Chris Mellor quoted me regarding an EMC spokesperson saying that SSD would be at price parity with HDD by 2010 – about 18 months from now. The implication was that SSD will replace HDD in 18 months time.

While I think this is incorrect, I did point out that this happened once before and there are reasons other than Cost per GB that might drive this crossover.

My IBM team 10 years ago or so developed a 1-inch drive we called the “MicroDrive”. Well, before you could buy 256MB of Flash, we sold 1GB MicroDrives. Although the cost per MB was much cheaper with the MicroDrive, the marginal value of the capacity was not large enough to motivate its purchase by a large enough proportion of the users. Only in extreme situations where the largest capacity was of value would someone choose the “cheaper” solution. Essentially, the value of a robust solid state solution was higher than the one that gave a lower cost per MB.

It’s kinda like making a trip to a Warehouse Store that sells groceries; it may be cheaper by the pound to buy a 10 pound block of cheddar cheese, but unless you’re feeding an Army the stuff will turn green before you can use it. In this situation the one pounder is easier to keep in the fridge, and you can use it up before you get sick of trying to add cheddar cheese to everything you make. Never mind the large quantity value proposition.

Such will be the case for Laptops – 128GB of SSD is a lot, and its speed and physical robustness is far more valuable than an extra 128GB for all but the most geeky users.

How about the Enterprise? Well, sure there are a lot of Customers who will find the speed and size of SSD to be ideal for certain circumstances, but with the capacity demands today it is unlikely that we can afford to substitute all the Petabytes of HDD with SSD for at least another 4-5 years.

So I am not sure Tucci was blowin’ smoke, but in the least his assertion seems a bit aggressive.

Perhaps if I started a “Pinheads and Patriots” section of the Blog? Nah, one of those is enough.