High-Speed Flash Memory Prices Low Enough For Laptops
The price of high-speed NAND flash memory has now fallen to levels where we should expect volume laptop manufacturers to start bringing out reasonably priced models with solid-state, as opposed to hard drive-based, storage. Because of the reliability of solid-state storage compared to hard-drive based storage, I suspect we can expect manufacturers to be thinking about doubling I/O speeds by shipping pairs of solid-state drives in RAID 0 (striped) configurations. With hard drives, striping is rare because it significantly decreases reliability compared to using a single hard drive. That’s because if one hard drive in a RAID 0 set fails, all the data is lost. This won’t be such a concern with flash storage.
So, think in terms of laptops with 32GB flash storage, able to read and write data at speeds of around 40MB/sec or 80MB/sec, depending on price. At the low (40MB/sec) end, this should result in laptops with significantly faster I/O than many current laptops (perhaps around double the performace that many people are used to). At the high (80MB/sec) end, this should mean laptops with truly blistering I/O compared to current hard drive-based laptops.
What should these flash-based laptops cost? Well, I think it should now just about be possible to produce solid-state laptops at the following price points:
- Laptop with 32GB (2 x 16GB low-cost memory, striped) flash storage @ 40MB/sec I/O I/O - starting at around $1,500
- Laptop with 32GB (2 x 16GB premium memory, striped) flash storage @ 80MB/sec I/O - starting at around $2,200
Some manufacturers have already begun to experiment with flash-based ultra portables. However, the technology is now at a point where it is starting to make sense to use flash storage, with larger drive sizes, in a wide range of laptop form factors.
Asam Bashir wrote:
For $2500 you can buy one now from Sony,
http://reviews.cnet.com/Sony_VAIO_UX390/4505-3126_7-32306444.html
Not sure what market the UX390 is aiming for, useless tiny screen and keyboard. Have to wait for Apple to come out with it’s ultra-portable for a well thought out product.
Not sure yet if Apple will use the Samsung hybrid drives for it’s high-end laptops over the next year.
Posted 12 Mar 2007 at 6:16 pm ¶
Steve Sarakas wrote:
NAND read and write life is limited, so much in fact, that wear leveling is usually employed to maximize life of chip. Meanwhile, disc drive mfr’s continue to make improvements, don’t forget. Consequently, NAND drives will probably be used in stuff like MIL. You can fry the whole NAND drive in an instant, but not a hard drive. Destroying a hard drive to avoid capture is problematic. Ruggedness is an issue, but hard drives can be rugged, maybe same G’s. An 8-layer pcb with a pack of VBGA packages on it can only take so many G’s too.
It’s also possible that as mask size gets smaller and smaller, cosmic interference will become intolerable. It’s already a factor in highest density DDR2 at higher altitudes. And that’s dynamic memory. Long term storage can’t tolerate anywhere near that much.
Besides, just because the prices have come down a lot the past few months, doesn’t mean they’ll just keep falling and falling. How many would be willing to pay that much for a drive? Look at the impact it already has on the price of MP3 players, etc.
Good luck.
Posted 27 Mar 2007 at 4:32 am ¶
simon wrote:
Yes, wear leveling is used… which gives flash drives long read/write lives. Easily long enough for use in a laptop.
It’s inevitable that prices will continue to trend down. There may be some blips if supply can’t keep up with demand. But it would shocking if prices didn’t continue to fall.
Some analysts believe that, because flash drives are so much more expensive than hard drives, people won’t buy them. I think that’s nonsense. Customers in the market for ultraportable laptops don’t look at component prices. They look at the total price of the device.
Even if you look at component prices, however, prices aren’t that much in absolute terms. For example, the new Sandisk 32GB laptop flash drive is priced at less than $350 for OEMs that can buy in volume.
Sandisk claims this drive works 100 times faster than current laptop hard drives for random small reads; that it boots Windows Vista almost twice as fast as regular hard drives; and that it uses less than half the power of regular hard drives.
How many people will be prepared to pay for such a hard drive? Plenty.
