2010 ‘turning point’ for client SSD adoption

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There is little doubt in the industry that solid state drives (SSDs), based on NAND flash memory, outperform their hard drive (HDD) predecessors, but they have yet to make a major impact on the PC market.

This is all about to change, according to Kingston Technology, which thinks now is the time for SSDs to help chief information officers (CIOs) address the business challenges of today.

Darwin Chen, vice president of flash at Kingston, met with IT PRO this morning and claimed that whilst the focus on the benefits of SSDs had so far been in the server space, it was time for the client side to shine.

“In business… given the shrinking budgets on the IT side and a lot of the initiatives going to the server side, there has been very little left to address the client side of the IT investments,” he said.

“The users and actual demands on the client side have been increasing. [It] is getting more and more complex – with the likes of Citrix, encryption etc – and demands are increasing whilst IT budgets are decreasing. The dilemma that a CIO must solve is how to stretch the hardware that they already have with may coming up to the need for refresh.”

He added: “How do they address that with a limited budget and satisfy all those competing priorities? We think NAND.”

Chen claimed that Kingston is able to demonstrate the benefits on offer to companies. In some cases, he said, simply upgrading a PC with SSDs rather than ripping and replacing can boost performance by 40 per cent as well as reducing costs.

Cost has generally been viewed as the main factor keeping SSDs back from mass adoption. But this is changing, according to Chen.

“The cost of SSD has dropped persistently from 2008,” Chen said. “For the client side, [we] look at price per gigabyte. The cost per gigabyte has dropped to a point where we are seeing it at a magic price point, $2 per gigabyte by the end of 2010.”

“It is the point where managers have told us for the last year and a half, when this product gets to [this price] I am ready to start rolling out. Even with the touch cost of installation… an SSD in an older laptop put alongside a HDD in a new system is better.”

Chen acknowledged SSDs had never been the “cheaper” option but said they had now got “cheap enough” for the advantages to outweigh the disadvantage of extra cash layout.

But in such a rocky economic climate, is this enough to encourage people to buy?

“There are going to be a lot of people that aren’t going to have a catalyst, a driving factor to make them make that decision and I think those guys are never going to change their minds," Mark Leathem, director of business development and marketing for flash at Kingston, told IT PRO. "If they don’t have any business reason, then they are going to say why am I going to spend $250?”

He added: “What we are seeing [though] is that the catalyst is some sort of software migration. It can be as simple as encryption … [but] a pain point is needed [to] make that move.”

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