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Seagate CEO William D. Watkins  (Source: Seagate)
Seagate's Bill Watkins doesn't see the appeal of SSDs for mobile applications

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are the holy grail of computer storage. The drives promise fast, sustained data transfer speeds, low access times, lower weight and less heat output (for mobile applications). The main downside to the technology is the extremely high price of entry.

The high prices of today's mainstream 64GB SSDs hasn't stopped companies like Dell, Apple and Lenovo from offering the drives on their laptops. Dell has offered SSDs since April 2007 and Apple's MacBook Air can be equipped with a $999 64GB SSD option. Lenovo's ThinkPad X300 and the upcoming Dell Latitude E4200 are SSD-only machines.

With SSD prices expected to drop 40% to 50% per year, the interest in the drives for other computing platforms is sure to increase.

Seagate, a company firmly entrenched in traditional hard disk drive (HDD) storage, unsurprisingly is not impressed with SSDs. "Realistically, I just don’t see the flash notebook sell," said Seagate CEO Bill Watkins. "We just don’t see the proposition."

It's understandable that Watkins would want to protect his company's investment in mobile HDDs, but it shouldn't be too difficult to appreciate the advantages on mobile platforms.

Watkins is known for making somewhat outlandish statements. In late 2006, he stated that, "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."

Watkins, however, has a response for SSD manufacturers should sales take off:  lawsuits. According to Fortune, Watkins is convinced that SSD manufacturers are infringing upon Seagate and Western Digital patents dealing with how storage devices communicate within a computer -- it's just a matter when the lawsuits will pop up, Gibson style.

With Intel throwing its massive weight behind SSDs, the future does indeed look bright for the storage medium. With SSDs finding their way into low-cost machines like the ASUS Eee PC on up to high-priced offerings from Apple, consumers hopefully will have more affordable SSD choices as the technology matures.

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Well
By FITCamaro on 3/24/2008 2:57:26 PM , Rating: 4
At least he's honest. And I agree with him right now. They're too expensive for not enough gain.




RE: Well
By Runiteshark on 3/24/2008 3:03:07 PM , Rating: 5
Exactly, I like this guy. He is a no nonsense no bullshit kind of guy.

And he is even honest.

Wish we had more CEOs like that.


RE: Well
By Gul Westfale on 3/24/2008 3:15:53 PM , Rating: 4
true but a forward-looking person would tell you tha in a few years SSD manufacturing costs will have decreased to the point where traditional hard drives would become obsolete. the same happened with CPUs, CMOS/CCD sensors, flash RAM, and pretty much any other silicon-transistor based tech- manufacturing improves, prices drop.

so i think he is really just pretending not to like SSDs because his company doesn't offer them, or he wants to send a message to SSD manufacturers- share your tech with us and we won't sue you.


RE: Well
By Master Kenobi (blog) on 3/24/2008 3:24:24 PM , Rating: 4
Flash based SSD's aren't the future due to inherent problems in Flash. I expect another type of SSD to hit the market to replace it.


RE: Well
By marsbound2024 on 3/24/2008 3:44:57 PM , Rating: 3
Yeah see below comment, posted a link: http://www.dailytech.com/Nanochip+Promises+100GBpe...

Your very own DailyTech articles. :)


RE: Well
By winterspan on 3/24/2008 7:01:26 PM , Rating: 2
Oh really? Is that why they've been standard fair in commercial and military data storage applications for years?
If you are talking about the write wear-down problem, you need to do more research because it has recently become much less of an issue than in the past, at least according to manufacturers public statements. I believe your very own Dailytech had an article including a statement from one of the primary flash manufacturers that their SLC drives would last some 10-15 years with regular use.

As I see it, the bottom line is that fast, reliable, and soon to be more affordable flash technology is already here and ready for the market. No matter whether one of the many experimental storage technologies overtakes flash in 5 years or so, I do expect by Q1-Q2 2009, that most upper-mainstream laptops will feature an SSD drive at least as an BTO option, and probably as a standard feature.


RE: Well
By Master Kenobi (blog) on 3/25/2008 8:59:11 AM , Rating: 3
Flash is not Fast. Write speed is terrible even on the most high end flash chips. I will stick with hard disks until SSD's based on different tech come out that can give me good write speeds.


RE: Well
By glennpratt on 3/25/2008 9:50:44 AM , Rating: 2
There are SSD's out today that are slightly faster than Raptors in write performance and trounce them in read performance. Then their is the whole seek time thing.

http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleshi...

They are pricey, but they aren't much more then the 15k Seagate's in our arrays, and I would kill to have read performance graph like that (our servers, like most, read much more then write).


RE: Well
By TomZ on 3/24/2008 3:30:07 PM , Rating: 3
Agreed that flash prices will fall, but for the forseeable future, magnetic storage will continue to cost just a fraction of flash storage, according to industry forecasts.

Remember - both HDD and flash costs are falling - it's not like flash is the only storage medium that is getting cheaper. That makes both technologies continue to be viable based on their respective strengths - HDDs will continue to dominate in terms of storage capacity/density and lower cost/GB, whereas flash will dominate in speed and power savings. There is plenty of room in the storage market for both.


RE: Well
By ineedaname on 3/25/2008 4:55:01 AM , Rating: 3
I agree that both magnetic storage and flash prices are dropping but you left out one thing. Which one's dropping faster. If you're talking about scalability Flash can scale much higher than magnetic disk storage. Magnetic storage is slowly hitting its limits while companies like Bitmicro have already made 1TB SSD's. So that really leads us to the question of how long will it take b4 SSD's eventually eclipse magnetic storage.


