We have to admit that many of us have been way too optimistic how quickly solid state disk drives (SSDs) could become an option for mainstream storage in desktops, notebooks and enterprise applications. Even in 2010, year 3 after mass storage companies began pushing SSDs, the technology remains expensive and is not competitive as far as storage capacity and price is concerned.
Seagate SSD
Due to its sheer size and position as largest hard drive manufacturer (which has changed recently), Seagate has always been a good indicator which hard drive capacities and technologies would make it into the mainstream market at any given time. That may also be the case for SSDs, a segment Seagate recently joined, and it appears that the company is cautiously optimistic that SSDs may be able to much better compete with HDDs one day, even if the sales volume isn’t so dramatic yet.
Teresa Worth, senior product marketing manager for Seagate Enterprise Storage, told Conceivably Tech that SSDs are likely to offer the same capacity as hard drives one day. However, the industry will have to move from SLC to MLC chips to achieve that goal, which may be difficult at least in the enterprise space as MLC drives may be more affordable and hit greater capacities. The downside is that they are less durable.
However, Worth does not believe that SSDs will replace HDDs anytime soon, as the company considers Flash a complimentary technology. Using SSDs is somewhat comparable to a 3-car garagae with three different cars and three different purposes, she said. The expensive and fast Porsche does make sense, but only for some applications. Due to their current limitations, Worth said that the adoption rate of SSDs is “small, but significant.” A key problem for using an SSD in much more general areas is the fact that operating systems and controllers are still designed for HDDs. In the end, integrating an SSD in the wrong environment may end up in a process that “shifts bottlenecks,” Worth said. “For many applications, SSDs are simply overkill.”
As far as the mainstream market is concerned, Seagate currently focuses on its hybrid HDD/SSD drives, which offer an advantage in startup times, but are not quite as expensive as SSDs.
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