Half of laptops to have SSD by Q4 2009

Posted on Monday, May 07 2007 @ 6:38 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Research firm iSuppli predicts that by the end of 2009, more than 50 percent of all notebooks sold will have a solid state disk (SSD) instead of a mechanical hard drive.
Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst at the company, said the shift to flash is being aided and abetted by a dramatic drop in prices for NAND memory.

He said that 1GB of NAND flash cost nearly 100 times more than hard drive storage in 2003, but by 2009 the gap between prices will be more like 14 times.

But it's not just price that will drive its use, said Wilkins. The use of memory gives better performance than rotating storage because of its faster read times. It also has better shock resistance and offers superior reliability to HDDs, he added.

The three types of flash storage currently slated all offer better performance than conventional HDDs - those are Intel's "Robson", hybrid HDDs, and solid state drives.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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Re: Half of laptops to have SSD by Q4 2009
by tim on Thursday, May 10 2007 @ 0:30 CEST
How does the performance of SSD drives affected by the interface: IDE/SATA/USB? Are those even a factor?



Re: Half of laptops to have SSD by Q4 2009
by Thomas De Maesschalck (lsdsmurf@dvhardware.net) on Thursday, May 10 2007 @ 14:44 CEST
Probably depends on the speed of the SSD. For instance, USB 2.0 has a maximum transfer speed 80MB/s while Serial ATA supports up to 300MB/s. So yes, it might have some impact.