>This is actually the part where we ask for your, our readers, help. What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market? Would live demonstrations at malls and other public places help? Or upgrade programs where you could take your PC to a store and they would do the upgrade there for you? Let us know your ideas in the comment section below and I'll make sure to bring them up with SanDisk and other SSD manufacturers. Remember that we are talking about the masses here, so think about your parents for instance – what would it take for them or other people who are not very comfortable around computers to upgrade their PCs with an SSD?
Try before buy or something similar. Let the user try the ssd for themselfs and they are not satisfied with the performance and responsivness, then they can bring it back. Obviously live demonstrations and help with install would greatly help aswell.
As far as OEMs are concerned; they should start offering base models with ssds instead of HDDs. I bet that a cost efficiently designed msata/m.2 ssd of 64/128GB size could potentialyl be cheaper than 500/1TB harddrive.
A demonstration would have to show real world results showing the difference. Merely booting up faster isn't that big a selling point to most. An extra 30 seconds of faster boot (something you do once a day) isn't worth the drastic cost per GB difference for most. Even as an enthusiast for me it still isn't. Granted now I have all the HDD storage I'm going to need for a long time (two 3TB drives), I'm just waiting for the extra cash to pick up a 240-256GB SSD for games to replace my 120GB one since space is becoming an issue. But my OS is still on a traditional 1TB drive. That will eventually change but it's not a priority.
At the end of the day, SSDs are still largely too expensive for most. They see the small size and are like "what the heck?". More are adopting cloud storage as a viable option, but that's the real sell. Convincing people they can make do with only a 64-120GB drive onboard while using cloud storage for everything else. People are spoiled with being able to keep their entire music collection on their laptop.
Considering that consumer space is moving towards cloud and streaming, having less much much faster storage makes a lot of sense. Who really needs a 1TB drive and actally _uses_ it ? Probobly not a lot of people. And by giving base models ssds instead of hdds this could potentially mean lower prices if done right. And consumers love lower prices.
Completely agree with that, additionally a lot of people have bought external Harddrives over the last couple of years to store all their stuff on. I think having a 128GB+ SSD in a low-priced pre-built computer makes a ton more sense nowadays as it will benefit you in everyday tasks and makes the machine feel so much snappier.
Three benchmarks in store or on YouTube that would likely impress Average Joes:
1. Opening and editing pictures/slideshows/movies on something like PS Elements 2. Playing and MMO like WoW or Marvel Heroes, something that is disk intensive that actually affects gameplay 3. Opening, editing, and saving large MS Office projects
Unfortunately, games are starting to balloon in install size. 50Gb+ is the norm going forward.
SSD's simply aren't cost effective for a "games" drive.
My Steam Library for instance, with over 500 games consumes almost 3 Terabytes (And that's JUST Steam!), yes I like to have everything installed and ready to-go, always, with a backup on another drive. I simply do not wish to waste time, downloading/transferring/copying/moving games all the time to an SSD, just click and play.
So, I just use a mechanical for everything else and a several-year-old 64Gb OCZ Vertex 2 SSD for my Windows install. I did just picked up a Sandisk Readycache drive though, hopefully I can configure it to cache my games drive, otherwise it's going into my grandmothers PC.
I don't have the time or interest to play 500 games. At any given moment I'm usually actively playing no more than one or two games. If Gigabit internet ever becomes ubiquitous this will become a non-issue as downloading games will only take a handful of minutes.
You can also backup and restore backups with steam very easily to and from hard drives, whenever you decide to switch what games you're playing. One of the nice things about SSD's is that they can easily handle reading or writing to or from a hard drive as fast as that hard drive can go, whilst also still being able to load or save other programs or files onto it while you wait for your backup or backup restoration to finish. It's way faster than a gigabit internet connection.
i think booting windows and autostarting programs like browser, itunes etc would get the biggest wows from novices. many people are used to waiting 1-2 minutes and more until they can even use their hdd-equipped computer, with a nice ssd-equipped system that should take less than 20 seconds.
Complete agree. My 6TB NAS is starting to feel a bit small.
As for cloud and streaming, this is what the industry wants not necessarily what consumers want. There are many places where there is no or limited access to the cloud and mobile networks are not going to reduce data transmission costs sufficiently anytime soon
If you don't want to listen to what people are telling you is the problem, I don't know what to tell you. Cloud storage is not "mainstream" by any sense of the word. It is something that the younger generation of users are just starting to embrace, but for the vast majority of us, we would rather keep our information stored locally then over a network for security reasons alone, not to mention the fact that cloud storage can be costly. The average user has roughly 500gb of information stored on their computer between games, photos and music, that would not be traded off for cloud storage. Yet the price of a 500gb SSD is still between 175 to 200 dollars.
"cloud storage can be costly." And it's SLOOOOOWWWW why even compare the two. One is a drive for active files and games one is for inactive and seldom accessed files.
You want to make SSD's more popular? Get the price and size to match HDD's and you're golden.
True, although it's nice to have at least two drives, so that you can backup important things much more quickly and conveniently than using cloud services.
Yep, I've got a 2TB and a 1TB drive plus a 256GB SSD, and I find that I keep needing to go through my files and deleting them to make space every couple of months now. I could definitely use another drive.
Games are taking a lot more space nowadays. Recent games can take 30-50GB each. My STEAM library alone is already 1.5TB and I haven't even installed all the games I've owned yet which probably bring it closer to 3TB of games.
It's an easy thing for those of us that have reliable and fast internet service to say, but the fact is a large portion of the population has neither. I think we are still a decade or two away from that being a reality.
I know of a few adult non-IT women who do use plenty of storage. And they normally don't like the cloud at all and have internetspeeds that really make the cloud a silly proposition. For clouds to even start replacing drives you'd need people to be a) really out of the loop and stupid regarding privacy issues b) people must have at least fiber and with equal up and download speeds.
The cloud at this moment is a dumb illusion some poorly managed companies try to bet on.
For people who use their computers only intermittently (which is perhaps the target of this question), the difference between quick startup and slow is that they turn off their computers instead of leaving them on all day. Microsoft is responsible for decades of many millions of computers being left on all day, perhaps 100 GWh/year per million computers (30 Watts for 8 hours, say, that could be saved per day), because of slow startup, which is potentially ameliorated by SSDs. People who use their computers all day aren't affected by this, of course.
I leave my PC on 24/7. It's doing work all of the time. If I'm out I can remotely access it and all of my documents. I leave my file server on 24/7. Do I really want to boot it up only when I know I (or anyone else on my network) want access to the files? That's what convenience is for. Now, my wife turns her pc off at night, but she's not a power user.
Hibernation on my Windows 8.1 machine only ends in blue screens within minutes. It was that way in beta and clean installs made no difference. If I leave it on all the time, it never seems to crash.
This is an excellent point. Before I had an SSD in my desktop I would leave it on all day while I went to work because I didn't want to have to wait for it when I got home. Sleep mode always causes problems so I avoid that and strictly use Shutdown.