Posted 27 Mar 2007 at 7:30 am ¶
Steve Sarakas wrote:
Wear leveling doesn’t give long life. It simply helps to prevent what is a short life from being made even shorter. NAND has worked well for storing voice messages and music, but for system files it’s plain not good enough.
Actually, NAND prices are expected to recover this year. I just read that in Electronics Business. We’ll see.
The best price advantage is with individual chips, when the total capacity is the same. You can imagine a bank of smaller capacity chips can be built to provide a larger total capacity, but this is expensive. And if you bank the highest density chips, well, those are individually the most expensive of all.
Of course, if the argument above is lowered to $350 there will be some takers. But, if that was going to cause NAND to mainstream then why are laptop mfr’s operating on paper thin margins as it is? I mean, if people were lined up to pay that for a laptop that was a lot faster than last year’s, then why aren’t they doing it now?
Volume has impact, to a point. But remember, the lower the price goes on increasing volume, the greater the volume has to increase for additional price reduction. That’s because it works on %. It’s just meaningless to think if someone would only buy a gazillion, the prices would fall to pennies. It just doesn’t happen, unfortunately. The biggest impact on prices has been the result of an abundance of facilities producing the second or third most dated sub-micron technology. Remember, it’s not in the best interest of these manufacturers to allow prices to fall all the way to spit.
Have large volumes of chips quoted, and you’ll see the price only falls so far on increasing volume. Some of that is due to the supply chain, but the biggest phenomenon is what I mentioned above.
SS memory may well supplant disc drives someday, and that is exciting. I just don’t think it will be NAND technology.
I don’t understand the Vista comment above, or where they’re coming from. I’ve written two different low level drivers for NAND flash - one for a Coldfire and the other for an 8051 derivative. Look at the data sheet and see what the page write times are. Ouch. All they give you is a window. Who cares about read only?
Posted 27 Mar 2007 at 1:17 pm ¶
simon wrote:
“Wear leveling doesn’t give long life. It simply helps to prevent what is a short life from being made even shorter.”
Fair point, Steve
I should have quantified it - Sandisk are, I think, claiming a MTBF of two million hours for their new 32GB flash drive. That sounds fine to me for a laptop hard drive.
Re: Why aren’t people lining up to buy new laptops now? Well, I think they are. The laptop market is growing at more than 25% a year (compared to less than 10% growth for the whole PC market). And, if you look at a manufacturer like Apple that makes high-price products, the sales growth rates are spectacular - Mac laptop sales grew by almost 200% in the last year.
Re: Price and volume. The big NAND players all seem believe there are new, untapped, volume markets for NAND flash. So, they seem to be planning increase scale and reduce prices to grow these markets.
Re: Write performance of Sandisk 32GB drive. They say they can read and write at a sustained rate of 62MB/sec. That’s pretty impressive…
There will be nowhere for them to hide on the performance stuff. Either they’re being honest and direct about the performance of their drive relative to regular laptop hard drives, or they’re not.
Posted 27 Mar 2007 at 2:16 pm ¶
Steve Sarakas wrote:
I’ll tell you where I see these NAND flash getting used in computers, and that’s alongside the disc. I think Intel started talking this way a couple years ago. That’s where the decent read times do make sense. If you don’t have to perform fast writes, then it can be used to boot up fast. Fast up and on is a major improvement.
Not sure how the MTBF on a flash drive would be determined. Life seems to be limited by reads and writes, not hours on. Discs on the other hand can’t spin forever, then there’s the moving head and all that. Funny, but every drive I ever had go bad, it was the circuitry and not the movement. Anyway, you can remap bad pages on flash, and just go around the failures. So, maybe they permit so much of this to occur before
calling it a failure. Not sure.
Thanks!
Posted 27 Mar 2007 at 3:21 pm ¶
simon wrote:
Yes, Intel is incorporating this idea of standalone flash caches as an optional component in the next version of the Centrino platform.
And the HSA (Hybrid Storage Alliance) which is Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Toshiba will promote hard drives with integrated flash caches.
Not sure where Samsung and Toshiba really stand on this, given they’re working hard on 100% SSDs. In fact, Samsung just announced a 64GB flash drive - 64MB/sec reads and 45MB/sec writes.
Posted 27 Mar 2007 at 3:47 pm ¶