by Zsolt Kerekes, editor of storagesearch.com
Although 2006 has been a very good year for revenue growth in the SSD market - next year will be even better. SSD market adoption has progressed pretty much as predicted in my article last year. And those predictions about applications look just as accurate for the next couple of years too. But as we start to see SSDs appearing more widely in products - there are some factors which may accelerate the take-up beyond what might be predicted from preliminary performance predictions.
For example - in the notebook market - flash vendors have predicted that SSDs will give an application speedup of x2 to x3. Those figures are based on comparing the theoretical performance of low cost flash SSDs compared to hard disk drives, and are backed up by early measurements done by product developers.
What the figures don't tell you is that the comparisons are done for new systems with a freshly loaded squeaky clean OS and application software. Real life is more messy.
If you fast forward a couple of months and end-users start doing software updates - the effect of fragmentation will slow the performance of the HDD based systems down by a factor of x2 to x7 depending on the application and the interval between defrags (which is rarely - if ever performed on most personal notebooks).
In contrast - the speed of the SSD systems stays the same as it was when the system was new - because the random access time is the same for all data - and fragmentation effects are effectively zero. The impact is that when you compare a 3 month old Vista notebook with or without an SSD - the difference in speed could be as much as x5 or x10. This only applies to notebooks which have pure SSDs and the benefit won't apply to hybrids.
I predict that once users have eyeballed the comparisons in real-life - the flash based SSD sales will soar. Pressure from users on their corporate IT managers to throw out the old HDD based notebooks will create a tsunami of demand as strong as that which led to companies originally buying PCs back in the early 80s.
(Reprinted with permission from STORAGEsearch.com)
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