StorageMojo isn’t a monologue. I’m really interested in learning from StorageMojo’s very smart audience.

StorageMojo would be a yawn if I banished every comment I disagree with. We’re all big boys and girls. We can entertain opposing ideas without our brains exploding.

That said, we will find that market forces - not engineering elegance - will drive the success or failure of notebook SSDs. Of course SSDs will get “better.” That isn’t the issue.

The issue is “will notebook SSDs get good enough to overcome their cost disadvantage in the broad consumer market?” Despite the desperate bravado of Toshiba the answer is still no.

In 3 years notebook SSDs will have no more than 10% of the market - excluding low-end Eee-type systems where cost eliminates disks - and that 10% will be confined to the high-priced ultra-light notebook market. Check back with me then.

For the record, everything I see says that small form factor flash SSDs will have their greatest success in servers and arrays whose random read workloads play to flash’s strengths.

Robin

What part of “I think that the SSD drive makers can do a MUCH better job than they’ve done so far, and that the raw technology is capable of doing much better. I think eventually the SSD products will get better, and we’ll see SSD drives (or their successors) used almost everywhere” managed to escape you? Or of “The answer is easy, but doing it is hard. You have to make it so that the issues are completely invisible to consumers. Note that this has been done successfully with flash for years”? Or of “I believe that it is possible to do a good enough job with caches in the computer DRAM, and in the FTL to make a system built from 5k endurance work for a very long time”?

In his statement “Now, if we can do something about the power consumption of the display back light and CPU, then SSD vs. HDD might make a difference” he does seem to have ignored my earlier observation that we already *are* doing something in these areas, and he’s simply wrong in blithely asserting that “Despite what a commenter said, spinning the HDD platter doesn’t take a lot of energy” - at least I’m far more inclined to believe the numbers that I found at seagate.com which specified how much power went to which activities than I am the unsupported qualitative opinions of someone whose specialty is in another field.

But in general he seems to have a far clearer understanding of the situation than you do, and you should pay much closer attention to what he’s saying.

- bill

The computing world is just realizing that. No matter how many point technologies you have, it doesn’t make a solution.

The fact companies are still trying to sell plain old raid boxes and servers with SDD is a good example that issue here, as you point out. SSD “could” be good device for servers and they “could” be a good device for the pc. Is it good device for cell phones and mp3 players, you bet…

Sometimes we need to ask the right question to get the right answer. Some larger companies can’t, or won’t, make changes to their product lines or open up their technologies for scrutiny. Why, do they lack fortitude, moral fiber, protecting their IP, or maybe management is just riding the wave ’til their parachute unfolds. Sometimes, they are held captive by their stock prices. The again, maybe, just maybe, its fear.

The fear that the truth of data integrity will send their customers running to their competitors. Competitors that are willing to sell ‘their’ customers what they want to hear. And, afraid of that their customers will jump ship, buy something that makes them feel good, irrespective of the hard reality - none of it is better than any other technology solid state memory technology. It doesn’t matter if “the check IS in the mail”, the account is overdrawn.

But are any of these the right question ?? Is this just a transitionary phase every industry suffers ? Does any of this really matter ?

The business of papyrus in ancient times is a good model to draw from. Making paper parchments in ancient times was an expensive process by modern terms. When parchments were finished as a message, they were often recycled to make other parchments. When the parchments wore out or decomposed, there would be professional scribes making copies. All an expensive process by today’s standards. Shifting up a few thousand years, we don’t see many people erasing a piece of paper so it can be re-used. Although, some economics do favor recycling paper. For the most part, paper products used as information media are disposable, it used once and disgarded. How many of us use the backs of sticky notes. It is disposable “use once” media.

This is the model for multibit solid state memory. Soon it will be so low cost, it will be treated is as disposable media. One year ago, I was paying $40 for a 2Gb USB drive. A few days ago I saw a 16GB USB disk for close to $30, In 2 years it may cost less than $10.

When data integrity becomes an issue, I’m sure there will be manufacturers selling raid and tandem versions of the SSD/SSM products. Businesses will be overflowing with opportunies for data chip replacement service organizations. Who says our service oriented economy is limited to printer toner, waiters, cashiers and house keepers ??

Back on track… The next generation decision makers in IT will be growing up with disposable data storage media integrated into everyday products . It will be as natural for them to accept these SSD products into the enterprise and budiness infrastructures as the last generation accepted scsi and fibre channel. Today, consumers accept SSM in their mp3 players and cell phones and don’t know or care if its 5000, 10000 or 1M write cycles. When they need better data integrity, increased capacity or performance, they will purchase more, for more copies of data. The old chips, they sit in the draw, get thown away or sometimes end up on ebay.

Someone will front end SS memory (Hmmm, we never heard of that before) with a big old BBU ram cache. IT departments will have to justify spending $1000/mo on new memory chips. While facilities will spend more than that on flushing the toilets.

cheers,
x