Don’t tell Seagate or Western Digital but solid state storage (SSD) will eclipse spinning disks (HDD) within two years. Well, they probably know that and are already anticipating the curve.
While the HDD market is focusing on more capacity for the price, Trendforce’s DRAMeXchange has issued the bold prediction that SSD will exceed HDD, especially in notebooks and desktops by 2018. The 3D Flash NAND used to make SSD is getting denser (up to 64-layers fitting four times the capacity in the same die size) and cheaper.
In part, the price reductions will come from China’s determination to be the world’s major silicon producer and the Government has a plan that is seeing enormous investment in silicon production.
SSD is even more economical if you trade off speed for unused or wasted space. Using say 100GB of a 2TB (2000GB) HDD does not make sense – buy the largest SSD you can for the money you have. The sweet spot at present is 240GB (approx) with prices below A$100 and 128GB (approx.) below A$60.
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But it is not all consumer driven either. “Pure Flash” as it is called is infiltrating the data centre market, especially for big data and analytics use.
Intel has released a broad range of new Intel 3D NAND SSDs to meet the needs of the consumer, business, Internet of Things (IoT), and data centers.
Bill Leszinske, Intel Vice President and Director of Strategic Planning, Marketing and Business Development for NSG, said, “These new SSDs reflect Intel’s 30-year commitment to memory technologies and our long-term plan to transform the economics of storage with trusted, breakthrough 3D NAND technology from Intel. This broad array of new 3D NAND SSDs expands the reach of PCIe solutions and offers a cost-effective replacement for traditional Hard Disk Drives, helping customers accelerate user experiences, improve the performance of apps and services and reduce IT costs.”
The range includes:
Client
Intel® SSD 600p Series is for use in desktops and notebooks and brings exceptional PCIe, Gen3x4, NVMe performance that delivers 17x improvements over traditional HDDs.
Intel® SSD Pro 6000p Series is for used in in high performance, highest quality business notebooks and desktops.
Data Centre
Intel® SSD DC P3520 Series Optimised for cost-effective read-intensive applications in cloud computing environments, such as storage virtualisation and web hosting.
Intel® SSD DC S3520 Series balances cost and performance and delivers significant latency and throughput improvements over traditional hard disk drives (HDDs).
Internet of Things
Intel® SSD E 6000p Series used PCIe and M.2 form factors and are ideal for IoT applications, such as point-of-sale devices and digital signage. It also has AES 256-bit self-encryption.
Intel® SSD E 5420s Series provides additional data protection to ensure data will be reliably read or written, even during momentary power loss.