Will SSD prices fall to a level that can beat HDD or even Blu-ray Disc on a per GB level in the next 3 years?

T&A: Nikkei Electronics Asia has just released a feature story on the challenges Solid State Disks (SSDs) are posing to traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs).

What’s interesting with the feature is how it begins by talking about Baidu.com, the world’s third largest search engine in terms of searches (according to comScore Inc.), and how the China-based firm plans to utilize SSD (instead of HDDs) for almost every tenths of their search servers and 100% for Web search servers. (Editor opinions: 1)

Farther down the story, it’s shared that there’s also the adoption of SSDs for disk arrays in corporate applications — like what HP and Hitachi are doing.

Not only that, netbooks and ultrathin notebooks with SSD-based storage solutions instead of notebook HDDs are becoming more attractive, thanks to the steady fall in price for NAND flash memory — the main component in an SSD. While still expensive compared to an equivalent cost-per-GBHDD, analysts predict price will fall even further.

According to the feature by Nikkei, it is possible for a 100-GB SSD solution to cost around US$75 by 2010. One year later, for the same price, you might be able to get the 200-GB version. Technically, the capacity in SSD isn’t the issue, it’s the price. Nikkei projects that all PCs will be sporting mostly SSD solutions by 2012.

Already we’re seeing traditional HDD makers like Western Digital and Hitachi making moves to move into SSD by either forming partnerships or acquiring companies.

For those of you who read HWM the magazine, check out our SSD Shootout in the September 2009 issue (Singapore edition). For the other countries, do check back with us.

Navin Danapal, Technical Editor, HWM Malaysia

Navin (HWM Malaysia): HDD makers shouldn’t really be worried about SSDs, even though eventually they will replace HDDs as how magnetic tape in the 1960s were replaced with the hard drive.

For a start, while SSDs are faster, robust, and consume less power, they still have a shorter lifespan as opposed to hard drives, especially under heavy usage.

We’re not talking about physical wear and tear here, but rather the number of times the SSD can be used electronically.

SSDs also lack the ability to offer massive capacities in the Terabytes at an affordable cost while for HDDs this isn’t an issue.

In the classic case of trickle-down effect, the SSD-HDD situation will be the opposite. As SSDs replace the HDD in lower-end segments of the market, the HDD can enter high-end segments to replace other aging technologies like the data tape which is still used for backup and archival purposes.

The proliferation of NAS (network-attached storage) devices will also fuel the demand for HDDs since RAID-based SSDs are still pricey.

There’s also external hard drives for backup purposes which HDDs can play a role in the consumer segment. Plus there’s Home Media Servers for a whole new generation of networked homes and digital content which need large storage spaces at an affordable cost with minimum wear and tear.

No doubt in data centers the cost of SSDs might mitigate the cooling and space requirements of HDDs, but this is easily rectified by housing data centers in cooler environments.

Like past technologies, storage is an important aspect of the technology evolution, so while SSDs are growing, they should not replace HDDs that quickly as HDDs can and will find life elsewhere. So it’s a long way to go before SSDs can truly triumph over HDDs as the de facto storage solution in the high-end terabyte space.