Now I don't care about shutting it down, hell, I even do Windows updates a lot more often because it's not so painful to restart the computer.
20 seconds is what I believe the threshold for this is, the machine needs to be usable, as in booted, responsive with at least one program open, within 20 seconds of me hitting "restart".
Actually I think the real problem is that the consumers are not educated on the impact of having an SSD. Today's consumers are trained by advertising to look for "1080p", "Intel i5+", and "6+GB" of RAM. They are certainly not aware of the fact that having an SSD will increase their relative performance by a significant margin. What SanDisk needs to do is to get a "Relative Performance Rating" into consumer's mind, and have the bulk of the score weighted heavily by an SSD (which is true). Then, setup demo units in Malls and Best Buys that include a SSD laptop with mediocre spec, and a top-spec laptop with a traditional hard drive and do a side-by-side demonstration of exactly what SSDs does when it comes to boosting speed. SanDisk should aim to shift the paradigm of what is important for consumersa to have when purchasing a computer.
This. Many people I know that are computer literate don't really know what's up with these SSDs and what are they good for. They don't realize how much time they would save in their everyday tasks if they would use a SSD.
I recall the early days when people warned that they were only good for 50,000 writes or something, then they would be unreliable. Clearly something changed with so many people using them as boot drives now, but like the initial worries about plasma televisions, those things linger even if they're obsolete concerns.
Now, we're down to 1,000! But, in hose early days, there was not wear-leveling. Then, there was wear-leveling that was very bad at handling small writes. Even at 50,000 writes, those 50,000 writes going to the same page over and over again could kill them much quicker than a modern TLC drive rated for 2% of that, due to spreading out the writing across pages and blocks.
Yep. Consumers are absolutely not trained at looking for SSDs. The only thing they look for in storage is the number next to overall capacity, and advertising for stores happily oblige in providing only this info.
SSD manufacturers should get together to push for a rating system that demonstrates how much faster it is for most people in everyday scenarios.
Few people trust rating systems, though. What they rely on are hard capacity numbers, like sizes. GB, MP, GHz, HD or 4K... We need to push the speeds instead of the sizes. Sell computers with 500 MB/s transfer speeds, not computers with 120 GB storage.
YES. The disk speed statistics are really important to show because (A) they are often the performance bottleneck and (B) there are very large variations even between SSDs.
I wish we could find a single speed number, have it make sense, have all the manufacturers use it and not cheat, and have it be useful for day to day comparison between two drives. We may need some collaboration through an independent industry speed rating body. As is, a product may list a different read speed based on the compressability of the files or any of a number of other things that can heavily sway how useful the number the manufacturers are using actually is. It's a pain to see a cheap drive advertising the same maximum mb/s as the premium drive, when the difference between the two in real use can be obvious to even a moderate user. Then there's the traditional issue of changing components without changing the model number, so you may get a relatively large gap in performance even from what should be the same device.
Personally, I'd like to see how useful an SSD would be in a university computer lab setting, with multiple users on the same machines with no need for large storage since the files get wiped from each system periodically. Make user verification pretty much the only bottleneck to swapping from user to user.
Really though, I think it's the business route to home user success. Where time = money, you have to make it pay to switch. Make the technology cheap enough and useful enough that businesses adopt it even for their low value employee computers. As in, even if the computer is getting used exclusively by a low wage employee, it will pay for itself to have an SSD instead of a spinning disk. At $10 per hour wage, a $100 SSD pays for itself if it saves 10 hours of work for the user. Of course, the plan also has to pay for any technical overhead from the IT department to implement and maintain the new drives. If you also save them time, the drive pays itself off sooner. Add to their workload, and it takes longer to reach the point of paying itself off. Once in the hands of business users for their everyday workload, then it's a matter of having the users notice the difference from their home computer and associate the difference with having an SSD. If you can pull that off, then you'll get more adopters at home. They will want to save themselves time/money to do more important and fun things, like watch cat videos on Youtube.
Then, you still need the computer manufacturers in on it. Make it an easy way to segment their market. Multiple storage drive base systems may be a market area the manufacturers should encourage. Maybe design a chassis to allow a novice user to easily swap in a better drive. Just get the main niches going, however you can.
Showing a side-by-side boot comparison is actually a really easy way to convince the average person of an SSDs benefit. It's visual, it's tangible, and something everyone can relate to. Such a comparison is how I convinced my group to only purchase new systems that include SSDs.
With Windows 8 I'm not sure how good such a comparison is anymore, but 2 years ago it was impressive enough.
Once you use a computer with a good SSD, you'll never go back. It's not just the start up time, it's installation time, time spent writing to disk, time applications take to start up, and any other activity that requires accessing the disk. Nothing makes a PC better than a SSD. Nothing. After that it's probably at least 8GB of RAM, then you can worry about CPU/GPU.
If you don't use a SSD every day then try to use a slow HDD, you don't know what you're missing.
Personally I'd be hesitant to advise a non-technical person a SSD due to the unknowns regarding lifetime of a cheap SSD. I would feel bad if someone bought a SSD and the thing got warnings of imminent failure a year and a half later and they would not know how to recover from it and how to replace it and move their OS to a new drive.
As for demos in malls.. that seems extremely silly.
This is horrid advice, how can you possibly recommend cloud storage in light of nude leaks and NSA spying and the government currently trying to push through the TPP in secret?
You must either work for a cloud storage company or the NSA. Worst advice EVAR!
M-SATA plus 2.5" hdd is the solution, period. Cloud Storage is not an option, at all, for anything of a personal nature. Business, sure, but certainly not anything sensitive or secret.
"64/128GB size could potentialyl be cheaper than 500/1TB harddrive." This is what I've been wondering for some time. But my theory is it's all in the marketing. Will an unknowing consumer buy a laptop with a terabyte of storage before they buy one with 128GB? Of course they'll opt for the terabyte even though they'll never use it. I can't tell you how many PC's I've looked at for friends and family that don't scrape the surface of their storage capabilities. So to that end, it would be a combination of a good marketing team and well engineered internal specs. It will have to happen sometime I suppose.
Yeah, mindset in consumers really needs to change. terabytes, gigabytes, cores and gigaherts are just meaningless for avarage user. What it counts is the user experience. And with ssd out of the box, its surely better.
Education of the sales droids is a big factor. Say if Toshiba decided to outfit all their entry level laptops with 256gig SSDs instead of hard drives at cost for the first year of implementation. If they educated the sales reps at best buy/etc., and honestly they'd probably already know, it'd be a gimme. "This gives you better battery life and significantly faster performance, load times of your programs/internet, etc."
Either that, or sell all of their retail-style SSDs with FREE disc cloning tech and an adapter. The disc, without cloning tech, is one of the absolutely biggest pain in the ass peices to replace. I'd rather get a new motherboard. Of course, now I have a cloning tool, so its easy as pie. I buy low level laptops for family and swap a SSD in and they get good performance for about $300 less than they'd pay for the premium.
