Solid State Drives in Laptops Face Reality Test

• On April 24 Dell began offering 1.8-inch 32 GB solid state drives (SSDs) as an option for its ultra-portable laptops as well as a semi-rugged laptop
• Fujitsu and Samsung have also announced laptop computers where a SSD is substituted for a hard disk drive (HDD)
• Such solid state drives are offered by companies such as Sandisk and Samsung
• These products currently have limited capacity and are expensive but may fill a market niche
• Will SDDs take over HDDs in the laptop market?

2007 marks the year that solid state disk drives (SSDs) began to show up at major computer companies. Samsung in particular has been making quite a bit a noise about flash memory catching up with hard disk drives and taking over more and more market formerly occupied by hard disk drives. They argue that 1-inch hard disk drives have been effectively displaced for MP3 players. There are rumors that Apple will introduce probably a 16 GB video iPod using flash memory rather than a hard disk drive. 1-inch disk drives are now made by very few hard disk drive companies and the product could be extinct within the next year. Flash memory manufacturers argue that 1.8-inch disk drive will now face pressure from solid state drives and flash memory both in laptop PCs and multimedia players.

Just how big a challenge is flash memory for hard disk drives? Let’s look briefly at the numbers. In CQ1 2007 the price of 1.8-inch form factor SSD with 32 GB capacity was about $750. On the other hand an 80 GB 1.8-inch drive probably sells for about $130 to an OEM. Clearly SSDs are not the ideal choice for a computer if economical storage is the requirement. There has long been a limited market for SSD laptops for military or heavy industrial applications where ambient shock and vibration would destroy a hard disk drive. This current use is likely to continue, but a broader market requires a usable amount of storage for an acceptable price even if the storage device is more durable in a severe environment and saves some additional power.

There are three scenarios that could drive growth in SDD laptops. The first is a slow down in the growth of data that people require when they are on the road—I don’t think this will happen, instead folks are requiring access to greater and greater amounts or richer content to do their work and to entertain themselves. This translates into higher storage capacity requirements over time.

The second scenario is that HDD storage capacities grow significantly slower than flash memory.  There has been noise that this is so but for small form factor HDDs the growth in storage capacity has been at least 60% annually allowing them to continue to compete with flash memory for some years to come.

The last scenario is a thin client environment. A thin client is a product (such as a laptop) that carries just enough storage capacity to allow it to carry files in immediate use. When the thin client requires more content it can erase content stored that has been backed up on a server over the internet or access more content off the server through the Ethernet. This model requires large HDD storage arrays at the central server and access to internet connectivity when the user requires it to get needed files not on the thin client.

This connectivity is the issue in my opinion. It is difficult and maybe impossible for most travelers to have continuous internet access and thus to be able to connect to and use files stored on a central server. Although this connectivity will get better in the future the bandwidths available will not be uniform and my fear is that users will not have adequate access to the data that they need—remember this is getting richer with time and thus requires faster internet connections.

I think that the total market for flash based laptops will be less than 10% of the whole market by 2010. I think the real growth of flash will be for the sort of applications that it has proved invaluable for: capture of content that is then transferred to the HDD on a computer and playing out content that was downloaded from a the HDD in a computer. In reality at least for the next five years or more the growth of flash will drive the growth of HDDs and vice versa.