Will the Thailand floods prompt a move to SSDs?

Will the Thailand floods prompt a move to SSDs?

With ASUS announcing that it will run out of hard disks at the end of the next month [via theregister.co.uk/], since new ones are not being produced in enough numbers to meet demand. In this scenario, prices are rising sharply.

An example of the price increase of hard disks is this WD 2TB disk on e-buyer at £211 pounds currently. (Anecdotally, this drive was previously available two weeks ago at just over £50, a 400% increase!). I brought a pair of these Samsung HD204UI disks last month from Scan for £46.99 a piece, these are now £125 each, a 266% increase.

Given that the increase in hard disk prices has been quite sudden, and dramatic (and may yet continue), perhaps as we see the cost differential between solid-state and hard-disk is reduced the value of the difference between the two systems is increased. This makes it easier to see the performance benefits as a substantial improvement, rather than a significant cost.

Perhaps this could be the point at which the threshold is reached for the transition from the old hard-disk media to the newer, more rapid SSD platform start to occur, especially for single-disk platforms such as laptops, and netbooks, and the ultrabook (where an SSD is a necessity to meet Intel's ultrabook requirements).

For those that need to store more information, it will still be cheaper to buy large capacity hard disks, but for the medium-term, in think that the low cost per gigabyte seen recently will be a thing of the past.

There will still be requirements for large slabs of especially for those hosted solutions. Perhaps we'll see the large swathes of “spare” storage in Google's gmail become more reduced until production capacity can be returned.

But isn't the only place where hard disks are produced, so perhaps Samsung will take advantage of the situation that Seagate and Western Digital face.

John Dixon

John Dixon is the Principal Consultant of thirteen-ten nanometre networks Ltd, based in Wiltshire, United Kingdom. He has a wide range of experience, (including, but not limited to) operating, designing and optimizing systems and networks for customers from global to domestic in scale. He has worked with many international brands to implement both data centres and wide-area networks across a range of industries. He is currently supporting a major SD-WAN vendor on the implementation of an environment supporting a major global fast-food chain.

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