September 2014 – The SSD Guy Blog

Why Aren’t SSDs Popular in New PCs?

For the past decade I have been asked when SSDs will overtake HDDs in the PC market- when will more PCs ship with an SSD than with an HDD?

My usual reply is: “Never!” I then go on to explain that two factors work against this ever happening. The first is the fact that SSD prices are unlikely to ever match HDD price per gigabyte, which is the subject of a few posts on The SSD Guy, the most recent appearing HERE. The second reason is that most PC buyers find SSDs unappealing when they are shopping for a new PC because of the price difference between an SSD and an HDD of the same capacity.

There are six Continue reading “Why Aren’t SSDs Popular in New PCs?”

Video: A Brief History of SSDs

Erik Logan of Pogo Linux sent me a link to an amusing & informative video he and his company put together called A Brief History of SSDs. In the video Erik (pictured) tells of Pogo Linux’ experience with SSDs.

The company has a lot of hands-on SSD experience: Pogo Linux ships servers and storage and has ramped SSD shipments (as a percent of all drives) from single digits three years ago to the point where SSDs now account for 31% of all drives they ship. Erik shared with me that: “Sorting through the Continue reading “Video: A Brief History of SSDs”

Big New HDDs Indefinitely Postpone SSD/HDD Price Crossover

Earlier this month Western Digital’s HGST division invited The SSD Guy to a launch of a number of products. On the HDD side there were:

6TB air HDD, HGST’s last air-filled enterprise HDD
8TB helium HDD, an incremental upgrade of last year’s 6TB helium HDD
10TB shingled helium HDD (pictured)

I view these as very solid evidence that HDD costs will continue to stay an order of magnitude cheaper than SSD costs, thwarting the price-per-gigabyte crossover that others have been predicting for years.

In fact, since my last post on the price crossover in 2011, very little has changed.

It’s safe to assume that the HDD industry will Continue reading “Big New HDDs Indefinitely Postpone SSD/HDD Price Crossover”

How Big Can an SSD Get?

Someone recently asked The SSD Guy to guess what would be the largest amount of flash that could be fit into an SSD’s case. This sounded like a fun problem, so I did a “Back-of-the-Envelope” estimate to try and figure it out.

First of all, I would judge by this post’s picture that you could get no more than 20 chip packages (4 x 5) on one side of a PC board for a 2.5″ SSD. That’s probably an optimistic estimate.

If you ignore the controller that would allow you to squeeze 40 packages onto a single circuit board.

Certain high-capacity SSDs use a “Butterfly” design to fit three circuit boards into a single 2.5″ HDD housing. With three 40-package circuit boards you could fit 120 chip packages into the 2.5″ HDD housing.

Today’s densest flash chip stores 128 gigabits or 16 gigabytes. Samsung and SanDisk can stack 16 of these chips within a single package, making a 16 x 16 gigabyte or 256 gigabyte package. SanDisk just announced a 512 gigabyte SD Card that doubles Continue reading “How Big Can an SSD Get?”

Hybrid Drives Not Catching On

Seagate announced last week that the company had shipped a total of 10 million Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHDs) over the lifetime of the product. This is far short of expectations by The SSD Guy and a number of other analysts and industry participants.

Why were our expectations higher? There were a few reasons:

The hybrid drive can be viewed as an evolution of the DRAM cache already incorporated into nearly all HDDs today. Replacing or augmenting an expensive DRAM cache with a slower, cheaper NAND cache makes a lot of sense.
An SSHD performs significantly better than Continue reading “Hybrid Drives Not Catching On”