Storage Effect

SSDs will be an almost ideal addition to enterprise storage systems. Notebooks? Not so much.

1. Many drives vs. one drive.   SSDs replace multiple disk drives in high-end enterprise systems.  Notebooks use SSDs as a one-for-one replacement, which wastes most of the game-changing advantages of flash.

2. Servers need speed, notebooks need capacity.  Servers can use SSD’s blazing performance without requiring much capacity.  SSD performance matters little to a notebook, but hundreds of gigabytes are needed per drive.  SSDs biggest weakness is cost per gigabyte.

3. SSD power consumption matters more to the enterprise.  Notebooks care about power, but the drive’s share of a notebook’s power draw doesn’t make that much difference in battery life.  High-end enterprise systems have a heat problem from multiple drives in a small space that SSD will help to alleviate.

4. Notebooks don’t leverage SSD speed. A notebook’s boot time and performance depend on many factors beyond access time.  High-end systems use many drives striped in parallel to maximize performance – a perfect opportunity for a much faster device.

Even in Enterprise, the devil is in the details

So let’s go, right? Not so fast, cowboy! One way SSD is less suited for the data center than notebooks is in durability.  Unlike notebooks, high-end systems work storage devices like dogs.  SSDs are improving, but today’s products can wear out before their time.  Losing data in a notebook doesn’t compare with losing it in a high-end business application.  And standards are a bigger deal in the data center.

Ready-for-prime-time versions will be available starting in 2009.  In the meantime, it’s smart to start playing with the technology now so you’re ready to implement in volume next year. 

Buy a fancy SSD notebook, too, if you’re a Techie or want to act like one.  If not, it’s probably a waste of your money.