"This is actually the part where we ask for your, our readers, help.....Let us know your ideas in the comment section below and I'll make sure to bring them up with SanDisk and other SSD manufacturers."
Why would you ask such question? That is not your job as a tech journalist. Why would you ask your readers to help a manufacturer to market their product?
that is short sighted. This is Anandtech - supposedly one of the most respected tech sites. Articles like this undermines their main purpose - INDEPENDENT, honest and transparent reporting. Price is only a concern when evaluating a product versus another product. It is not their job to MARKET for a company.
What happens if they give a great review to a mediocre product to help Sandisk? Would you feel the same way then?
While this article is about Sandisk, the problem is about SSD penetration into the computer market in general. The question what not asking how to sell Sandisk SSD's specifically, but SSD's generally. It just happens to be Sandisk that brought the question to the table.
When the supreme court hears a case to rule on a law, somebody needs to actually bring the case before them. Some person or company has the be sued, or charged, or something. I think you are being too judgmental. Just my opinion.
This is what I replied to another comment, which I hope clarifies the situation.
"SanDisk sponsored my trip to FMS and in return we agreed to do an article about what SanDisk presented and showcased at the event. AnandTech doesn't cover international flights, so finding a sponsor was the only way I could attend the show. Note that this is the case with every trade show and is thus nothing new or out of the ordinary.
However, SanDisk wasn't involved in the editorial process at all. The only condition they had is that the article needs to be linked to FMS and the meetings/presentations at the show, so I decided to write about TLC NAND and the Fusion-io acquisition as both are big things for SanDisk and the market in general, and one of SanDisk's presentation had interesting data about TLC as shown in the graphs in the article.
We also talked about SSD adoption for a lengthy period of time and I thought it makes sense to reach out to you, our readers, for input. SanDisk did not request or demand this -- it was all my idea. SSD is without a doubt the biggest upgrade that can be made to improve user experience and I'm genuinely interested in what can be done to increase the adoption rate. It's not for the marketing departments, but for all the people that could have better user experience if they knew about SSDs. I also think it's an excellent opportunity for you to be heard and there already great comments, which I'll definitely bring up when I meet with the companies at CES.
I hope this explains the situation. I'd like to emphasize that we are and will continue to be editorially independent and the purpose of sponsorships is to provide you with better content, for which attending trade shows and building relationships is crucial."
A big one for me is just plain old consumer knowledge. I've talked to many non-technical people, you know how many people have heard of a solid state drive? Exactly zero. Hard to get adoption when the general consumer doesn't even know your product exists.
For somewhat tech-affine people who want to stick to their current OS installation (many people do) we need software to transition smoothly to a SSD. Samsung already ships it by default, but I suspect most people simply don't know about this.
And for less tech-savvy handling different storage locations (OS SSD, other internal drive, external drive, cloud 1, cloud 2 etc.) is cumbersome. Anything that eases this pain could help. I'm thinking about hiding the complexity of the storage system from the user. This could e.g. be automatic caching (with write caching and generous cache sizes - I'm not talking about 8 GB!) or manually or automatically creating relocating specific content to the HDD via hard links. SSD vendors could provide a software to statically assign this to certain folders like for media files, folders marked by the user via the explorer context menu or automatically to old & big files (service pack uninstall etc.).
BTW: I know this could already be done relatively easily using the libraries of Win 7/8. But I'm pretty sure most people are not using them, let alone have given relocating the corresponding storage locations a thought.
I think what would work for new OEM laptops with SSD is a "SSD inside" kind of campaign with jingle and pretty face. Add a few real benefits like longer battery life and you are good to go.
Or how about bundling the new SSD with online backup secure and encrypted and hassle free. May be even cold storage for life of all those pictures and documents. To get out of the big spinning rust disk vs smallish SSD? Add it some automatic download and archive of the paper-less bills and CC statements and tax returns, etc. and you are golden.
My parents or other mainstream PC users can't be convinced to "upgrade" their PC by anything until the next PC. The labor cost of servicing is just to high. They are easier convinced to buy a new laptop/PC if they can see the tangible benefits above.
One word: INFOMERCIAL. If the general public can be pursuaded to buy junk like My Clean PC to make his or her computer faster, a very well structured infomercial that actually "informs" the general public that his or her PC is hampered by the slow hard drives installed by OEM should do amazingly well. The general public does not even know that SSDs exist, let alone the benefits(60 - 120MB/s vs 300 - 550MB/s). Showing side-by-side comparisons would help. Include cloning software and ***** A FREE OPTICAL DRIVE BAY CADDY **** would almost ensure success. Could possibly be bigger than the George Foreman Grill, if correctly implemented!
I strongly agree, but we are considering the general public. Steve Jobs had it correct with the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) template for marketing. Have you ever sat down with a professional that has a degree in a very advanced science(like a neurosurgeon or endocrinologist), and he or she wants to explain things to you thoroughly in professional jargon? Most people get lost and tune out the conversation. The only thing that general public wants is for the product to perform as expected as easily and simply as possible with as few hiccups as possible. You can even break it down in layman's term. I like to use cars to explain computers to my clients. The CPU is like the engine, RAM is like the fuel injection, and storage are like tires. If you put cheap tires on your Ferrari, your Ferrari will only go 120 MPH. If you put the best tires in the world, your Ferrari will perform to the top of its capabilities. Adding an SSD like putting 550 MPH tires on an electric engine. Sometimes I'll even go as far as describing how having a Core i infrastructure is like having a drag strip between the RAM and CPU vs an Indy car track for Pentium processors. Everytime, people seem to appreciate that I know these things, but he or she usually begins to just state "I just want it to work like your saying." So, yes. We geeks will completely understand the finer details, but the general public just wants to KISS it!
"This is actually the part where we ask for your, our readers, help. What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market? "
Stop chasing benchmark speed at the expense of everything else. Streaming r/w speed is nice, yes, but it appears to be coming at the expense of other things that, for AVERAGE users are more important. This primarily means:
STABILITY/SAFETY. This is a huge one. I mean, for crying out loud, it is STILL an issue. Samsung, supposedly the safest brand in terms of firmware that works, had to release an update two months ago to resolve firmware issues. It's 2014, not 1011. This shit should not still be happening. If the industry as a whole wants to expand, it should create some sort of "Designated as not a PoS" certification program which takes drives, tortures them in a variety of ways, and certifies that they are SAFE SAFE SAFE. They don't screw up when they lose power randomly. They don't screw up when they are running at 99% full capacity. When they DO fail, they fail by telling you that writes no longer work, and by allowing reads to access 100% of the drive so you can recover (even if you were too foolish to run a continual backup). etc etc.
