The State of Solid State

The Fall (as in season), of 2011 will be recorded as the fall of the hard disk drive (otherwise known as HDD) in the annals of computing history. "Neck-deep" flooding in the Bang Pa-In, Thailand brought the vast majority of world production to a screeching halt and doubled the price of drives within a space of days. Why do you care?

From 1956, when IBM (yes, that IBM), introduced them as the secondary (there was a time when Floppy was king) point of storage for computers, these things have become increasingly dominant in the industry as our society has become increasingly digitized. In that day and age, virtually all computers were mainframes and most off-line mass storage as done on tape. Remember those old movies showing the "computer room" with banks of cabinets and big reels of tape spinning?

At MIT where a lot of this type of technology was developed, virtually no one was even allowed into these rooms. If you wanted to run a program, you had to hand it over to one of the "priest" (swear to Jobs, that's what they called them) and those guys would run the "stack" and you'd get a green-sheeted print-out. My first job in college was at Texas A&M in the Teague building doing card punch for a professor and running the resulting program! I guess I was an Aggie Priest! Anyway, as things progress from the 70's into the 80's, computers got the big "packs", removable hard drives in a cake carrier size..... just like the picture above. We had a "mini-computer" at my first job after college which used these things.

At that job, I generally worked on an IBM PC AT. It was a 286 and had the then crazy expensive and extravagantly sized 60Mb hard drive in it! My boss at that cotton company was a little technology crazy and spent a lot of money on such things, so we had the AT, an XT, AND a Compaq Portable. You remember, the clone with a folding keyboard when closed up looked remarkably like a Singer sewing machine ready for travel!

So, is this post about old storage mediums? No: as close as that is to my heart (I know, it's a weird unexplainable thing), that isn't the case. I've recently gotten to the point where my little computer side-business is even starting to go in this direction. The last three machines I sold were equipped with SSDs instead of traditional hard drives. When Joe-blow on the street is opting for it instead of the older, more capacious, and cheaper mechanical drives, then it's time must have arrived.

 

What brought this on all of a sudden? Well....yesterday, I took my last system with a mechanical boot drive "off-line". Our home server built in this Silverstone PS07 case, with the Asus E350-M1pro (AMD APU 350 Brazos chip), had a 500Gb Seagate Momentus XT in it. Yes, I know; it's a "hybrid" drive, but the NAND part of it was just a big cache and didn't really function as an actual SSD. It's being replaced by a 160Gb, Intel 320. It got me to thinking.

It's been a long road, from 2011 till now. It started with this little drive. It's all I could afford at the time, 64Gb Mushkin Callisto in the 1st Blackbird build. Over the course of the last 3 years, that machine has gotten 128Gb, and 256Gb SSDs; with the most recent rebuild I installed my very first SATA-III drive. A 240Gb Sandisk Extreme. That changeover didn't just change Blackbird; it's 256Gb Samsung SSD went into my wife's T500, the temporary 128Gb SSD went into the Viking HTPC replacing a 64Gb Samsung. This last weekend, I just upgraded our living room HTPC to a 128Gb SSD as well. Last month, my personal X301 got an Intel 320, 160Gb that has a TRIM function to replace the older Samsung 128Gb drive that did not. As you can see here, this isn't "1st Generation" replacement, I'm now in the 2G with bigger, faster drives displacing older, slower and smaller drives.

It's undeniable that SSDs was faster, but they were way expensive. So what happened? It wasn't quite this dramatic, but we are back to the top now. In 2011, the floods in Thailand didn't just drive up the price of hard drives, it changed the landscape of computer storage overall. In years past, the industry would have just borne the brunt of the high costs caused by the shrunken supply and then return to normal when the factories came back on line. However, in this case; there was an alternative in the budding SSD industry. Solid State Drive manufacturer's response to the "disaster" was to aggressively ramp up production while cutting prices to penetrate the market. Basically, every 9 to 12 months, the capacity of drives would double at the same price-point.

As the capacity was rising and the prices were dropping on SSDs, we can add the arrival of the "Cloud". This perfect storm (no pun intended) of technologies is spelling the end of the mechanical hard drive in it's traditional role. What has now happened is that in many cases, the SSD have taken over as boot, or only drive with commonly found capacities of 480Gb and beyond. Yes, they are still expensive compared to the spinning platters, which is why you often see the boot drive/storage drive (SSD/HDD) combination. 

Why am I writing about this now? It's that there's a "sea change" out there. You can feel it. SSDs are now the accepted norm for users who want performance. As I pointed out earlier; the last 3 laptops that I sold; one a Dell Latitude E6400, the other two ThinkPads, T61 and T500 all went out with 64Gb SSDs. What makes this remarkable is that I deal in value. My clients want something that will run well for as little as they can pay for it. However, they know the difference between a "cheap" consumer machine from Wal-Buy (my word), and something made well that should last. They also want performance if they don't have to pay too much for it. I offered all of them the machines with a regular HDD, but offered them all an alternative of a small 64Gb SSD for $50 more. After seeing a machine with an SSD run, they all chose less capacity, but better performance, despite the additional $50. These were "regular guys", not gamers, or Tech Gurus. Their use of them is from daily working computer to sit by the recliner check email/web-surfer. They just want their machines to be snappy!

Back in 2008, when the ThinkPad X300 was introduced, the thing that set it apart wasn't the thinness (the MacBook Air was slightly thinner AND beat it to market), it wasn't the uncommon at the time, Hi-Res LED lit screen. It wasn't even the still not standard, ridiculously slim 7mm optical drive that the MBA didn't have.....still doesn't. If you blow that picture up; it's item "N", the 64Gb SSD! The X300 was the lone machine on the market at that time that only came with an SSD! Now 5/6 years down the road, it's a tide that is beginning to wash away the HDD dominance. Ironically, the old hard disk drive has be relegated back to it's original role......that of secondary storage.