Intel just Conroe?d the HDD market

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: woolfe9999
SSD's are superior to conventional drives in the following areas: performance (as of the newest, across the board), heat, noise, ergonomics, longevity. Conventional drives are superior to SSD's in the following areas: price.

Am I missing something here, or is it plainly obvious that once the price comes down on SSD's to levels that compete with conventional drives, there won't be any market for the conventional drives anymore? Are the companies that currently make HD's all getting into the SSD market, or do they have some alternative plan for survival? I just can't see any market for conventional HD's in say 5 years time.

- woolfe

You're pretty much on the ball, excepting that conventional hard drives will hold a capacity advantage for many years to come. SSDs will displace the niches currently occupied by 10k+ drives and then trickle down into the mainstream over the next few years. Most of the current drive manufacturers will probably build or acquire their own SSD divisions at some point, or otherwise get shut out as the market for conventional drives dwindles.

 

[taltamir]

speaking of size... that is really a factor of the COST right now...
If Intel can fit 50nm 160GB of SSD chips (plus controller and board) in 1.8 inch form factor, how many chips do you think you could fit in a 3.5 inch form factor? And how about when intel transitions them to 32nm next year?

The reason SSDs are so small right now is that they are just too expensive to put many chips in one drive.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: taltamir
speaking of size... that is really a factor of the COST right now...
If Intel can fit 50nm 160GB of SSD chips (plus controller and board) in 1.8 inch form factor, how many chips do you think you could fit in a 3.5 inch form factor? And how about when intel transitions them to 32nm next year?

The reason SSDs are so small right now is that they are just too expensive to put many chips in one drive.

I think they are dumping the 3.5-inch form factor completely, they already have done so for conventional Enterprise hard drives(most 10k and 15k SAS drives are 2.5-inch now). Probably just take a few product generations before Dell and the other OEMs start making desktop cases with 2.5-inch bays, and then the rest of the market will follow suit.

 

[taltamir]

its possible, point is, if you want to compare data density (and not as a factor of cost), you should compare the top end 2.5 and 1.8 inch platter drives right now.

Biggest platter drives:
3.5: 1.5TB
2.5: 320GB
1.8: ?

Biggest intel drive @ 50nm:
2.5: 160GB (not on sale yet)
1.8: 160GB (not on sale yet)

@2009 intel expects to transition those to 32nm... which decreases the size by 36% and allows even more density. At that point they would be superior to platter drives in density. leaving only cost as the last bastion of platters.

Except, that due to cost I don't expect the total size of SSDs to eclipse platter drives for a while, simply because it will be too expensive to make a drive so big.

 

[Xed]

I might be blind and missed it but when are these drives due?

 

[woolfe9999]

Originally posted by: taltamir
speaking of size... that is really a factor of the COST right now...
If Intel can fit 50nm 160GB of SSD chips (plus controller and board) in 1.8 inch form factor, how many chips do you think you could fit in a 3.5 inch form factor? And how about when intel transitions them to 32nm next year?

The reason SSDs are so small right now is that they are just too expensive to put many chips in one drive.

QFT. I did not include size in my list of advantages for platter drives because I just assumed that cost and size were two sides of the same coin. I assume that as manufacturing costs go down, available sizes will go up.

I did, however, leave out one additional advantage for SSD's: power consumption.

That rounds out the list of SSD advantages as follows: performance (as of the newest, across the board), heat, noise, ergonomics, longevity, power consumption.

Pretty much a clean sweep once the pricing issue is resolved.

- woolfe