AlexHopmann.com

Engadget covers some presentations from Samsung on the next few years of SSD progress that suggests that SSD prices will be dropping to about $1.5/gb by 2010. They lament that it won’t really pass hard-drive pricing but to me this really isn’t that big a deal. This is yet another turn of the process described in the book “The Innovators Dilemma” which maps the progress of hard-drive technologies all the way back to 8″ disks and the old-school platters. Each new generation is slower and more expensive than the previous one but expands out into new market segments and takes over eventually with efficiencies of scale.

Except that this time the new technology isn’t slower. Storage capacities have improved amazingly, faster that Moore’s law for decades, yet the drives are barely faster than they were 20 years ago (relatively speaking). This has a lot to do with basic physics- you can only spin a platter of atoms so fast. This time the new flash-based technology has the potential to be faster (at least on certain dimensions like access time) right out of the gate.

For more than a year now people have been talking about the upcoming hybrid hard-drives that combine a normal hard-drive with some flash used as an extra cache. Vista has some special support for these that can take advantage of the flash to put commonly used information that is needed for startup to make boot/resume and application launches much faster than before.

But it occurs to me that flash memory comes in different speeds too. I’ve been looking into this for my upcoming new camera since for shooting HD video I think I’m going to need the faster version of the SD card. But with true SSD drives you could do the same thing as the hybrid hard-drive, and combine some fast-flash (used for those commonly accessed bits) with a bunch of slower storage for documents, music, media, stuff you don’t access as often and where the slower speeds are fine. Given how small the chips are compared to a 2.5″ hard-drive you should be able to cram a ton of memory into a laptop soon once the prices become reasonable.

Another thing that I’m unclear about is the power-usage. I’m hoping that these SSDs will be much lower power than a spinning hard-drive. Just because they are solid-state doesn’t mean that they are low-power. CPUs, GPUs, and RAM manage to use lots of power all the time. But I’m hoping that given that flash can store information with the power off that the power-usage is just proportional to the amount of reading and writing going on, not the amount stored. This lets you add as much extra storage to your machine as you can fit with no extra power consumption.

All in all it looks reasonable to expect that fully SSD-based laptops will be a speciality item in 2007 (Dell just introduced two models this week), common in 2010, and by 2012-2013 I wouldn’t be surprised if it will be rare to have spinning disks in a laptop/portable computer.