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Solid State Drives Could Replace Hard Drives |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Tuesday, 18 July 2006 |
Industry research outfit In-Stat has made the bold assertion
that solid state (Flash Memory) storage could supplant the traditional hard
disk drive in laptop computers in the near future.
Less than two months ago Samsung was the first vendor to
get rid of the hard disk in a laptop and its Origami device, followed
shortly after by Sony.
There are significant performance advantages to using solid
state storage rather than spinning disks, but the economics of Flash memory
currently make this option a premium choice.
To be fair in-Stat says it might take ten years for Flash
drives to replace hard drives, but it's confident that solid state drives (SSD)
are up to the task and could reach a 50 per cent share by 2013.
The research was driven by In-Stat's survey of 389 mobile
computer users, which allowed primary insight into consumers' valuation of SSD
in mobile computers.
From the research, In-Stat weighed the perceived benefits of
SSDs with the rapidly declining cost/gigabyte trends of Flash to develop a
demand sensitive forecasting model.
"The HDD industry has done a phenomenal job of driving
areal densities; however, it is clear that there are user segments for which
drive capacities far exceed the user's need," says Frank Dickson, In-Stat
analyst.
"When one examines the declining cost trends for Flash,
the user's need for storage and the premium that consumers place on the
benefits provided by SSDs, it is easy to see that there will be a clear demand
for SSDs."
The research showed up that almost two thirds of respondents
are comfortable paying extra for SSDs in mobile computers and the big reason
for this was the power savings of memory over spinning disks.
In-Stat says crunch tome for SSDs comes about 2010 at which
point they start to become an economically viable alternative to a wider base
of consumers.
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