Guess what proportion of the 370m or so PCs shipped this year will include an SSD? According to Samsung's senior team in its SSD division, the figure is between 5% and 10%. Next year, they expect it to hit 20% – and by 2016 to reach 50%.
For anyone who has experienced the speed and silence that SSDs bring, that has to be a good thing. With SSD manufacturing capacity growing rapidly, HDDs – hard disk drives with rotating platters – are starting to be less competitive. Prices for SSDs are now below the magic "$1 per GB" level, at which price sensitivity drops away: you can now buy a 512GB SSD for less than $500 (and about 400 in the UK), which means that you can give an old PC an entirely new lease of speeded-up life by copying the data onto the new drive.
And that is the market that Samsung is going after with the latest generation of its SSD range, the Samsung Pro 840 – following last year's 830 range. When the drive goes on sale in October, it will be targeted at users looking to update their machine rather than going to the expense of buying a new one. "There's not a lot of money around in Europe," one Samsung manager told me, explaining why the company is presently going after the upgrade market – which is of course enormous, given the installed based of hundreds of millions of PCs. The forecast is that the number of SSDs bought for the "aftermarket", as it's called, will roughly treble or quadruple this year and next.
I've had the chance to try out the Samsung 840 drive and to benchmark it. In the graphic below, which was first used for a group SSD test in January, it's been added as the last – and, as it turns out, usually longest – line in each group.
What the benchmarks show is that the 840 beats everything else, in most cases pretty handily, except in the "random 4K write" test. (And that might have been a one-off artefact of the test.) The benchmark, carried out by XBench, doesn't particularly torture the drive, but it's a good enough facsimile of real life.
The key message is that SSDs are now affordable, as has been becoming clear. Samsung, as the world's biggest memory maker, is making aggressive moves here – it's aiming to be the biggest in various markets (it's already second, it says, in the UK) and could drive down the price so that 1TB of SSD storage for your main machine is just an afterthought.
One area though where SSD doesn't quite match up: use in high-end workstations, especially those used in work such as architecture which use colossal temporary files. SSDs perform poorly if they're used for repeated writing (because while it's extremely fast to read from them, writing requires the erasure of the memory location followed by the writing of the new data – unlike magnetic HDDs which simply write without erasing first). It may be a little time, executives admit, before they're quite ready for that sort of punishing environment – although the SSD 840 Pro range are touted as being for "24-hour" use.
And what about the suggestions that SSDs fail catastrophically when they reach the end of their lives? That's not such a problem as it appears to be, says another Samsung executive. "When you see the first few errors occur, you still have all the rest of the data there on the drive – you've only lost a little bit where it went wrong. But when a HDD dies, everything is lost." The latter might not be quite true, but SSDs are improving not only in speed but also in longevity – the idea that they're only good for a short life is now long past. Samsung is offering a five-year warranty on its SSDs – and by the time you reach the end of the warranty, any replacement drive with the same capacity is probably going to cost around one-sixteenth, or 6%, of what you paid originally. So that means that that 512GB drive will cost about 24.
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