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Q: How about general consumers, are they ready for SSD yet?

A: No, I don’t think we are there quite yet, there are a couple of things in the way. First of all, if you want to build a SSD today, you can actually take a CompactFlash (CF) controller chip and put it on NAND.

It’s got a parallel ATA (PATA) interface, and you can make a SSD that way. Are you going to get the reliability and performance of NAND out of that device? No. I don’t think you will. The very first drives use what we call zero generation controllers because they didn’t design a controller for SSD but for CF. If you are going to support SSD, you need to have better error correction capability. The amount of read/write activities to a SSD is far in access of what most CF would ever see.

In the first generation of SSDs, specific controllers were taken into account. They optimized things like error correction to give them a reliable solution in a SSD. Second generation controllers will go for more performance. And in the third generation, we will see the server solution where there is further optimization with more reliability. There are more blocks of memory reserved for redundancy in repair. These controllers will also probably be talking to a greater amount of NAND flash.

The time frame for this is maybe three years.