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by Zsolt Kerekes, editor (June 2009 / updated September
2010) |
This article looks at the state of the
market for
SSDs
in notebooks.
It's not a pretty sight... This is a troubled and
complex segment of the SSD
market - which has earned itself a deservedly bad reputation. Nevertheless
SSD vendors continue to throw products at the notebook market in many shapes and
sizes - hoping that something will stick before their cash runs out.
see
also:- why the notebook SSD crystal
ball is murky - new Sep 1, 2010 |
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| Problems
with the Notebook SSD Market |
There's a simple way to
summarize my
complex
view of the SSD Notebook / Netbook market.
Lots of initial hype
and optimism that the market would deliver an astonishingly new product
experience to users, followed by dismay and disillusion due to a flurry of
poorly conceived, badly designed and ineptly executed products.
For
an analogy - think cars, gas and batteries.
Just as
electric
cars are mostly expensive lifestyle trophies which don't solve the problem
of how to drive thousands of miles reliably or affordably - so too most SSD
notebook products have been expensive duds.
I commented on the failure
of the notebook PC market to design worthwhile SSD based products in an
earlier article.
Discussing it with readers since then- I've been able to get a better
understanding of why the notebook pc market is so bad at innovation.
And
so we get back to cars...
Everyone knows that the problems seen
recently in the car market didn't arise from the credit crunch and recession.
The roots go back decades. The auto market has paradoxically invested
huge
amounts in R & D - but despite that - has failed to be innovative.
So
too - the pc market has developed into a lethargic mind set where the design
is driven more by spreadsheets- than by engineers.
- Intel or AMD bring out a new processor - tick the box for the next model.
The same old cycle for the past 27
years.
- Notebook PC interfaces change in a major way only once every 10 years.
Broadband is over a decade old. USB changed from 1 to 2. Disk interfaces changed
from PATA to SATA (and
many didn't even make that change). PCMCIA changed to ExpressCard but most early
ExpressCard SSDs were slower than
hard drives.
- Market analysts
give you quarterly spreadsheets which predict how many models you can expect to
sell with different size screens, capacity, memory and battery life.
- Remember to load the latest image of the OS from Microsoft. The same old
cycle for the past 27 years.
All these factors tend to stagnate
innovation - rather than promote it. The successful notebook makers have been
those who can recycle the same motherboard or chipsets and general IP through
multiple product generations - with little or no brainpower involved. Move the
mouse to import the new iteration of the technology - click click. Cut and
paste to next year's designs.
In the rare cases recently when notebook
designers had to wake up and drink some coffee - they got burned.
The
hard disk makers
promised that
hybrid drives
would create a new market segment. It did. But as StorageSearch.com predicted
(when the concept was mooted in
2005) - notebook
hybrid drives were mostly duds.
Microsoft promised notebook makers that
their Vista OS would help sell new models. That was a dud. Instead the user
experience of notebook users with Vista in the first few years was so
appallingly bad - that the lesson learned was - hang onto your old notebook as
long as possible - or if it dies - go out of your way to buy a rare new notebook
installed with XP.
The combination of the hybrid and Vista fiascos
being such recent memories - you can't blame pc notebook makers for being too
cautious about flash
SSDs.
Except I do blame them - because the badly designed and
poorly integrated solid state notebooks we've seen in the market in
2008 and the
first half of 2009
have tarnished the reputation of the SSD market.
And there were some
badly designed SSDs
in that mix to share some of the blame too.
I'm not sure if electric
cars are the future of personal transport - but I do hope that we'll be seeing
better designed SSD notebooks sooner rather than later. |
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The User Value Proposition
of SSDs in the Notebook Market
The text below appeared in
STORAGEsearch.com's
SSD Market
Penetration Model which was published in November 2005. That article also
described the 3 other other main markets for SSDs.
In 2005 most
analysts and IT and electronic publications doubted that flash SSDs would ever
be affordable or viable in notebooks. I disagreed. But I was too optimistic
about the timescale and the willingness of the PC market to innovate.
The
text below is the original unchanged text. |
| Road
Warrior - Featherweight Notebooks - (weighing under 2lbs) |
This market has not
started yet (in 2005) but will kick into play during 2006/7.
My
wife is a marketer who travels a lot by plane (in Europe) and train (in London).
