The SSD revolution has begun

THESE ARE EXCITING times indeed, especially on the storage front. I realise that for many, the words 'storage' and 'excitement' are not commonly used in the same sentence, unless it's something like, 'There was great excitement that day, when Big Aunty May got her fat ass stuck in the storage locker'.

I like storage though and, in typical male fashion, the more I have of it the better. It doesn't matter that I haven't enough content to fill up the spare 200GB I have lying around, it's just the fact that I have it that counts. Like a kind of storage comfort blanket for when my broadband speeds improve (30kbps at present, laugh away, I know). On that day, I too will be ready to hit the torrent sites and download more crap than I could ever watch, just because I can. Yes, when it comes to storage, the bigger the better I say and yes, I realise how phallic all that sounds. However, because I'm generally a tight git with my pennies, the more bytes I get for my buck, the better.

Which is why I can't fully understand why solid state disk (SSD) drives make me excited. Here we have a tiny amount of storage for a gob-smacking amount of cash. What is it now, five times more expensive per gigabyte than HDD storage? It goes against my whole ‘pile it high, buy it cheap' ethos. In fact, the mere mention of SSD has my inner Scot going into paroxysms of fear. I'm not Scottish, by the way, but I think everyone has an inner Scot, someone that's fanatically cautious about parting with the cash. Right now, my Scrooge-like William Wallace is waving a claymore and growling at me as he backs away with my credit card.

I guess I like SSDs a lot now, not just because they will revolutionise whole segments of the device industry, particularly notebooks, but because they are finally here. Unlike most bright new technologies SSDs are in the wild, if not exactly affordable. In fact, the past few weeks has seen more activity in the SSD space than in the previous six months. This is it, the official start of things to come.

For most of last year, almost everything SSD was coming from Samsung's marketing department, interspersed with some similar announcements from SanDisk ,and even one or two from TDK. Apart from showing up in some UMPCs, there's been little else going on. In the last six weeks though, it's like everyone else has decided to gatecrash the party. Here's a brief recap of what's been happening. Fujitsu announces that it's no longer going to build 1.8 HDDs, just SSDs. Dell offers its first notebooks with SSD drive options, as does Samsung and Fujitsu throws up a few SSD-enable pen tablets. Samsung launches the first 64Gb SSD, just a few months after the arrival of its latest 32GB SSD.

Asus, interestingly, is hoping to take the price sting out of the SSD tail by announcing plans to sell cheap SSD laptops. Again, there's two words, ‘SSD' and ‘cheap' in the same sentence but, possibly for the first time, the word ‘not' isn't separating them. Asus will launch five cheap laptops with 7-inch screens, Intel SSD drives from 1-40Gb and wallet-friendly price tags of $199-$599. Transcend has just announced its first 32GB SSD product while Sony which, like Samsung, offers pricey UMPCs with SSDs has recently announced that it's swapping out the 40GB HDD drive in its new Vaio G ultra-portable notebook with a 32GB SSD. Of course, all of that is not even touching on the growing number of 16GB SSD cards for notebooks.

Everyone is still yammering about the cost being too high and they are right, it is. In fact, despite Sandisk claiming that prices are falling by 60 per cent a year, it's not fast enough for many. Even Samsung has said that at current levels of price decreases, SSDs will still cost three times more than HDD storage even in 2010. My thought is that there's been too much focus on the price, which is not always the best marker for success. After all, the original IBM PCs and iPods, to mention just two, were all very poor value in monetary terms with what already existed. And you can see how they failed.

It's how people will use them that will make the difference. Anyone wanting significantly faster notebook boot-ups, data access, longer battery life, less weight etc. etc. will snap these up, regardless of the tag. In the coming months more and more notebook vendors are going to hop on board and by the end of this year, most will offer some SSD options. True, they will not be cheap, but 2008 will see that change because everyone will have an SSD offering and that's when some price competition can kick in.

Will it be enough for me to wrest back control of my credit card from my maniacal, sword-wielding inner Scot, remains to be seen. But, I own a shotgun, so I'm optimistic. µ