Are Flash Solid-State Disk Drives Ready for the Enterprise?

Flash-SSD Price and Performance Trends

Realizing the huge potential of Flash memory due to the growing prevalence of portable electronic devices such as PDAs, mobile phones, and digital cameras, semiconductor manufactures have ramped up production capacities as well as increased Flash memory densities. As a result, price per MByte of Flash-SSD is expected to fall by an average of 80.86 percent annually within a 5-year period starting 2004, according to market research firm Web-Feet Research (see Figures A and B).

As we move towards 2009, the price gap between HDDs and F-SSDs narrow significantly (a difference of about $0.05 per MByte in 2007), while F-SSDs dramatically increase in performance over HDDs (at 100x-150x over in terms of sustained transfers and IOPS). Web-Feet Research also predicts a significant reduction in the F-SSD/HDD cost ratio by approximately four times, from 433:1 ($0.078 vs. $0.0018 per MByte) in 2003 to 107:1 ($0.096 vs. $0.0009 per MByte) in 2006. Flash-based SSDs will also maintain their cost-per-MByte advantage over DRAM-based SSDs.

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