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by
Zsolt Kerekes, editor - published
January 27, 2010 (updated July 30, 2010) |
Want to buy some
terabytes (or petabytes)
of SSD storage?
One confusing factor for buyers and specifiers is that
market prices for SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1 for the same
capacity!
With hundreds of oems active in the SSD market in 2010 and
thousands of product
news announcements - how
can you decide which SSD prices relate to your own needs? And which don't?
This article will bring a sense of clarity and order into what can seem like
a crazy market. |
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the irritating thing about
$$D
pricing!
SSDs are among the most expensive items of computer
hardware many of you will ever buy - with high end models costing more than
high end servers. There's nothing more annoying than spending a large sum of
money on something only to find that someone else you know has just bought the
same thing at a fraction of the price you paid.
Buyers in the SSD
market - who are already confused and irritated enough by the technology
aspects in the SSD shortlisting process - are liable to be stunned by
a new level of random numbers when they look into the issue of pricing.
Why is a terabyte SSD from one company 2x, 5x, 10x or even more than
100x more expensive than another? (And the companies selling those
outrageously costly SSDs keep reporting great business results - so someone
must be buying them - even though other products are much cheaper.) The simple
explanation is - that all SSDs are not the same. And SSDs can do more than
storage. That's why just looking at "capacity" like you would for a
hard drive - does not
give you a true picture of what the product can do - or what it might cost.
a transport analogy for SSD price vs capacity
Outside the SSD market we're already comfortable with
holding seemingly contradictory cost information in our heads - without getting
a headache. Because we know the invisible factors which lie behind apparently
identical purchase decisions.
Let's suppose you need to travel 400
miles for a meeting. Your options are:-
- walk
- bike
- car
- train
- canoe, yacht, raft, speedboat, or river ferry (start and end destinations
have ports on the same river)
- airline (1st class, business class, regular human)
- helicopter
- Airforce One
For the sake of this illustration - the critical distance
you're going to travel is identical. It's 400 miles. But the cost
will vary considerably depending which way you go. And although you may look
at more than one alternative for how to get there - depending what the meeting
is about and your personal resources and preferences - it's unlikely you will
get confused. When it comes to the SSD market - "distance" is like "capacity".
In the travel world - our decision making is simplified by the fact we
filter out a lot of irrelevant choices - which we know from our own experience
are not valid choices.
None of you reading this - are the
President of the USA - so you can instantly filter out the Airforce One
option. It probably never crossed your mind before reading this article.
When
you've learned more about the part of the SSD market -which relates to your
needs - you'll easily be able to filter out confusing price messages. Higher?
Or lower? Who cares? If they're irrelevant you can safely ignore them.
Factors which influence SSD Prices
The main factors which influence SSD pricing are listed in the
table below. I've placed them in order of importance - with the most significant
at the top of the list. |
| Factors which most influence SSD
Prices © 2010 StorageSearch.com |
| Speed |
"Speed" is a catch-all term which
includes latency,
random IOPS
and throughput.
Nearly all these factors can be artificially boosted
to look good in benchmarks - and the numbers don't always translate to
application performance due to
halo effects.
Despite the smoke and mirrors, however, experienced users (and this editor) know
the fastest SSDs
when they see them.
In the right circumstances
server users
will buy the fastest SSDs to achieve application acceleration which is
not technically possible without SSDs, or which costs far more - using
additional servers and hard disks.
For the same SSD storage
capacity - street prices for the fastest SSDs can be more than 200x more than
for entry level SSD products.
Before
2007 - the "Year
of SSD Revolutions" the predominant part of an SSD's cost was the
memory type and memory capacity. After that the
SSD controller too
became a significant part of the product price mix. That was the year it
became clear that even within the constraints of using the same interface, and
memory type some designers in the highly competitive
2.5" and
3.5" SSD markets
could use clever architecture
and knowledge of device characteristics to leverage significantly more
performance out of those memory chips. The result was to make their products
more attractive to users - and gave them the ability to charge a higher price.
Those factors - related to SSD IP - had always been true in the
rackmount SSD
market too - but it was in 2007 that it became easier to make like for like
comparisons. |
| Memory |
Here's a simple rule of thumb based on analyzing
published price data - for identical storage capacity - across a wide range of
commercially available SSDs.
- RAM SSDs cost 9x
more than SLC flash SSDs
- SLC flash SSDs cost 2x to 6x more than classic
MLC flash SSDs (2
bits per cell MLC)
Here are some additional price
complicating factors...
- within fast flash SSDs - the amount of
over-provisioning
could mean you've actually got twice as much memory inside the SSD (or half as
much) as you thought.