And if the industry is so damn short-sighted that it insists on crippling this certification program, so that its tests aren't demanding, aren't trustworthy, are full of loopholes, well then, boo hoo --- it damn well deserves to be stuck in its current ghetto of limited sales and desperate attempts to try to grow.
After this (by far the most important) issue of stability and safety, the second most important issue is - optimize for random r/w rather than streaming. Yes streaming is nice and you can get big studly multi-100MB/s numbers that sound good. But what actually matters for MOST users' daily performance is the random access numbers
- get the maximum power draw down. As long as the maximum power draw (usually for random writes) is over 2.5W, these devices are basically not usable as external drives because they are too dangerous to use when connected to USB2. They'll seem to work just fine, then hang as soon as a stream of writes hits them. The external drive market may not be huge, but it's not negligible either.
- The second aspect of the external market is that, where possible (which I assume means USB3) you still need to support TRIM and SMART. Just because a drive is external doesn't mean I no longer care about its performance or its longevity/safety.
Basically, vendors need to spend less time worrying about dick-measuring benchmarks and more time thinking like Apple about what is best for the average customer.
If you have an SSD, CPU speed becomes less vital to overall performance. If the BOM is 430-$50 higher with an SSD, you can easily make do with an i5 instead of an i7. Easily. Most CPU cycles on these clunky laptops are completely wasted. Fatter CPUs and spindle drives also are heat bombs in every laptop. An SSD solves all of these problems. The OEMs can keep buying their contracted Intel chips - they just get to build better-balanced cheap laptops that their users will actually like to use. I don't get why SanDisk and other companies don't recognize this.
demonstration of same laptop one with ssd one with hdd. Both have same windows image installed and it should be a heavily used, old installation not a fresh one. Then users can compare directly how much faster the SSD laptop will be down the road in 1-2 years.
To comment on the the last paragraph; the industry is not ready to offer lower performance/lower cost SSDs to the consumer market just yet (You can already purchase laptops with SSDs in limited configurations). It's all about getting as much revenue up front before selling out to the masses who always want the lowest price. The manufacturing cost associated with creating larger capacity drives and faster speeds needs to be paid for by the OEMs first to allow the overall costs to be reduced so that they can be passed on the non-OEM end-user. This is standard industry practice in the technology sector.
since even my granma now uses a notebook with an ssd i can only speculate... we as a family only use harddisks in nas (note that excluding videos & backups an 1TB ssd could replace it easily) & as a second large storage drive where needed (2TB steam library being one example)
however most people i know a) have no clue how much space they actually need & b) play it save (when buying a notebook now and they think they might use 256GB in five years they buy the 2TB because they might need it and it's often the cheaper notebook)
An easier/cheaper way to migrate the OS and software from an HDD to an SSD would be nice. Most SSDs don't include something like Acronis and buying it separately is cost prohibitive when using a smaller capacity SSD as it adds something like $30 to the effective cost.
I think one thing that would be very nice to see though would be OEMs selling desktops and laptops with a SSD as the default drive rather than the HDD. Otherwise personally, when I buy a laptop with an included HDD but not an SSD and only 1 drive bay, taking the HDD out and replacing it with an SSD is a tough pill to swallow when it means the cost of the HDD as part of the laptop purchase price (probably something around $40-60) was wasted. Or encourage laptop manufacturers to include easily accessible bays for more than a single 2.5"/mSATA drive, and still have the default one an SSD so the OS doesn't have to be migrated afterwards.
Also, moving mobile devices (phones/tablets) away from the godawful slow eMMC controllers to proper SATA/comparable controllers and half decent NAND could help. If the snappiness of the average user experience on a well advertised mobile device increased significantly to where average people could notice the difference in an overwhelmingly positive manner, with proper marketing the everyday appreciation for SSDs could increase and therefore make average consumers more interested in making sure their nonmobile computing devices have fast storage. People seem to be willing to pay a lot more for a flagship smartphone while simultaneously skimping on a crappy laptop/desktop. And people seem to be spending more and more time interfacing with a smartphone than a desktop or laptop these days.
When Apple explained what "x GBs of ram" meant to the masses, they did it in terms the masses would understand (i.e. "It's this many songs or this many movies." If SSD makers want to get the masses onboard, they need to create a "metric" that the masses will understand. As the main benefit is speed, they should start labeling their SSDs as "x seconds to start the average program." This way, with HDDs also labeled as such, the masses have clear concrete metric that they understand.
Isn't it obvious? The reason NAND capacities aren't increasing is because people (consumers) aren't demanding more. Why is that? Two words: CLOUD STORAGE.
But what about the ones who're notusing SDDs yet? Bet they're not using cloud storage in any serious way either (I'm not talking about those 2 GB Dropboxes).
That doesn't make much sense. Cloud storage makes the HDDs they are buying less important. It's less 1TB SSDs v. 120GB SSDs as it is 250GB SSDs v. 2TB HDDs.
Well those who are tech savvy know about SSD and its benefits, and have already picked it up. Those who are not tech savvy and buy their systems from OEMs (eg: dell, hp, lenovo, acer, ...) do not know about it. To make matters worse the OEMs are charging a massive premium to switch to SSD and are not designing most of their systems to be able to contain both SSD and standard HDD at the same time. So those non-tech savvy users end up going for the big numbers, i.e. TBs, and not the performance, even though they barely use 200GB in total.
So to get a higher penetration or sales, get the OEMs on board to start designing their systems better, promoting and stop charging insane premiums on SSDs.
Even cheaper prices are the only way to ensure penetration in the lowest end of the market.
Now, what I would REALLY want to see instead is the prosumer segment to be given the attention it deserves. I know several people from various HW forums including myself that want BOOTABLE NVMe pcie SSD with performance that makes them a worthwhile upgrade vs the top end SSD such as Sandisk Extreme pro and Samsung 850. For over a year there is complete silence in this regard. And yes, prosumer means way under 2$/GB with performance in line with intel P3600.
Capacity and performance and the way operating systems are designed to me is a barrier. Most people want simple, are not techies. IMO most PCs would want performance on key things like OS boot, commonly used apps, but they also want space for long term storage, things more read than written. To use an SSD with a Hard Drive is complex to implement like this, not automated. If small SSDs could be installed and automatically take on the activities needing the performance boost without users needing to manage it, making a small SSD, practical for the masses, then they would have something.
Please note I am not talking about likely 80% or more of readers here, who like me can do this themselves, but really, it is a pain.
Windows coult implement this. When it detects an SSD and HDD combo, it should automaticly move programs and other stuff that can benefit from ssd to the actually ssd and movies/music to the HDD (Ie Documents folder to the HDD by default).
