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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. |
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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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| There
are
hundreds
of articles about SSDs on StorageSearch.com |
Here, below, are some
examples.
- RAM Cache
Ratios in flash SSDs - it's important to know the underlying RAM cache
architecture - even if you're happy with the R/W and IOPS performance.
- 2010 - 1st Fizz
in the SSD Bubble? - even the dogs in the street know this is going to be a
multibillion dollar market. Greed will play as big a part as technology in
shaping the
SSD year ahead.
- the pros and cons of
using SSD ASAPs - auto tuning SSD appliances are a new category of SSD
which entered the market in the 2nd half of 2009 to accelerate servers without
needing human tune-ups. How can you tell if they are right for you? And how
well do they work?
- the Problem
with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs - long established as a useful performance
modeling metric - this article explains why some specs are exaggerated when
applied to flash SSDs - or predict the wrong results for many common
applications.
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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.
- 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.
The situation
has impoved recently, however, and the fastest ExpressCard SSD in June 2009
(made by PhotoFast)
had R/W speeds of 180MB/s and 100MB/s respectively. A new rev 2.0 standard -
agreed for ExpressCard in June 2009 - will enable faster SSDs in the future.
- 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. | |
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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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