The Death Watch for Hard Disk Drive Technology Begins Now (Finally!)

So, while we have achieved “affordability”, we haven’t quite gotten to the fully usable state – for the typical user – as a result of low storage capacity. So, the price is good for the mainstream. But 32-40GB is not.

But then again, the definition of useful depends on what an individual users need. And for most users, 32-40GB is going to be too small. But, to the credit of Intel, OZC, Patriot, and Kingston, they’re not quite pitching their low price drives for the masses.

So, let’s take a look at the different usage patterns for today’s hard drive users and see how those users would respond to the pricing of the current crop of SSDs:

Type of User Characterization Mainstream Baseline Price (for HDD) Mainstream Baseline Capacity
The Laptop User Storage of Boot Operating System, Applications, Documents, and Music Library $100 128GB
Desktop User or Laptop as a Desktop Replacement Storage of Boot Operating System, Applications, All Documents, and Complete Media Library (Music, Movies, Photo Library) $100 500GB
Home Media Servers Storage of Boot Operating System, Media Serving Applications, Complete Media Library $100 – $200 1 TB+
Netbooks (Based on the Google Cloud Model) Storage of Boot Operating System and Cached Data from the Cloud $50 – $100 20GB+

In the above, I’m looking more or less at consumer/home/office users – not server users. Server use-cases can land all over the map. Many server users have already decided to adopt SSD. And other’s don’t see the cost efficiency yet. Plus, we’re assuming that mainstream means for individual use.

So, from the above table, which budget considering users could make use of SSD technology today? Pretty much any technically inclined user in the table except for the laptop users.

In a laptop, there’s pretty much only room for one drive – so that drive has to be big enough for all of the user’s storage needs. So, for those on a budget, the 32-40GB drives aren’t going to cut it. The casual laptop user will need about 128GB, which would run about $250+ – over the mainstream budget. And the desktop replacement laptop user will probably need to shell out a whopping $1000+ for a suitable drive.

But, on a desktop or home media server system (again for the technically inclined), an affordable SSD would be perfect – well, someone perfect. A small SSD would perfectly fit in as a boot drive – housing just the boot operating system. Windows 7 would be one of the largest OS’s these days – and it only needs about 16GB to boot. The remaining content can be stored on cheap hard drives.

So, for users who have the technical abilities to separate the OS from applications, user data, and media libraries, a small SSD would work nicely. OS data is frequently accessed – particularly upon system startup. So even in such a hybrid setup, system performance and energy consumption would be enhanced. Of course, when launching applications and working with large media files, the performance benefit would be slight – though still probably non-zero since OS data is pretty much continually accessed.

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