I work for a retail company that does upgrades like this, unfortunately we charge quite a bit unless someone has one of our "support" plans. Which all said and done isn't a bad deal for most of the masses that can't be bothered to figure out how to install a SSD. I think, if OEM started releasing more laptops with SSDs in them without a $300 premium for it, we would see more adoption as well. Seriously the majority of "regular" people PC that I work on have around 30gb of data at max. A few outliers have close to 100 GB. Instead of throwing 1tb HD into all systems, why not use 250gb SSD. Your budget machines will perform better, thus giving people a better experience and less likely to go buy brand B next time. Maybe a kiosk with a budget machine running a 5400 rpm drive, and one running an SSD. With a few easy to demonstrate programs geared to take advantage of the SSD would help.
The way I have convinced people to purchase SSDs, especially in conjunction with a new computer:
For people who use the PC for "office"-type work (Web, e-mail, Word, Excel, etc), an SSD is the one component change that will make a significant difference in computer "speed".
-An SSD responds to the computer 2 orders of magnitude (>100x) faster than an HDD, because: -Other than a fan, the HDD is the last mechanical component in the modern PC. -SSDs act more like RAM than the HDD. -So, an SSD: -Makes the computer feel much faster. -Prevents the PC from getting slow as quickly -Makes the computer last longer -Is the one and only component change that can prevent the kind of slowdown your old PC is giving you. Not a "fast" CPU. Not more RAM. An SSD.
If you don't rip DVD's to your hard drive on a regular basis, a 256GB SSD is big enough, and it will make your computer feel much faster for its entire life, especially as it ages.
I'm just about willing to opening up the box and install a new SSD, but not if it requires the operating system to be significantly tweaked for it to be used effectively. Given my 3-6 year computer replacement cycle, I'll almost certainly wait for my next computer purchase and include an SSD as well as an nTB hard drive if possible. [Probably needless to say, I've just created this account, I've been following Anand for 3 months only for background, not because I'm ever going to build my own or an enterprise system.] For new computers, a fast SSD could be cheap if its use were optimized just for fast start/restart. Not that that usage helps SSD manufacturers.
The operating systems already are tweaked. For Windows, just do a fresh instal to the fresh SSD. It will handle the rest. All the shenanigans some people go through are entirely unnecessary, and the few good (or bad, if you use the related features being disabed) tweaks are as good for an HDD-based system as an SSD-based one.
Your question about how to for Sandisk to penetrate the consumer market is a hard one. At the end of the day, SSD is a geeky tech that most people do not (or will not) understand or care. For someone who is into IT, they definitely see the need and excited about the fast speed load time and transfer files. But for most consumers, they do not know worry so much about that.
Unfortunately, I see this is how the adoption from CD to DVD is like. When DVD first come out, the consumers weren't crazy getting new DVD drives for their computer. They only do so because there's a need (DVD movies). They buy DVD players and not everyone rushing to bring their computer to a store to have it upgrade to a DVD drive.
Given time, price decrease and what not, DVD becomes a standard. I see is the same for SSDs. The driving market for SSDs (consumer end) is still those who are IT savy. For your consumer, like my dad who only use the laptop to read the news and watch youtube video, they don't mind the slow boot time and will not be willing to invest in a SSD. He might as well get a new computer after a few years.
The good news for us, consumers, is that through the years because of competition, the price per GB gone down significantly. But for the manufacturer, they either have to mass produce (low cost) or create very fast drives and sell at a premium to make a profit. Anything else it will be hard for them to survive.
The big OEMS don't even offer SSDs on their desktops below ~$2k in my recent experience trying to help a friend out - or if they do it is at an insane markup (like 128gb for +$300).
I have a friend, Unix admin for 15yrs, a super nerd... and he is still afraid of SSDs dying like the first ones he had 5 years ago.
Hard to convince non-techies that the key to unlocking performance is using an SSD since traditionally all they think about is the CPU. Did my mom buy an SSD equipped laptop after I explained the new one she was looking at would basically perform exactly like her old one? Nope.
Just another thought, maybe the consumer OEMs like Dell are at odds with SSDs because of the massive increase in product longeivty they cause. The #1 thing making a computer feel 'slow' after a few years, especially cheapo laptops, is crappy hard drives burdened with too much cruft. The hard drive is also the part in a computer with the highest failure rate and the lowest life span. Maybe the SSD manufacturers and the OEMs are at an impasse, well, until one of them disrupts the market. I think when/if that happens, it will play similarly to the way T-Mobile destroyed cell phone contract prices.
>What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market?
Cheaper SSDs. If an SSD could be used for the same cost as a basic hard drive, it would be much more attractive to OEMs. This might mean simpler, cheaper controllers as well as an effort to drop nand prices and the use of less nand dies - the performance would take a hit, but could still be more than a mechanical drive. Right now 64GB ssds are still around £5 more expensive than 320GB 2.5" hard drives at retail.
Also, personally I'd be tempted by decent cross-platform caching software.
Problem with the OEMs. They intentionally left SSD only as an option instead of a default because the computing device would perform well for years, making the upgrade cycle longer.
To solve it, the consumers has to specifically look for devices with SSDs before OEMs scramble to place SSDs as the default on their products.
But, how do you educate the consumers now that they spend more time on a phone or tablet instead of an x86 machine? I saw Samsung a few years ago giving effort to educate consumers with the benefits of an SSD and yet the adoption rate still remains very slow. Even the company I work for does not have an idea of SSDs. They still kept on buying new machines which are pretty much overkill for 99.9% of their use. An SSD will help will greatly with Windows updates which is a pain for everyone in the company and my job to deploy applications and maintenance.
From my personal experience and my parents, I think SSD's have a few hurdles before they become mainstream. We're fairly tech savvy, but even for myself, I only put in an SSD on my new built system (2013; 128GB OS drive), but everything else is still on a HDD.
Even at the time, not seeing any SSD's in action, I merely had an extra $300 to see what the hype was all about. Do I regret my purchase? No. Do I think it was necessary? Not at all.
1) I think the main issue is OEM market penetration. I've grown up with multiple systems all HDD based, even my 2011 laptop is HDD based. My family and I are so use to 1-3 minute boot times that a 10 second boot time is just an unnecessary luxury (but yes, launchin applications is faster) - we keep 3 of our desktops running 24/7, so boot times is essentially non-existent.
2) price. i wouldn't mind swapping my Ivy bridge laptop HDD for an SSD, but I've grown rather accustomed to my 750GB storage. Spending an additional $300-400 for a 512GB SSD seems unnecessary - I might as well save that money for a new laptop that comes with an SSD when this one dies.
3) Demos are needed. If consumers can't see real life examples of an SSD and HDD side by side doing the same thing. People won't be convinced. I certainly wasn't prior to buying one. It's almost like an ios vs android issue. Simplified interface of iOS won the masses initially compared to android, and now it's a price war.
3.5) this is more of an after thought, but I think apple's going to have an edge for the next few years in terms of laptop sales. Most of their laptops are all on SSD's, increasing speed of responsiveness. Theyre on PCIe SSD's, a fact u don't see heavily marketed by Apple. The common person is going to use their laptops, and realize how snappy it is without knowing why, attributing the difference to apple/OS and not the SSD.
