Over the last two years, Solid State Drives (SSDs) more commonly known as flash drives have followed a fashion of being sold directly to the laptop or portable device manufacturers or through special online consumer electronics retail sites that have only a handful of physical outlets.
A major changed happened last week when Intel Corp., a market leader in manufacturing of flash drives, made an announcement that its flash drives will now be available at more than 800 conventional retail outlets. After Intel other cos. have also announced to follow the same pattern.
Expected Turn Around
It can be easily smelt from this step that the consumer has moved a step closer in replacing or supplementing computers hard drives with these flash drives as they now become affordable and available.
An analyst at market research firm Forward Insights expects that this move will definitely broaden the end market consumer profile. While he also said that gaming and technically sound users will remain among the major consumers but retailing of these SSDs will surely enhance the appeal for these SSD’s and accelerate the adoption process of these SSDs as prices also come down.
Cost Efficacy
SSDs remain 10 folds costlier than hard drives and their cost seems to be increasing in past years. The second quarter of last year saw an increased price of per unit price of flash memory chips up to $4.10.This clearly represents a 127% increase from the final quarter of 2008.It is believed that the SSD prices can come down from $1.9 to $1.7 approx. but only for PC, laptop manufactures. Online shoppers couldn’t find any remarkable difference in the prices and will continuing paying $3.
A normal SSD of capacity ranging from 80 GB to 120 GB of memory is offered on prices from $215 to $400.Intel offers an 80 GB X25-M for $225 in its stores, whereas a hard drive of capacity up to 1TB (1000 GB) can be bought for as little as $99.
SSDs can supposingly beat hard drives on the basis of performance especially for computer boot up applications. A test conducted by a famous site shows that an SSD took just 20secons in comparison to HDD’s 40 seconds of cold boot.
Advantages
• SSD restarts in 26 sec while HDD requires 37 sec.
• SSD seems to be more durable since they do not have any mechanical moving parts like actuator arms etc. thus they become a better option for mobile devices.
• Cost wise as SSDs are still costlier than HDD but there will be a point when you can actually buy a SSD of capacity around 16GB in cost of a HDD.
The increase in the performance of computer when its HDD is replaced by SSD is remarkable. It can be easily foreseen that in the upcoming years the SSD will become an integral part of our systems and notebooks. Availability of these SSDs in retail outlets has added a seasoning in the curry.
