A brokerage firm by the name of Avian whose research covers the tech industry is reporting that an unknown computer manufacturer is receiving a 20 to 30% return on laptops fitted with SSD [solid state drives]. According to the article at PC World no one knows for sure who the PC company is and no one is confirming this is happening. Dell, which has been pushing SSD in its laptops, would not confirm the rate of failures. According to the article:
The findings do not reflect well on the current trend toward SSD-based laptops. Offered by manufacturers such as Apple, Dell, Lenovo and Sony, they are significantly more expensive than conventional laptops, with the price tag justified by characteristics such as light weight, silence and fast data access speeds.
Naturally any new product is going to experience some growing pains. Because of this it is sometimes best to wait before diving into any new technology. It would seem that SSD is one of those newbies that should be avoided for now.
Comments welcome.
Full article is here.
nice one ron, i just did another one saying the failure rates are wrong, i smell a SSD battle
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Not being a techno-geek, I don’t really pretend to understand why SSDs aren’t more reliable. But aren’t they really just larger versions of the flash drives we all carry as key fobs? My daughter accidentally put hers through the washing machine and the dryer and it still works like a charm! I know my highly mechanical hard drive in my laptop and desktop could never stand such a beating.
What’s the problem?
Hello Jim in Virginia,
There may not be a problem. It could be that one source is over reacting.
But like any new technologies, there re going to be some glitches at first. The one difference I can see between the thumb drives and laptop drives could be heat. Those cases get toasty inside sometimes.
I personally think it is way to early to even judge SSD until more systems become available to the consumers.
Regards, Ron
FIRST, like for any new technology, I am expecting higher than normal failure rates, for a year or so, up to he moment the technology mature! However, speaking of 10 to 20 percent it is very vaguely. If it were 3% to 4% (meaning 25% margin error) maybe I can accept it, but a 100% margin error (from 10% to 20%) of “reality” does not sound real… Some extra info available at: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13924_1-9897828-64.html or http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9895986-7.html !
SECOND, if you study performances of actual available SSD versus HDD, except power savings evident for SATA I only (but not for SATA II !), soundless and a more life span for a device without moving parts, they are relatively close. True that some applications gain very much using SSD devices, but for general purposes, the differences are very small, maximum tens of percent. I can believe that 10% want money back, since can use HDD for cheap, but other advantages like soundless and reliability, make it doubtfully!
THIRD, with some changes to better manage of internal operations for read and write – regardless of external communication standard, it is possible to speed up the performance of current technology few tens times !!! YES, theoretical more than 50x speedier for a 16-32GB SSD and could be 10 times more (for a total of 500x) for a 200GB SSD… The actual internal “management” of flash memories – likes as a FDD device – tries to be cheaper (we are already speaking about thousand of dollars), but can change for internal computer purposes. After all, these devices looks very much like a processor, they can reach the same speed and the same price! Hence, the future will be different…
FORTH, could have new interface prescription for SSD devices, any actual SATA cannot match the theoretical SSD performance can reach… Actually, I am expecting to have a… SSD card that could be inserted direct to a PCI Express x16 slot, like an ordinary video card! See you!
Hi GIM,
Thanks for the info.