They also don't offer an HDD to SSD upgrade option, instead the cost is "bundled". Smart marketing move, higher margin/priced laptops, with the consumer not really knowing the cost of parts (eg: adding $200-300 for an SSD in a laptop, would mean that SSD costs $200-300 - consumer would shop elsewhere for an SSD, probably not buy it due to the hassle or install/switch)
Confession: I only own one SSD, which is a 120GB boot drive (a Sandisk!) in my HTPC. For that specific application, I could see that a snappy response was helpful and perhaps key to spousal adoption.
For my main laptop, I use an old Thinkpad with a 4:3 screen (T60, SXGA+), and I know an SSD would help a lot, but I still won't spend the money. I'd like at least 240GB, and I'd stick a big hard drive in the second spindle. Maybe when I can pick one up for £50 in the UK. Cheapest I have seen so far, for periods of about 10 minutes on Amazon, is £65 for a Crucial, was it M500 or MX100, I don't recall.
Don't fancy TLC either, or tiny lithography. An end-of-line M500 is what I am hoping for.
Sandisk, please quit focusing on how to penetrate the broader consumer market. Focus on your core market, the enthusiasts. The 21% market share you have represents people that can do the data transfer and hardware upgrade themselves. And we're saturated. We've had SSDs commercially available for five years. And now that 128GB and 256GB are more palatable for the thriftier geeks, you can bet your mechanical keyboard we have an SSD in every device. Until you can scale operations -and SSD prices- into a true price-parity with HDDs, then OEMs will be unable to afford integrating these -relatively speaking- expensive SDDs into the lower levels of their product stack, and that untapped 79% will remain so. Why isn't SanDisk courting the margins of their captured market? SanDisk makes fantastic products. Among enthusiasts they have name recognition, reputation and brand loyalty. We will buy new SSDs, but we need a reason to replace our 3-year old SanDisk SSDs. If we can't have size, then we want SPEED! We like you, but where are your ultra-fast PCIe SSDs? We will upgrade for that. We might even pay a nice premium. Mom and Pop? Not so much. And these "market penetration" suggestions... a consumer education campaign? Good luck. A "geek squad" like HDD to SSD data transfer service? Ill-advised. What wet-behind-the-ears marketeer concluded that process wouldn't be a logistical and liability nightmare. As for Anandtech, slow news day? I enjoy market analysis, but acting as the mouthpiece for the SanDisk marketing department by trolling your visitors for "market penetration" ideas is a new low. Get back on track.
SanDisk sponsored my trip to FMS and in return we agreed to do an article about what SanDisk presented and showcased at the event. AnandTech doesn't cover international flights, so finding a sponsor was the only way I could attend the show. Note that this is the case with every trade show and is thus nothing new or out of the ordinary.
However, SanDisk wasn't involved in the editorial process at all. The only condition they had is that the article needs to be linked to FMS and the meetings/presentations at the show, so I decided to write about TLC NAND and the Fusion-io acquisition as both are big things for SanDisk and the market in general, and one of SanDisk's presentation had interesting data about TLC as shown in the graphs in the article.
We also talked about SSD adoption for a lengthy period of time and I thought it makes sense to reach out to you, our readers, for input. SanDisk did not request or demand this -- it was all my idea. SSD is without a doubt the biggest upgrade that can be made to improve user experience and I'm genuinely interested in what can be done to increase the adoption rate. It's not for the marketing departments, but for all the people that could have better user experience if they knew about SSDs. I also think it's an excellent opportunity for you to be heard and there already great comments, which I'll definitely bring up when I meet with the companies at CES.
I hope this explains the situation. I'd like to emphasize that we are and will continue to be editorially independent and the purpose of sponsorships is to provide you with better content, for which attending trade shows and building relationships is crucial.
My chief concern here is not with an improper vendor relationship. The relationship is fine. I understand Anandtech will NEED vendor relationships to continue providing stories about new technologies. It's not about that. It's about the content. I read the story. This is all FMS had to offer? Nothing about super fast PCIe drives? NVMe? SanDisk didn't send any engineers to talk about how their acquisition of FusionIO is going to make for some new kickass products? No, they only sent the B team marketing crew to give SanDisk's account of their own market challenges and the projected cost of Toggle NAND? Who cares? Don't you think it's a bit presumptuous and naive to think that our "marketing ideas" --and don't delude yourself.. that's what you asked us for-- are going to somehow outfox the prevailing market forces? No, sorry. Bootstrap up and lower Prices or increase capacity / speed. I'd much rather read about those types of advances. Until then, I could care less about "the state of Sandisk"
I did talk about SanDisk's NVMe strategy on the second page, but you have to understand that no company is just going to spill out all their secrets and roadmaps. John is the head of the enterprise team (including engineering) while Kevin leads the client side, so neither of them is part of a "B team marketing crew".
I get that you're establishing credibility, but I care as much about John's and Kevin's titles as they do. Where's the news here.. and what is this Page 2? What Page 2? .. *looks* oh ... OH! Well, then, uh.. that uh explains a lot. *readingreadingreading*...NVMe..FusionIO...UltraDIMM.....*Final Words... ffffffffffffffFFFFUUU!
I owe you one beer. I'll go bang my head on rock. Thank you.
The problem is the OEMs. They let accounts run product development and wonder why the experience sucks. OEMs have their heads up their ___es. There is no good reason why Apple's market share has risen so much on the PC. The reason is because they have innovated AND marketed. They add something and tell why it's good. Apple is not perfect at all, but they haven't ruined their premium branding.
HP bought Voodoo and killed the brand.
Dell bought Alienware, but didn't kill the brand. Dell hasn't done great at promoting it either. Dell has XPS, but lacks the balls to standardize SSDs in that series. Partially because of capacity. Whereas Apple has the fusion drive (128GB SSD + 1TB HDD). This is the idea that will enhance adoption in cost sensitive areas. MS Windows needs to help the OEMs out here as Intel has already done their part.
Samsung's product lineup is asinine. I looked at their 900 series laptop about a year or two ago and it had that software caching. I think it was an 8GB cache.
Lenovo does decent in product features. I just don't trust a totally China owned company. I don't trust the others much either, but Lenovo even less.
Sony had great battery life before Haswell and Broadwell, but who knew about it. Their service was meh.
Speed is not the only benefit of SSDs. Durability is another when it comes to drops. PC OEMs have jacked up the prices too high for the SSD upgrades. It is often cheaper to buy and upgrade yourself and save money then the upgrade fee Dell was asking and you get the retail bells and whistles that Samsung provided (software utility). Intel did a crappy job of getting OEM wins for their SSDs in the client space, which I can't explain.
I have ensured all the PCs I support have SSDs in them as we have replaced since 2009. It makes my support call much faster. 4 year old PCs aren't total dogs in the last year.
Take note PC OEM an AMD APU plus an SSD is a perfect low cost laptop. AMD CPU performance is almost good enough; the GPU performance is good enough. Add a decent screen 1600x900 is enough to differentiate in this current market.
