The differential cost between SSDs and HDDs continue in today’s Fry’s ad. Giant flashing yellow caution light for SSDs.

Today’s Fry’s Electronics ad on the back page of the first section of the San Jose Mercury News carried a giant flashing yellow caution light with respect to SSD adoption. OK, so there wasn’t really a big flashing yellow caution light, after all this is still newsprint, but that’s how my mind interpreted what I saw on that back page. The Fry’s Electronics ads are ever present in the San Jose Mercury News and today’s ad carried listings for a 1Tbyte 3.5-inch Western Digital HDD--on sale for $54--and a 256Gbyte 2.5-inch Torqx M28 SSD selling for $549.99 after a $150 mail-in rebate. Even with the rebate, you get 25% of the storage for 10x the price with the SSD relative to that WD HDD. Therefore, the cost-per-Gbyte is 40x higher for the SSD.

This is certainly not a diatribe against the Torqx brand, which is made by Patriot Memory--a well-known SSD maker. It’s just a general rule for SSDs. They’re simply 20-40x more expensive than HDDs per Gbyte. As analyst Jim Handy discussed at last month’s MemCon 2010, that differential cost per Gbyte can be expected to continue indefinitely and as long as that differential holds true, I do not think we’ll see wholesale or even significant adoption of SSDs in PCs, laptops, and netbook computers. (Enterprise SSD adoption, now that’s a whole 'nother story.)

Some pundits will argue that 256Gbytes is ample for most users and I’ll grant that--with the caveat that increasing use of video can quickly Hoover up as many Gbytes of storage as you can muster. (I’ve got close to 4Tbytes of disk storage on my video-editing PC at home.) However, 256Gbytes of storage will go a long way for the average PC user. Even so, the price is still 10x too high to trigger mass adoption.

Further, I see storm clouds on the horizon. The blog entry I wrote a couple of days ago (Hynix initiates “20nm-class” NAND Flash production with 64Gbit devices) mentioned that Hynix just announced volume production of 64Gbit NAND Flash devices based on “20-nm-class” fabrication technology. By my calculations, it takes 32 such devices to build a 256Gbyte SSD. Just that amount of silicon alone costs more than the retail price of $54 for the 1Tbyte WD drive in today’s Fry’s ad and that ignores the cost of the SSD controller chip, the PC board, the passive parts, the connector, and the case parts, assembly, plus some margin so that the SSD maker and the distribution channel realize some profit. So we need several more generations of NAND Flash device before we’re going to see realistically attractive SSD pricing to trigger a mass adoption.

How many more NAND Flash generations past the “20nm-class” do you think we’re going to see? One? Two? Moore’s Law cannot hold forever. Dennard Scaling, which we’ve been riding as long as Moore’s Law, died at 90nm. If we see just two more generations for NAND Flash devices before Moore’s Law for silicon dies out, you’ll still need eight NAND Flash devices to build a 256Gbyte SSD. Will that be enough to drop SSD pricing across the mass-adoption threshold?

If these matters interest you, consider signing up for next week’s Flash Memory summit being held in Silicon Valley. You can sign up for that event here: https://www.expotracshows.com/flashMemory/2010/

Also, Denali Software (now part of Cadence) is shaking things up this year at the Flash Memory Summit! Join us for a night of fun with plenty of drinks to go around and cool tunes to groove to. Boogie Knights will be entertaining you with hip dance moves, bell bottoms, & enough polyester to get you moving on the dance floor!
* Aug 18 - The Loft Bar & Bistro - San Jose, CA http://a.denali.com/5Q