Do you think HDD prices and performance are standing still. There just isn’t going to be parity in these competing products any time soon (next 5-8 years i.m.h.o.) So when either side claims a superiority, it seems fundamental to question and attempt to prove the claim. Flash (SSDs) will improve with maturity, without doubt. And inherent qualities in flash will bring improvements to users. But this whole debate has been attended by much hype and the usual caveats should be heeded.

Joe

http://blog.laptopmag.com/web-surfing-test-shows-ssds-better-for-battery-life

To be attributed to Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development for Micron:

“The controllers analyzed in the Tom’s Hardware review are early-generation, multi-chip and in some cases even use FPGA’s, which can be quite power hungry. As with many other first and second generation drives, these drives are not delivering on the full potential of the NAND and are not delivering properly on the performance promise.

There is another factor to be aware of. If the CPU spends 25 million clock cycles waiting for random HDD data, but only part of that waiting for SSD data, the actual increase in notebook power consumption may be in the CPU. A useful metric is how much processing gets done per watt. If you are willing to scale back performance to that of an HDD-based system, an SSD-based system should deliver significantly longer battery life.

Finally, consider that many of today’s applications and operating systems are not optimized for SSDs, but for rotating media. As an example, Vista has a background defrag utility that is not needed, and in fact is not desired for SSDs.”

But the preponderance of ALL the testing is that notebook SSDs have either no or small power advantages over hard drives for most consumers. There have been a couple of tests that do show some advantage: Anandtech’s test that played music continuously - when most road warriors would use a player or a cell phone.

And there are good reasons for this: hard drives are pretty efficient and getting more so; and current displays, CPUs and graphics use a lot more power than the disks. There’s only so much juice you can squeeze out of this lemon.

In a consumer driven world the fine points get lost. Until a major notebook vendor can advertise something like “Get an extra 60 minutes battery life with our high-performance SSD” the notebook SSD market is toast.

The standard engineering take is: give us more time and money and we will make it better. And I’m sure they can and will make it better. The question is: better enough to matter?

Here’s the marketing take. When you charge more for less capacity and the only benefit is performance - and even that seems limited to startup and some file operations - you do not have a value proposition that consumers will buy.

And BUYING, my friends, is the name of the game.

Flash will still play an important role in data storage - just not in the notebook market.