Apple has been first to PCIe SSDs after dropping HDDs in their laptops altogether. Apple will lead the pack in WiFi AC spec roll out. Apple has made Intel worried that they would put Arm cores in their notebooks, so Intel has been driving down power usage. Who is using the overpriced Crystalwell SKUs? Apple. Crystalwell is a gem that Intel has priced too high and then keeping it from the channel was nonsensical too. Apple is the reason why PC OEMs even consider putting high res and IPS displays. I have pulled apart an Apple device (x86) or two and I like the build quality. I don't like non upgradeable innards especially on the Mac mini; that was uncalled for. The Mac Pro is priced way too high.
Congratulations PC OEMs! Your crappy build quality has made Apple's hardware seem reasonably priced.
The real problem is people are dumb. They buy something and then complain about how slow it is. You tell them that they could have upgraded and you get a blank stare. The black Friday deal didn't have an SSD.
Honestly I don't know that there is a way, other than doing what they are now, pushing the prices further down. I love cheaper of course, but I am waiting for the tipping point of capacity versus price where it makes sense to replace bulk storage with SSDs instead of using HDDs.
I don't need much, but I still have ~2TiB of storage and call it 3TiB for short/medium term growth (say, 24 months of growth capacity). Times 3 for desktop, server and then backup to mirror my data. At current prices, that is around $3,000. Also many drives. My price point would be much closer to $.10 per GB instead of .30-.35 per GB. At $1,000 for all of it, I could seriously consider it. Take out the backup and leave that spinning disk and for my desktop and server, ~$600 for both for the reliability, long life, low power, no-defrag requirements and high speed of SSDs and I'd jump on SSDs for bulk storage.
Still 3-5 years away from that the way things are going. Until then, all you'll see me do is the "minimum" to get my OS and applications off spinning disk (which I've already done). 120GB SATA3 and 60GB SATA2 drive in my desktop, 128GB SATA3 drive in my laptop. Maybe in a future upgrade I'll get a couple of 128GBs in my desktop in RAID0 for performance. Maybe.
Where are Sandisk's OEM wins with SATA drives in the client space? Why the hell is Dell packing Liteon SSD drives in their Latitude lineup? Dell uses Samsung also, but I get that. Apple has been known to roll with Samsung and Toshiba SSDs. I don't see why Sandisk couldn't have done better in the OEM space.
OEMs need to up the ante on at least one of their product lines and then communicate that to customers. OEM to customer: "We're including SSDs, display, and build quality. Hey! We're even going to support you 18-24 months with North America support and a replacement device in a week as opposed to 3-4 weeks. In this series you can expect cutting edge tech, quality, and support." What PC OEM is doing that? That is why they fight over the bottom. There has only been cutting corners over the years.
"This is actually the part where we ask for your, our readers, help. What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market?"
It definitely has to be getting the OEMs to start dropping HDDs. I mean, you mention the masses, and I believe it's really just that. The masses don't go to Newegg or Fry's and buy an SSD to upgrade their systems, and they also don't go to those sellers to build their own computer. They go to Best Buy, Target, etc. and buy the cheapest pre-built system they can find, and as long as it does Office and go on the internet, they're pretty much set. They don't care that it has a 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM HDD or SSD in there. They see 500 GB, and believe it's good for them.
At any given capacity, an HDD will always be significantly cheaper, and that's where OEMs will go because that's where their systems sell. Just as you said, they also use low res 1366x768 TN panels because it lowers the price even more. We call it a bad user experience. To the masses, it's just another cheap laptop that can do Microsoft Office and go on the internet. That's all they need. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but that's what's on the market today.
In the end, it'll be OEMs that will cause the client market to start adopting SSDs at a higher rate. Once OEMs can offer products in the $200-$500 and only have SSDs, that's when client SSDs will really boom. For now, I think it's expected that only enthusiasts or people willing to spend closer to $1000 or more on a system will be getting SSDs by default. As SSD prices go down, that may probably change. Even Apple is providing SSD only options for its recent Macbook Air/Pro line, but they are still in the $1000 and above range. Eventually, it should reach the Dell Inpirons and HP Pavilions of the future, and that's what the masses will get. I don't believe HDDs will go away entirely, as they will always be cheaper for more capacity, and that's where big datacenters are moving and external storage is always great, but I can see SSDs becoming cheap enough that the consumer products may just be SSD only. We'll see though. It's only a matter of time when SSDs become really cheap. I just don't know how long that time is.
The problem is that on the low end machines you do not have any SSD options. Even on midrange machines there is no SSD option.
Second problem is uefi and how do you move your laptop to an SSD without loosing recovery partitions etc. With older systems I only had to worry about Windows activation.
Third, people still want big storage, where are the 128gb SSD / 1TB drives and why is MS not implementing software to handle the drives as one?
Quit thinking about consumers. Partner with a major OEM (Dell or HP) to manufacture desktops for government and enterprise workstations. Use mSATA or SATA SSDs in the 64-128GB range for the OS install, as most government and enterprise users store the majority of their data on the enterprise server farms. Heavily market the automated hardware encryption for the local storage, as well as the increased reliability over the rotating disks. Reduced startup time is also a significant resource opportunity if you shave 2 minutes off the startup of 1,500 workstations in a single government office.
Concincing OEMs is your biggest issue. I recently bought my wife a laptop. What I wanted was a low end CPU, IPS screen and SSD. You know what I found? ZERO OPTIONS. Can't get a low end CPU with a nice screen, only an i7. The model we settled on was nearly $1k and DIDN'T HAVE AN OPTION FOR AN SSD... I guess that's an upgrade down the road.
I am reminded of LCD panels and why they went to wide-screen formats. A 19" square cost more, and typical users did not understand why. When you do not know why, you only choose what you do know, price.
I can understand OEM reluctance to add to the base cost, but they should add the option to the base unit. Many OEM's do not even have an SSD option that is priced anywhere near what they cost individually on the market. Many users just buy whatever is in the stores, or they insist on a "Dell" or whatever. They defer technical specifications to the OEM since they do not or cannot understand them.
You cannot hope to get the low-price segment until SSD's surpass HD in price per GB. You always get what you pay for. Better off targeting the discretionary spending on computers in the mid to high end where they are adding discrete graphics, beefier PSU's, water cooling, and higher-end computer cases.
It really should be easy when you speak to someone. What is the number one complaint about computers? They are slow. What is the slowest component in computers today? Spinning hard drives. Are you willing to pay more for a faster computer? End of discussion, that question is rhetorical. They have to make their own opinion.
I just upgraded from a ReadyCache SSD accelerator to a 480 GB Ultra II during the Black Friday sales. I think that up until this year, for me, price was a primary deterrent to buying an SSD. Also, I think that a lot of people have been watching the bad press generated by OCZ, the Intel 8 MB bug, and Samsung;s recent TLC problems. I actually chose the Sandisk Ultra II because there products seem to have not experienced these bugs so far. Until it is clear that SSDs have passed their teething problems, everyone is going to view them as the potential new IBM GXP 60 Deathstar model that has potential future reliability problems.