- new types of nv memory
such as PRAM, MRAM and RRAM etc could appear in some SSDs in the 2010 to 2012
timeframe - fitting between some of the price boundaries listed above.
Historically
the market ratios between these various SSD memory types has fluctuated a lot
due to demand vs supply, timing of new geometry shrinks, etc. You can get an
idea of the crazy degree of change and direction by seeing the graph in this
classic RAM
vs flash SSD pricing article. |
| Reliability |
Some SSDs have average operational lives which can be 2x, 5x, 10x or even
100x longer than entry level consumer grade SSDs - when they are used in
demanding applications.
Reliability options within the
SSD market - include
internal hardened
data
integrity, enhanced
fault
tolerance or
enhanced
endurance. |
| Interface / Form factor |
Some interfaces and form factors are supported
by more vendors than others.
That means prices may be lower for SSDs
having otherwise similar speed and memory types.
For a complete list
of SSD directories organized by interface type and form factor see the
SSD Buyers Guide. |
| Security & ruggedness |
There are some other features which can be
important in some SSD applications - but which are not present in all SSDs.
Where they are needed - they can impact system cost (for any given capacity) by
anything from 30% to over 300% compared to other devices with a similar speed.
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| Ease of installation |
For server apps - in particular - buying the SSD
is just part of the process.
Getting it to work effectively is
another hurdle to cross. I've examined these issues in a separate article -
SSD ASAPs
(Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage). This discusses the situations in
which it's worth paying more for an SSD ASAP - and those others where it's not -
and where human tuning is more likely to give better performance results at a
lower price. | |
Conclusion
SSD
pricing looks complicated - because it is complicated!
It would
be misleading to claim otherwise. There is no such thing as a "single SSD
market". Just as in the transportation analogy used in this article -
there is no such thing as a single way of getting from point "A" to "B".
But you can takes steps to simplify your own SSD price search. A helpful
tactic is to decide which pricing messages to filter in or out - depending
on which features within the SSD cost model are relevant to your own needs.
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Clarifying SSD Prices |
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Calories count is an inconvenient
issue for storage
searchers impatient to sample the market's delicacies. | |
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| Looking for
Cheaper Flash SSDs? |
Editor:- July 17, 2009 - "Future
NAND (flash) price reductions will be much less than what we have experienced"
- according the analysis in a new
article
by Lane Mason, Memory Market Analyst at Denali Software.
The
article analyzes the market assumptions, and historic cost base for SLC and MLC
flash (including x4) for various geometries and suppliers - and discusses the
likely cost per GB upto 2013.
In the past 4 - 5 years the price per GB
for flash memory shrank by approximately x100 - but the author warns
that in the next 4 years the price shrink may be in low single digits. |
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"Most of the
low-hanging (technical) fruit for NAND cost-reduction has been picked" -
says Lane Mason in this "must
read" article.
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articles which look at the macro costs of
storage
The
Real Cost of Storage - this wide ranging article by Joerg Hallbauer
(published, April 2009, in GestaltIT )
looks at the lifetime cost of storage in the enterprise.
Settling
the SSD 'High-Cost' Debate - by Amyl Ahola (published June 2009)
compares SSD and HDD array solutions. The principles aren't new - but the
article brings these comparisons up to date.
The Cost of Owning and
Storing Data - by Gene Nagle (published April 1999 in
StorageSearch.com) was one of the
earliest articles which examined this important subject in a consistent way.
Looking
into the far distant future -
Reaching for the
petabyte SSD - by Zsolt Kerekes (published March 2010 in
StorageSearch.com) proposes that
the way we think about storage will change - from being a cost overhead (today)
to being a profit center. More (storage) will be better - if enterprises can
leverage their data (and automatically grow new data) with upcoming SSD and
search-engine enabled software technologies. | |
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| the SSD
Heresies |
| Editor:- June 8, 2010 - more
than 10 key areas of fundamental disagreement within the SSD industry are
listed in a new overview article published here on StorageSearch.com -
the SSD Heresies. |
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Why can't SSD's true believers agree about
a single coherent vision for the future of solid state storage? ...read the article | | | |
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the fastest SSDs
Speed
isn't everything, and
it comes at a price......... |
But if
you do need the speediest
SSD then wading through the web sites of over 180 current SSD oems to
shortlist products slows you down.
And the SSD search problem will
get even worse as we head
towards a market
with over 1,000 SSD oems. |
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| What's the
best / cheapest - PC SSD? |
| Editor:- May 14, 2010 - I often
get emails from readers which ask the above question. |
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| There
are
hundreds
of articles about SSDs on StorageSearch.com |
Here 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.
- SSD Backup - how can
backup to SSDs be cost effective? Some vendors are already offering products -
with unique value propositions.
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