- Sunday, 22 November 2009
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There's one thing I can promise you about the space program. Your tax dollars will go further. - Wernher Von Braun
Solid state drives save money says analyst
TO SPLASH OUT on SSD notebooks, or not, is an interesting question, and an analyst believes he has come up with an answer, saying his research shows companies who buy their employees SSD equipped notebooks save money long term despite the higher initial purchase price.
Since SSDs became a buzzword a year or so ago, firms have been to-ing and fro-ing over their pros and cons, wavering over whether the extra expense of the supposedly more robust and higher performance solid-state storage subsystems is actually worth their significant additional cost.
But now IT market research outfit Jack Gold Associates reckons it has managed to align the numbers fortuitously on its various spreadsheets, and has come up with an answer, delivered in full in a study entitled Solid State Drives in Business Notebooks: Cost Benefit or Cost Burden?
The long and short of it appears to be that despite having to dig a little deeper and pay some $200 more for a machine with a solid state drive rather than a bog standard HDD, companies could end up saving themselves $214 over a three-year lifecycle and $493 if the machine is kept in service for five years.
As a result, according to the report, "the SSD expenditure has an ROI of 107 per cent for a three year lifecycle and 247 per cent for a five year lifecycle."
The report claims to have taken into account "the true costs associated with business notebook failures including variations in failure rates over the life cycle, costs of repairs both in and out of warranty, IT tasks and labor rates, end user effects, etc."
The report added that the cost of repairing a failed notebook under warranty with an HDD was $970 vs. just $715 for SSD and that the average failure rate of a notebook was reduced by one-third due to the higher reliability of SSDs. µ
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Higher reliability? For RAM that looses its juice after a year and gets worse from then on? hmmm
Im an accountant and I would have gone for the more obvious measure of time saving due to faster IO and start times, etc, but reliability? repair costs?
Lies, damn lies and statistics.
Higher reliability?
Actually - I think SSD drives now last a lot longer than a year. Intel guarantees 100GB per day for 5 years, which corrsponds to about 1000 years of use for me.
What I don't understand is how they calculated the savings to be so low. Doesn't anyone actually use their computers? I reckon an SSD can save 5 minutes a day for a moderately heavy user (like an IT professional). That's about 1% of available time, or maybe $500 to $1000 a year.
My next hobby horse is how much time you can save with a full WUXGA screen, rather than struggling to fit all your spreadsheet columns/IDE windows on a narrower screen. Again, minutes a day, which adds up to far more than the cost of the hardware, and certainly not worth the $100 saving.
is this guy on the ssd payroll? he is trying to encourage support for ssd using statistics - the reality is conveniently not included. consider purchase cost and reliability. if you are a business you cannot afford to lose any data and costs can be difference between sink or swim!
conventional hard drives dont automatically die within 3 years! ive looked after 4 laptops over the past 9 years and they all still work fine with original equipment - not an ssd in sight!
sound like desparation from a man with his head in the sand
management armed with a spreadsheet can prove anything one way or another. Be it true or otherwise. Same here it seems.
Personally I think the money would be better spent on online backup solutions and hard drive encryption software.
Personally, These statistics seem reasonable. I've had alot of overheating issues with the Dell Latitude D620, which has required the replacement of the hdd on 2 occassions. An SSD would have been less likely to overheat, and more resistant to heat damage than my bog standard hdd. These two failures could have been prevented by paying a little more up front for an SSD.
I agree with one of the other comments. You can interpret the data any way you want. If you have the data, then it should be published for others to comment on. Where did you get your reliability data for hard drives? Where did you get your data for SSDs? Any SSD reliability data has to be taken with with a whole salt shaker. There are NO standards today for SSD reliability. Manufactures claims are not fact.
Please show us your data and let us make our own conclusions on the cost savings!
Several studies have shown SSDs are already a winner on lifetime cost due to reduced power consumption and air conditioning load.
have used SSDs for 3 years to come up with their $214 figure, and which models have been around for 5 years for their $493 saving?
And I mean widely available, commonly used units that a decent sample size can be derived from, not the $20,000 custom made versions for special uses (military etc).
Ever heard of MTBF? Do you think someone waits around for 50,000 hours to see if a device fails? You can't be serious....
MTBF calculation is only part of the picture. How about operational G force, which is the number one failure of hard drives (some smuck dropping the unit while it is running, crashing the heads).
This is why many mobile HD have sensors to detect free fall or jarring and then retract the heads thus averting a crash.
And if you think you need a decent sample size to do accurate failure calculation, using that mentality they would have to crash about 4,000 malibu sedans to have a 2.5% sample size. Absolute Insanity!
My concern is that the Intel guarantee is for SLC drives. But the costs given are for MLC drives. That is a huge discrepancy. Wanna bet that the analyst has been told about the error, but can't change it?
SLC drives are $400+ more expensive as of May 2009 prices, the latest that we have from finance group at my company.
No manufacturer offers more than an 18 month warranty on MLC drives. Most offer only 9 months.
SLC
Roughly 100,000 - 250,000 charged write cycles.
(100GB a day for 5 years.)
MLC drives
Less than 10,000 charged write cycles.
(4 GB a day for 5 years.)
It's not hard to find storage sites that describe what happens when an SSD drive loses it's capacity to hold data. No resistance = No Good.
We fell for the hype last year. Not this year. Good Luck All!