Running Powerpoint is critical - but so is the ability to pack a notebook PC and
a week's worth of clothes and paperwork into a lightweight bag.
Notebook
manufacturers like Sony, Toshiba and Dell love this kind of customer. Her
lightweight notebooks typically cost 3 to 5 times as much as similar looking
luggables weighing 3 to 4 times as much. And she changes them every year -
because they never quite have enough performance.
In this part of the
notebook market customers pay a hefty price to get less weight and better
battery operation... And adding insult to injury - low weight notebooks also
have processor clock speeds which are typically 3 times slower than desktop
PCs (or luggable notebooks). The expensive notebooks also have slower hard
disks because that's another way manufacturers deliver longer battery life.
What
can flash SSDs do for this market?
A 30GB
flash solid state disk
can act as a speedup accelerator - complemeting a low power hard disk - so
that a 1GHz lightweight notebook processor delivers similar performance as a
3GHz desktop model. (As CPU clock rates rise - the benefit delivered by the SSD
actually increases.)
How much will high powered road warriors be
prepare to pay for a flash disk which makes their featherlight notebook PC run
as fast as a desktop or a luggable?
$2,000? $1,000?
You'll see
that the cost, compared to a hard drive is not the relevant factor.
The
customer value proposition in the Road Warrior Featherweight Notebook
market is that the SSD provides desktop application performance in a low
weight, long battery life form factor which is impossible to achieve using
microprocessor technology. (Where high speed - means high power, fans etc.)
As
flash disks are on a steeply declining cost curve - and new entrants to the SSD
market apply learning curve pricing this application segment for SSDs will grow
to billions of dollars in the next 2 years.
...Later:- January
10, 2006 - high performance Intel/SPARC notebook maker
NextCom
announced it had qualified flash SSDs in its notebooks and mobile servers,
thereby becoming the world's first notebook maker to publicly offer an SSD
option.
A
video
by Samsung (Q406) demonstrates the advantages of SSD accelerated notebooks
graphically.
...Later:- 2 years after writing this article -
in
April 2007 Dell offered 32G byte SSDs as an option in its notebooks priced
a little over $500. | | |
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upgrading old PCs with new SSDs
Editor:- July 9, 2010 -
Upgrading
Old PCs with SSDs is a cautionary tale published on Denali Software's blog.
I've often told readers who asked me about this subject - that they
could be wasting their time trying to upgrade old notebooks with
PATA or
SATA SSDs - because
most of the speedup benefits - if any - will be lost by the latency damping
effects of cheap and slow bridge
chips on the motherboard - and that - unlike in a server - notebooks have
precious little CPU headroom.
It's nice to see these views are
shared by the author of this article who works for an
SSD IP vendor.
Here's
what I said to a reader (Simon, in June 2010) who asked me for advice
about his Mac - which had a 4,200 RPM HDD and a lot more details supplied which
I'll skip here.
Servers have a lot of CPU and interface performance
headroom.
Notebooks and PCs don't - because they are designed to meet strict
price points.
That means notebook interface
chips are cheap and slow and waste many tens of microseconds latency. That's
OK with the HDDs they
were designed to go with.
Installing a fast SATA SSD in most notebooks is a waste of money -
because most of the potential performance is lost between the CPU and the SSD in
a poor motherboard interface.
If you have a bus interface like
express card or
PCIe of some sort -
that could give better results.
All notebooks in the market today
are designed according to spreadsheets and formulas around HDD-aware chipsets.
There hasn't been any innovation in the notebook market for about 20 years. They
just follow the lead that Intel,
Microsoft,
IDC and
Gartner give them.
It's possible that a new generation of
Google OS notebooks will lead
to better chipsets for notebooks which will feed back into the Wintel and Mac
markets.
Until then the best starting place for an SSD notebook speedup is a
model which has been designed for the faster HDDs - like 7,200 RPM. In those
cases the chipsets will be slightly better.
When Mtron
emerged into the SSD market many years ago with a notebook SSD that was many
times faster than Samsung etc I spoke to the guys there and asked how they did
it.
They said that instead of using standard HDD SATA chips in the SSD
they redesigned the SATA chip to make it faster for SSD. That difference made
their SSD the fastest at that time.
But if delays are already soldered into the notebook motherboard -
most advantages of an SSD will be lost.
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| What's a
Notebook SSD? |
Let me begin by saying
- there's no such thing as a "notebook SSD".
