October 2017 – The SSD Guy Blog

Those who have been reading posts on The SSD Guy blog for some time have often heard me explain that SSD prices will not fall below HDD prices anytime soon. Last week Western Digital shared a roadmap that shows that we can expect for there to be a sizeable price gap between the two technologies at least through 2028.

Let me stop for a moment to point out that Western Digital Corp, or WDC, no longer has any reason to take sides in the HDD vs. SSD battle now that the company has acquired SanDisk, a leading SSD maker. Even before that, WDC’s HGST business has been the market leader in SAS SSDs for a number of years. WDC doesn’t take sides in arguments about SSDs vs. HDDs. Instead the company stands ready to sell whichever one the customer finally decides to use.

This post’s graphic comes from a chart that WDC used on October 11 when introducing its new MAMR head technology, which the company expects to propel HDD capacities up, and HDD price per terabyte down, for a number of years. To create this chart WDC’s HDD team joined forces with the SanDisk flash team to project both HDD and NAND price per terabyte for the next 11 years. The most important conclusion is that Continue reading “WDC: No SSD/HDD Crossover”

A few years ago The SSD Guy posted an analogy that Intel’s Jim Pappas uses to illustrate the latency differences between DRAM, an SSD, and an HDD. If we look at DRAM latency to be a single heartbeat, then what happens when we scale that timing up to represent SSDs and HDDs? How many heartbeats would it take to access either one, and what could you do in that time?

I still think it’s a pretty interesting way to make all these latency differences easier to understand.

Just recently I learned of a Rich Report video of a 2015 presentation in which Micron’s Ryan Baxter uses a different and equally interesting analogy based on tomatoes.

Tomatoes aren’t the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about SSDs, but this video may change my way of thinking!

The tomato slide, 9:30 into the presentation, is Continue reading “Comparing SSDs to Tomatoes”