SSDs and TCO
One of the best arguments to use an SSD is also one of the most difficult ways to sell anything. This is the Total Cost of Ownership, commonly abbreviated to “TCO.”
TCO has been used as an argument for buying anything from compact fluorescent bulbs to Jaguar automobiles.
The argument usually revolves around an item whose initial price is higher, but which has lower ongoing (or operating) costs, and when these costs are combined, the higher-priced item proves to cost less to own over the long run. In the case of a compact fluorescent (CF) bulb, the bulb may cost $7, versus $1 for an incandescent bulb, but it consumes 18 Watts compared to the 75 Watts consumed by the incandescent bulb it replaces. In addition the CF bulb lasts ten times as long (10,000 hours vs. 1,000 hours.) This works out to a savings of 470 kWh – or about $50 – plus $3 in bulb costs. Continue reading
Why Don’t HDDs Spin Faster than 15K RPM?
Some folks who look at the speed difference between HDDs and SSDs ask themselves why HDD makers don’t defend their market against the SSD menace by cranking the speed beyond 15,000 RPM. An unfortunately popular answer is that the edge of the HDD would have to break the sound barrier and the HDD would shatter. Is this true?
With a little back-of-the-envelope calculation The SSD Guy can rapidly disprove this. (Forgive me, but I am going to mix metric and English measure here.)
The speed of sound is Continue reading
SNW SSD Shortage
At this week’s Storage Networking World (SNW) conference there was no shortage of SSD presentations, but none of the keynoters who shared their data center experiences had deployed any SSDs in their systems.
This seemed particularly odd to The SSD Guy since the MySQL conference I have been attending for some time has fewer SSD presentations simply because almost everyone who attends that conference already uses SSDs.
Why is there such an odd disparity?
The simple reason is that Continue reading
Avnet’s SSD Virtual Summit
On April 3 & 4 Avnet Embedded will host an on-line conference called the SSD Virtual Summit. This free on-demand seminar will feature a keynote by Yours Truly, The SSD Guy, and presentations by leading SSD makers and related firms including Adaptech, Crucial, Dell, HGST, Intel, Kingston, LSI, Micron, OCZ, Rorke Data, Seagate, SMART Storage, STEC, and Toshiba.
Come join in to learn the latest information on SSDs.