RE: Well
By drebo on 3/24/2008 3:41:27 PM , Rating: 2
Platter-based hard drives will never go away. The storage density is far, far out of reach of solid-state storage. Not only that, but I believe they'll always be cheaper from a GB/$ standpoint, which is what's most important in a lot of applications.

Aside from that, with 1.8" drives, we already have a drive that's tiny, power efficient, and virtually silent. Granted, they're not that fast...but on an iPod or an EeePC, the performance bottlenecks are NOT at the storage medium.

I'm with Seagate...I don't see the need for SSDs right now.


RE: Well
By lagomorpha on 3/24/2008 7:13:32 PM , Rating: 2
I'm typing this on an Eee and can tell you that the low transfer rate of the internal SSD is a performance bottleneck. Also, the 2nd Eee is supposed to only consume 7 watts of power which means the power consumption of a 1.8" drive (as much as 1.4 watts) is going to have a significant effect on battery life. Solid state is currently the way to go for devices this small, the 1.8" hard drives were a stop-gap measure that won't survive much longer.

As mass storage devices conventional hard drives can't be beat but someone is going to need to find some application for all the extra space to convince consumers to purchase drives larger than 1TB. IMO Seagate should encourage the production of high definition porn. It is the only way they will be able to sell large amounts of 1TB+ drives.


RE: Well
By winterspan on 3/24/2008 7:53:56 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
he storage density is far, far out of reach of solid-state storage.


You are right about cost/GB, at least for a few years, but your comment about storage density is TOTALLY false. Here are some recent announcements:

BitMicro 3.5" SSD - 1600GB /1.6TB
http://www.news.com/BitMicro-announces-1.6TB-solid...

BitMicro 2.5" SSD - 832GB
http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/04/bitmicro-introd...

MTron 1.8" SSD - 128GB
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=htt...

Also, just wait until the next generation is available.
Intel and Micron have an alliance for next-gen flash production at 45nm(IIRC) and Samsung is already talking about 30nm flash chips. At this transistor size, they can squeeze 64 GIGABITS / 8 GIGABYTES into ONE chip or in other words enough density for a 512GB 1.8" drive thats thinner than the double platter 160GB 1.8" HDD availabe today. I can only imagine what you could fit on a 2.5" and 3.5" drives.

Your comment about 1.8" HDDs is a joke. Yeah, of course the 1.8" drive wouldn't be a bottleneck streaming MP3s at 192kbps from an iPod, but they are completely unacceptable for laptop applications. In fact, Thats why you see them being the first to be replaced by SSDs. compared to a good 1.8" flash SSD, they are clunky, fail all the time, slow as molasses, and use 5x the energy.


RE: Well
By drebo on 3/24/2008 9:44:51 PM , Rating: 2
None of those devices are available.

Announcements for XX TB, blazing fast solid-state drives have been coming out for years, yet none exist.

I'd prefer to place my money on a proven technology, rather than one that is the subject of popular myth.


RE: Well
By winterspan on 3/25/2008 12:39:44 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
Announcements for XX TB, blazing fast solid-state drives have been coming out for years, yet none exist.


quote:
[they are] the subject of popular myth


If you don't know what the hell you are talking about, then you should spend some time researching the topic, otherwise you end up looking like a fool.

SSDs currently available (retail or OEM):

MTron 2.5" SATA SSD
access time .01 msec
sequential read: 100MB/s
sequential write: 80MB/s

SuperTalent 2.5" SATA II Elite SSD
access time .01 msec
sequential read: 100MB/s
sequential write: 80MB/s

Samsung 2.5" SATA II SSD
sequential read: 100MB/s
sequential write: 80MB/s

OCZ technology 2.5" SATA II SSD
access time .01 msec
sequential read: 120MB/s
sequential write: 100MB/s

Adtron SATA 2.5" SSD
access time .01 msec
sequential read: 78MB/sec
sequential write: 47MB/sec


RE: Well
By kelmon on 3/25/2008 5:33:53 AM , Rating: 2
It's entirely possible that HDD will eventually disappear entirely but that day is many years away. However, it's pretty likely that HDD will disappear from your computer much sooner as its role changes to that currently occupied by tape storage. Tape is still used a heck of a lot because it's so cheap relative to HDD but even that is changing as HDD becomes cheaper. For example, our image archival system is maintained by an EMC Centera system that uses HDD rather than tape because the costs of such a system decreased sufficiently that the project could afford it. I can quite easily see HDD replacing tape for archival purposes and SDD (or similar) replacing HDD on your desktop/laptop in the next few years.


RE: Well
By FingerMeElmo87 on 3/24/2008 4:56:14 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
true but a forward-looking person would tell you tha in a few years SSD manufacturing costs will have decreased to the point where traditional hard drives would become obsolete.


i dont think that that day will come for a long long time. sure, 32GB SSD's may come down to the $100 within the next few years but traditional HDD's are sky rocketing when it comes to storage capacity. even their transfer rates are respectible. $100's for 64GB's in a 4 years or 2TB's worth of traditional HDD's?


RE: Well
By Brian23 on 3/24/2008 5:21:12 PM , Rating: 2
While it's true that HDs are a lot bigger than flash drives, this isn't a big strike against flash. In the future, everyone will have their home server with it's 8TB of hard drive space and wifi. All the laptops will only need 64GB of space because all the multimedia is stored in a central location. I mean seriously, why do you need to copy your multimedia collection to every computer you own? Just put it on one and stream it to all the others.


RE: Well
By jRaskell on 3/24/2008 5:28:39 PM , Rating: 3
The reason I have a laptop is because it's portable. When I'm at home, I use my desktop PC with it's 22" display and raw processing power. When I'm on the road, I use my laptop. So when I'm using my laptop, a hypothetical home server won't be of much use.