Solid State Drives replacing HDD laptops in 2009
Micron Technology, headquartered in Boise, Idaho, is a DRAM and flash memory manufacturer that this week announced its plans to bring solid-state drives to the market. These drives will function similarly to current hard drives, but instead of storing data through disk rotation, data will be stored using "NAND" technology – much like in cameras and Mp3 players.
Micron will begin mass production in the first quarter of 2008. The first batch will have capacities of 32GB or 64GB. Although this is less than half the average capacity of today's laptop hard drives, it is actually larger than what most business users require, said Dean Klein, Vice President of Micron's Storage Systems Development Department. Laptops with solid-state drives will wake up from sleep mode more quickly and perform applications faster.
"The sweet spot in the notebook market is between 60GB and 80GB," he said.
Micron did not discuss pricing, but these drives are expected to cost several hundred dollars, which remains a stumbling block. To replace a standard 160GB hard drive with a 64GB solid-state drive on a Dell XPS 1330 laptop still costs an additional $950. Considering that the 160GB hard drive only costs $1599, solid-state drives are indeed uneconomical.
Despite this, the magic of Moore's Law and the ability of storage manufacturers to endure pain will make solid-state drive prices more acceptable. The first change that will occur by the end of 2008 is that solid-state drive manufacturers will adopt multi-level cell technology, said Klein. Current manufacturers use single-level cell technology.
Multi-level cell technology uses two (and soon four) bits for data storage. This reduces the stability of the drive, but the error rate will be low enough to make it suitable for notebook use, he added.
A 64GB solid-state drive is expected to cost around $300 by the end of 2008. This is still high, and he predicts that only 8 million solid-state drives will be sold throughout 2008.
After that, the industry will highlight the advantages of these drives, Micron executives predict. Even if price reductions slow down, by 2009, a 64GB solid-state drive will drop to $200, and 18 months later it will fall below $100. By this time, HHD hard drives will also increase their sales density, making the competition even more intense.
This article was translated by diglog from http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,62035041,00.htm.