Solid-state disk will go mainstream in 3, 2, 1...

Outside the R&D Lab

Of course, it's not all about technology. Behaviors and logistics will also have to change for adoption to increase, both among resellers -- which have to switch their products over from traditional hard drives to SSDs -- and end users, who need to grow into confidence in SSD, Chander adds.

Another factor is the performance variation among SSD chips. A series of tests from the Transaction Processing Performance Council showed that write transfer rates among SSDs from a variety of vendors ranged from 26MB/sec. to 113MB/sec. and read rates varied from 49MB/sec. to 142MB/sec. "Most of the SSD notebook implementations have not been very good, and muddling the issue have been concurrent bad experiences in the hard-disk notebook market due to Microsoft Vista," Kerekes says. "It makes many users wonder why they bothered to buy a new notebook at all."

The economy will also affect SSD uptake. While helping to push prices down, the current downturn will also likely produce both winners and losers in the featherweight notebook market. Assuming that the downturn is akin to the recession of early 2000, Kerekes sees the losers being products that offer mediocre performance, meaning not much higher than a notebook hard drive. "As notebook SSD prices drop, many of the 25 or so manufacturers making such products will try to gain market share or recoup investments before exiting the market," he writes on his blog.

The winners, meanwhile, will be products that are significantly faster than hard drives "because there is always a market for faster products, even in a recession," he writes on his blog. At the same time, the recession will put a damper on new notebook sales, making it unlikely that some of the high-penetration rates predicted by IDC will be achieved.

Meanwhile, Back in the Data Center

Flash memory-based SSDs are also making their way into the enterprise data center, where the performance and power savings of SSD are attractive. The main issues SSD needs to overcome in the data center are reliability, price and user acceptance. "It's still an untested market," Chander says. "IT managers have a lot of mission-critical data that they're not ready to store in SSD."

In EMC's case, SSD is positioned as a high-performance "tier zero" in the company's Symmetrix DMX-4 array. "EMC is saying you can put frequently accessed pieces of your data set on SSD, to increase system performance," Janukowicz says. Less accessed data can remain on Fibre Channel drives.

EMC is using SLC NAND chips from STEC, but it says it's also adding a lot of its own intellectual property to ensure reliability that's on par with Fibre Channel, as well as the ability of the array to take advantage of SSD speeds and I/O capability. The company expects SSD pricing to be on par with the very highest end Fibre Channel drives by the end of 2010.

Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems has unveiled a plan to offer 2.5-in. and 3.5-in. SSDs across its servers and storage products in the second half of this year. It also tweaked its ZFS operating system to handle SSD. In Sun's case, the role of flash memory is as a high-speed cache, Stokes says. Sun claims that it can dramatically boost performance while lowering power consumption by coupling an SSD-based disk cache with a pool of slower, cooler-running drives, he says.