more competition, the better the products produced and the quicker prices will go down, but to get that competition there has to be market demand for companies to want to get into the business on producing these drives. A catch 22 situation.....

So another question: When do you think prices will start going down to the point where a 200 GB SSD will cost about $100 to $200 dollars? It looks like regular drives will always offer better $/space ratio but when will SSDs come into the reasonable price zone?

 

I think once the price gets into the $2/gigabyte range, sales will increase exponentially for mobile applications.

 

Not so much a cach 22. Technology has a tendency to be created just because it can be created. The original SSD's were stupidly expensive and offered nothing except for slightly higher preformance. it wasnt even that big of a gain. But the technology pushed ahead and now is being persued by alot of diffrent companies.

As to your second question. I would give it about 2-3 more years before you reach the critical (IMO) 1 dollar per GB. But unfortunatly i see none of them making larger drives. Now in 3 years they will have more than likely reached the cap of the SATAii capabilities so you will have UNGODLY speeds from the drives...but even in 3 years time i'm unsure if they will even have a 256gb drive.

But that goes back to my Hybrid users statement. Most people at that point will be using a 128gb SSD for their OS and programs, but will use a traditional HD for their data (which at that point will be around 1TB+ in a 2.5in drive)

 

When it is only ~20-30% more expensive for a SSD than a HDD with equal capacity.

 

I am a little surprised that Intel Turbo Memory 2 is only 2GB. 8GB would probably be enough to hold all the most frequently used files for both the operating system and programs and provide many of the speed benefits of SSD. However, I recall that Intel is planning to move into the SSD market so it might see large size Turbo Memory as unwanted competition to SSDs.

John

 

I always wondered, how well would a game perform off a high-speed memory stick like off a Sandisk Extreme 3?

 

Samsung announces crazy fast 256GB SSD


Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing for Samsung Semiconductor, proclaimed that it was "trying to double SSD capacity every 12 months
Samsung's SSD plans

 

Nikolas... you are my hero.

If that pans out then by 2010 we'll be sporting 512gb SSD's and by that point the price will bearound the 1-2 dollar a GB range.

Combined with the speed of this drive this bodes well for the SSD in the near future

 

Well as I was saying in post #2. The storage space is bound to go up...but the costs is the only downside to SSDs IMO.

 

I was looking around the web last night and read various articles on SSDs and peoples predictions as to their success, their cost etc. It looks like there are 2 different types of SSDs, one that uses MLC memory and one that uses SLC memory. The SLC is the faster kind and has insane speed. I read something in the order of 200 Mbps read and 160 Mbps write!!! But these types of drives are very expensive so the industry seems to be going to MLC memory(cheaper and slower too) to help in the reduction of cost for these drives so that they can penetrate the market. I was a little dissapointed with that.

So it looks like even if SSDs become more common, the first set of them will probably use the slower memory and might not offer as dramatic a difference in speed than regular hardrives.

As was alluded to before, I think SSDs will have a better market with laptops due to their increased ability to handle shock, battery life and heat. The only way I see them really becoming popular in the desktop market is on raw speed alone.

 

Clearly you aren't following the SSD market. Earlier generations of SSD have been based on SLC, and have high performance and high cost. The newer "cheaper" SSDs are based on MLC. However, the performance differential seems to be be more of a function of implementation than technology used.

SSDs are going to be in a state of rapid evolution over the next several years. It'll break down to SSDs taking over all but the truly massive storage requirements and mechanical spindles taking what's left. That too will change over time. Eventually (say 10 years or so) it may be difficult to purchase a mechanical spindle.

I disagree. The speed of SSDs is simply blinding when it comes to many desktop operations, like loading applications. I think that the transition of laptops to SSDs will act as the impetus to move desktops that way.

As far as raw speed alone, SSDs are comparable in performance to all but the fastest of the 10K consumer drives. And there are aspects of performance that they still make the 10K drive seem slow.

Cheers,

 

I figure I will get one for my desktop first. Mainly becasue I do not use my lappy that much

Come on INTEL, quit being so damn slow with your SSD and get me one NOW!

 

It might be possible to run a very quiet machine with SSDs instead of mechanical spindles in a desktop. I'm rebuilding my HTPC with an SSD in the near future.

Best,

 

i think that SSD's will go mainstream soon followed by memristors. Its just time that we need to make them cheaper.

 

That 256GB Samsung drive looks tantalizing.
I'll wait until it's $200 on eBay.

 

Hard drives are still faster most of the time.

 

I read recently that some company (sigh forget which) has made some major headway in increasing the potential lifespan of flash drives to the point where they become reliable alternatives to standard HDDs.

I'd probably agree with most people in this thread who say it'll be ~3 years before we see industry wide competition making mass-produced, reliable, (relatively) low-cost flash drives.