What your computer's drive will look like in 5 years

"Two years ago, SSDs cost $17.50 per gigabyte, so it's obvious that consumer NAND flash memory will soon be a true contender to hard disk drives -- it's just not there yet," Gartner analyst Joseph Unsworth said. "I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200, and that's going to happen around 2010. Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage."

Klein argued that using an SSD in its native state, as NAND chips on a board without an enclosure, will reduce cost, weight, power use and space.

In January last year, Lenovo launched the Lenovo ThinkPad X300, the industry's first mainstream notebook designed not to take a hard drive, but a 64GB SSD. Dell followed IBM with its all-SSD Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks.

"Moving forward people will design the entire notebook around SSD. You could spread SSD out over the mother board. So moving forward there will be a lot of custom notebooks with custom SSDs," said Brian Beard, marketing manager for Samsung's flash memory group.

Samsung, which sells laptops, not only manufactures and sells HDDs, but it's own line of SSD as well as selling flash memory to other vendors to resell.

Beard expects SSD penetration in the laptop market will only reach 30% by 2012, but he also believes around the same time HDD and SDD will reach price parity.

Within the next year, Micron expects to bring to market a high-end SSD that could achieve 1GB/sec. throughput by using a PCIe interface rather than traditional SATA or SAS. The transfer speed is four times that offered by Intel's newest, enterprise-class SSD, the X25-E.

In a video on Micron's blog site, Joe Jeddeloh, director of the vendor's Advanced Storage Technology Center, demonstrated the technology using a two-processor, eight-core Intel Xeon PC and a card with two SSDs and 16 flash channels. A blurry readout showed the SSD reaching 800MB/sec. throughput, with Jeddeloh claiming that it "will be hitting a bandwidth of 1GB/sec. and at least 200,000 IOPS," or I/O operations per second.

The card was directly connected to a PCI Express (PCIe) slot, bypassing SATA or Serial Attached SCSI interfaces. While PCIe has the same throughput as SATA II -- 3Gbit/sec. -- PCIe offers more channels.

Using file transfers ranging from 2KB to 2MB, Jeddeloh demonstrated 150,000 to 160,000 random reads per second in the video. "That's what flash can do when it's managed correctly," he said.

NAND flash boards

Physical PCIe slots may contain from one to 32 lanes of data. Currently, PCIe Generation 1 offers 250MB/sec. throughput per lane. The second generation of PCIe is expected out next year and will offer twice the throughput, or 500MB/sec. per lane. While SATA 3.0, expected out this year, also doubles throughput, it only offers one lane.

"Each lane of that x4 PCIe is as fast as a SATA 3.0's 6Gbit/sec. bus," Klein said. "So I can be four times as fast on that one slot as an SSD could be on a SATA 3.0 connection. That's really the direction things are going."

Read more about storage in Computerworld's Storage Knowledge Center.