Not according to In-Stat. Solid state flash drives may be lighter and more stable, but standard optical hard drives are simply cheaper.
Solid state drives will only inch their way into about 6% of the PC market by 2011. Guess which types of devices they’ll be found in?
A new report from In-Stat says that solid state drives were barely a blip in 2006, but 24 million of the little buggers will have shipped by 2011.
The bulk of them will be found in Ultra Mobile Personal Computers or UMPCs. It makes absolute sense that small, compact, mobile devices would make use of the teeny tiny mass storage medium. But there is a problem: Cost.
There are few compelling reasons for most PC purchasers to pay more money for less storage than they can get using an HDD, so In-Stat expects HDDs and Hybrid Drives to continue to outweigh SSDs in these applications for at least the next several years.
Nevertheless, SSDs’ advantages in lower power, higher reliability, lower noise, and faster access than HDDs, in an extremely durable unit, make for rapid growth in some markets, especially in military and industrial UMDs.
-Jim McGregor, In-Stat analyst
Ruggedized devices are screaming for SSDs. They will be far more reliable under stressful working conditions than conventional hard drives. And the power savings are key. Spinning up hard drives to dig out information is costly to battery life.
Aside from UMPCs, I’d also like to see larger solid state drives in smartphones. Many come with limited internal storage (less than 64 Mbytes) and users have to opt for external miniSD or microSD cards for additional storage. While the external option isn’t a bad one, it wouldn’t hurt to see more generous drives built-in, especially as prices come down.
I recently bought a 1GB SD card for my computer and camera for $10. Compared to the $50 I spent on a 512MB card for my mom’s camera for Christmas a year ago. So it’s definitely getting cheaper, FAST. (either that or I got ripped off a year ago when I bought that card…)
All it’ll take is a few bucks lower in price and a brave computer manufacturer (I’m thinking Dell) to start shipping their more expensive computers with Flash drives for harddrives.
Another possible hurdle would be speed.
I have to disagree with InStat. Sure, there is information pointing to how it won’t be all that popular now — but who would have guessed that video cards would have dedicated RAM? But now, video cards have more RAM than some computers do – AND it’s expected that they will have at LEAST 128MB. I’m sure that “back in the day” it wasn’t popular because it wasn’t used that heavily. I think that what it comes down to right now is that while they are not currently as stable, they will eventually be just as stable — if not more — and are only getting better & more widely used from here on out.
On top of that, the are without doubt faster than current hard drives are capable of being. Coupled with that is the amount of growth we’ve seen in data per square inch (or whatever they measure that by) on regular HDD’s: i can only imagine that growth rate will eventually be transcribed to SDD’s. Heck, who would have thought 4 years ago that we could have 8GB solid state mp3 players?
I don’t agree with their assessment at all. Most of the people that make these predictions don’t pay attention to history.
SSDs are going to come down in price and will eventually outsell the standard HDDs. It’s just a matter of time.
I don’t disagree with this report but I think the gaming market must not be ovelooked.
These guys drive sales across the hardware spectrum and that market isn’t getting smaller.
For games, any kind of increase in speed is welcomed, even if it is at a slightly higher cost.
Perhaps Hybrid drives (lets say 2GB solid and the rest HDD) which creates the perfect balance between price and performance would be the way to go.
I would certainly like it in my current laptop: less HD, less heat, less fan, less noise.
Notice that this article was posted, only 16 months ago.
To day the 64 GB disk costs 9 time the comparable HDD. If the evolution continues the SSD will be cheaper, faster and larger then any HDD in late october 2009.
Your next computer will hold a…… what?… right a SSD at about 5 TB (that is Terra bytes).