Dell has crunched its numbers and says there isn't a problem with solid-state drives — but it's still early days for the costly technology.
The company says that the reliability rates for those notebooks are equal to or better than for notebooks with hard drives and that the return rates are "an order of magnitude lower" than reported in a recent analyst report from Avian Securities.
Avian earlier this week said the return rates for notebooks with solid-state drives has been around 20 percent to 30 percent. A Dell spokeswoman says that's just not so: the return rate actually is around three percent. Dell typically doesn't talk publicly about return rates with this kind of specificity, but the report and the coverage that surrounded it prompted the company to put some more light on the issue.
In short, Dell says, solid-state drives are doing as expected for a new technology.
So how did Avian get the number wrong? Managing partner Avi Cohen said that Avian might have been getting early data on returns, and not the complete data on sales. He says he can't and won't challenge Dell's data. He even saluted Dell for being an early leader in this category.
Despite the discrepancies between Avian's report and Dell's numbers, Cohen added that there is another issue: customer satisfaction. Although the return rate is a lot lower than he expected, Cohen claimed that there is a sense that customers are somewhat disappointed with the performance gains, considering the high price of notebooks with these drives. Putting a 64GB flash drive in a notebook adds US$874 to the price for customers in the US — reduced earlier in the week from US$899.
"Anecdotally, the returns have been high and the expectations have been low," Cohen said.
Performance, or at least lower-than-expected performance, is an issue that the flash industry will likely have to contend with. The first generation of flash drives could not run particular applications — specifically Microsoft Outlook — as well as notebooks with regular drives, Dell admitted. The probem was ameliorated in February, the company said, when a new generation of flash drives with a better interface went on sale.
But what do you get for US$874? Boot-up time is a bit quicker, and some applications come up quicker, but the differences can be measured in seconds. I tested one and liked the quicker boot-up, but not for that much money. The best thing about the drive was that the computer made less noise.
Jim Handy, an analyst at Objective Analysis, said he's heard anecdotally that buyers or testers were a little underwhelmed. Again, it's unscientific, and this isn't meant to detract from Dell's data, but that perception is out there.
Dell's Cohen also said that it will also take time for manufacturers to come out the cheaper flash drives with flash that holds multiple bits per cell.
The flash industry, of course, would like to see flash notebooks take off because they are suffering through severe price declines.
"The semiconductor business has seen a significant decrease in operating income due to a larger than anticipated declines in sales prices of NAND flash memories," Toshiba said on Wednesday in revising its current sales projections downward.
Like a lot of people, Cohen says flash-based notebooks will be big, but not just yet. The price has to come down and the technical glitches have to be ironed out.
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adslnerd@bigpond.net.au
20/03/2008 03:53 PM
I would never touch SSD. The technology is still in its infancy and very expensive, and its reliability has not been proven. I would never go SSD as its too much reliability on RAM chips, as I prefer a physical hard disk with a platter. Standard hard disks have worked for years and proven to be extremely reliable, so why change what works. Compare the MTBF rates between current hard disks and SSD and you will see a huge difference.
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c2h2
26/04/2008 04:56 PM
SSD is rather quick in terms of IO seeking speed, and lower energy demand, it will become a standard component in the near future
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