But there are
plenty of different SSDs which go into notebooks.
Confused? - You
should be. Here's a list of SSD directories - any one of which - or all of which
include manufacturers of viable notebook SSDs. Depending on the size of the
notebook, other SSD options include:-
- 1.8" SSDs
- these are usually pre-installed by the original manufacturer. Available with
upto 128GB capacity, the fastest 1.8" SATA SSDs are as fast as the 2.5"
SSDs but are much faster than hard drives.
- 2.5"
SSDs are available pre-installed by the original manufacturer and as user
installable upgrades. In the latter case most SSDs designed for the user
upgrade market include an additional
USB interface which enables
you to create an image of the original hard drive while the new SSD is outside
the system.
Here's a warning to users! Upgrading an old hard disk
based notebook with a new 2.5" SSD can be a disappointing experience -
because the SATA / PATA
interface path on the old motherboard wastes a lot of the potential latency
gain of the SSD. Try before you buy - or carefully read
upgrade
benchmarks which you can trust.
- 1.0"
SSDs - which also includes motherboard soldered SSD chips and modules.
These are mainly used in netbooks - because they can occupy a 75% smaller PCB
footprint than a traditional drive. A new standard in this market is
slim
SATA SSDs.
- ExpressCard - this is intended
to be a user upgrade market. But performance of early ExpressCard SSDs were
disappointingly slow in comparison to 1.8" drives. A new rev 2.0
standard - agreed for ExpressCard in June 2009 - is faster and offers similar
speed to SATA 2.
- Mini PCIe cards - is another user upgrade market. In July 2009
Active Media
launched its
SaberTooth
brand of SATA Mini PCIe MLC flash SSD cards as upgrades for Asus Eee PCs. R/W
speeds are upto 155MB/s and 100MB/s respectively. The 64GB model costs
$219.95.
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Notebook SSD Timeline from
SSD History
1993
- HP offered a PCMCIA
flash disk as an alternative to a hard drive in its
HP
Omnibook 300. Although not strictly speaking an SSD (because it didn't
include wear leveling)
it was one of the first serious attempts to offer solid state storage in a
mainstream portable PC.
January 2006 -
NextCom became
the first notebook maker to qualify flash SSDs for use in Windows XP, Linux and
Solaris notebooks.
May 2006 -
Samsung launched the
world's first high volume Windows XP notebook using SSDs.
April
2007 - Dell joined the
growing roster of notebook oems offering SSDs as a standard option.
September
2009 - Intel said it
will deploy up to 10,000 SSD notebooks this year to its own employees. This
followed an
internal
evaluation of the "compelling" productivity benefits of using
SSDs instead of hard drives in business notebooks.
November 2009
- Google opened its
doors to developers who want to work with
Chrome OS - a new operating
system for web notebook products. Its architects are "obsessed with
speed". So they designed it to support only
flash SSDs as the
default mass storage.
January 2010 -
Toshiba
announced
it is sampling 128GB mSATA MLC SSD modules (30mm x 50.95mm x 4.75mm ) aimed
at the netbook
PC market. Sequential R/W speeds are 180MB/s and 70MB/s respectively. Weight
is 9g.
March 2010 -
WD Solid State
Storage
announced
its entry into the
SSD notebook
market. WD's SiliconEdge
Blue 2.5" MLC SSDs offer capacity upto 256GB (MSRP $999), R/W speeds
of 250MB/s and 170MB/s.
May 2010 -
StorageSearch.com - published a new
article called What's
the best / cheapest PC SSD?
June 2010 - to save space,
power and cost in notebooks
Hitachi revealed it
had integrated a flash SSD inside a new Blu-ray optical disk module.
June
2010 - to save power in notebooks
Samsung announced
imminent volume production of a 512GB
SATA SSD - the 1st to
use
toggle-mode
DDR NAND which enables sequential R/W speeds upto 250MB/s and 220MB/s
respectively while using about half the power of a regular
flash SSD of the
same capacity.
August 2010 -
NVELO launched
Dataplex - a software product
aimed at PC oems - which provides
SSD ASAP
functionality inside a
notebook.
Dataplex will begin shipping from select Tier 1 PC OEMs in 2011. | |
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| SSD encryption - does
it hurt? |
Editor:- a reader asked me a
good question...
Does SSD encryption hurt performance and
reliability? |
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