One of the tech guys at work asked how my SSD experience has been. I have honestly had to say that while I as an enthusiast found the ReadyCache to work well and the Ultra II is good so far, it is hard to recommend upgrading SSDs wildly given the bugs and the reputation risk of such a recommendation.
If I were SanDisk, I would focus on both speed and reliability. For example, the Ultra II that I bought is a relatively new drive and really only the second manufacturer on the market to use TLC. I think that the two pronged approach is needed to sell SSDs: 1) speed, which is easy to show based on the boot times and 2) reliability which would rely on customer testimony, warranty and data points lie Tech Report's SSD endurance experiment.
As I see around the web what is manufacturers want is not exactly customer want. The customer I mentioned here is casual customers. Who need faster start up, short program load and less shutdown time. In my personal viewpoint the hydrid HDDs is the best. The common size I think 1TB or 02 TB mechanic with 32GB SSD is enough. With my a amateur gamer I need 4TB or 6TB mechanic with 32GB SSD is ok. We need 300MB/s sequence read or wirte. 50k IOPS is enough.
Getting non-computer people to upgrade a mechanical harddrive to an SSD isn't going to happen unless they have a computer friend that does the upgrade for them. I've personally bought and paid for 6 upgrades from mechanical drives to 256 GB SSDs for my non-computer friends...still have 3 or 4 more friends to upgrade. I buy the drive, borrow their computer, clone the drive, and then install the SDD, and give them their mechanical drive in a USB enclosure. From and industry stand point this means a (likely a free) service (either bring your computer in to the store and we'll upgrade it or we'll send a tech to your house and upgrade it). The real battle is to get OEMs to quit using mechanical drives and start using SSDs. We still have the problem with not enough RAM. Before I upgraded to Windows 8.1 with 32 GB RAM, I had my XP machine tuned to boot with less than 180MB RAM, so that the remaining 3.2GB could be used for programs...I was almost always running out of RAM. I have friends that would complain that their system was slow...1GB RAM, but 4GB of virtual memory running all this software grinding away on the mechanical drive. Most of the time they had no idea what the software was or why it was one their machine. My system is setup with hot plug system drives. One is an SSD and the rest are mechanical drives. I have an i5-3570k with 32 GBytes of RAM. I can tell you first hand there are times when the system is busy for 10s of minutes waiting on the mechanical drive (processor is nearly idle, but drive is at 100% busy), but when I do the same tasks with the SSD I don't notice the slow down (I'll still see the SSD at 100% busy, but the system remains functional for other drive access related tasks). I have the same problem at work only worse...slow mechanical drive that is encrypted, constantly backing up, constantly scanning for viruses, and constantly being monitored by the company IT security...That computer is also an i5, but it can take up to 45 minutes to boot. I've often thought about swapping the drive for and SSD, but my job isn't worth the risk of altering company property...so I just sit there and wait on the mechanical drive.
From my point of view, I don't need faster SSDs. Beating the SATA 3 specs won't have any visible impact on my usage. What I need is larger capacities and lower prices.
I think that in lesser developed countries like India where I live, the awareness of NAND storage is very less. As said above in the article, live demonstrations in Malls and shopping centers especially in metro cities would be a huge boon for consumers who want to make their PC faster just by a simple upgrade. There are not many high end PC users in the Indian market so they would most definitely consider the cheapest option. Processor: No, Graphics Card: Not worth unless you are a gamer, RAM: Probably if you have very less RAM to start with, SSD: YES.
Thinking about my parents, they need to really see it in action. They also don't buy much online. So I think to target the baby boomer and average Joe, having a well educated staff at retail stores is going to be the best. Price is high on the list as well - they were looking to spend just enough to get something that works, but not more. So an informed associate at Best buy with a demo station which lets buyers compare a ssd to a hdd side by side.
Thinking back a few years when many people were on dial-up internet, there was a lot of success marketing DSL and cable as 10x, 30x, 600x faster than dial-up. I think putting the added performance in simple terms like this could also go a long way to reaching the average user.
If companies like Sandisk want to grow their market share they need to provide better support to their end users. I have yet to see Sandisk provide a 2.5 to 3.5 bracket with an SSD, even though it's a $1 part with free shipping on ebay. Look at the crummy software Sandisk gives with their SSDS. The Sandisk SSD Dashboard is among the worst I have ever seen on Windows. It requires a minimum screen resolutions, it really shouldn't for what it actually does. It doesn't accurately detect firmware updates, and erroneously marks older drives bad. Sandisk is also extremly slow to provide firmware updates to their SSDs. It took six months to fix a TRIM error bug that was well documented and I get the feeling the only reason they bothered patching it was because of customer uproar on their forums and other forums. Sandisk seems to orphan their older SSDs in terms of firmware, and the overall experience buying a Sandisk product is underwhelming. The packaging feels like a small deck of playing cars and the labeling itself looks no-name. Put a holographic sticker or something on it for chrissake so it doesn't look so much like an off-brand. I realize most of Sandisk's customers are large OEMs and wholesalers, but the end user experience is what will drive the sales. There is a lot of weight in IT hobbyist and professional channels and their brand loyalty, many companies live or die by their reputation.
Interesting. Consumers - other than Apple customers - can't get SSDs because Manufacturers don't want to risk their bottom of the barrel profit margins by using higher dost SSDs.
The only way SSD manufacturers can get more SSDs used is to: 1. Increase Apple computer sales 2. Lower SSD prices more to the point that they are equivalent to hard drive prices.
It is an admittedly smaller market perhaps, but SSDs make wonderful upgrades for older computers and particularly laptops. Older laptops with a C2D processor are "enough" for most users, even though they are 7 years old. The laptop I am typing this on is a 7 year old Lenovo R61 with an SSD in it. Gotta love the old Lenovos, they are built like tanks. Adding an SSD to Windows 7 and 4GB of RAM to the old workhorse makes it more responsive than my new work provided i5 laptop with a mechanical hard drive. Thus fortified, the old Lenovo workhorse will probably run another 8 years.
One of the biggest problems with OEM SSD adoption is that OEMs simply do not offer well configured laptops. What I mean is they have purposely screwed over medium level laptops to try to force people up into higher end laptops. This technique is called upselling. Almost every manufacturer does this. And the same exact problem also applies to other components. We as enthusasts often know what a good value setup is. IE one that cost a moderate amount of money but gives you good bang for your buck. Interestingly go see if you can configure any major OEMs laptop to look like what you would pick. I bet you will find it hard or not possible at all. Instread you will be forced to upgrade past what you want to something higher for a lot more money.
Now if you want to upgrade to an SSD the next problem is that it will cost you an arm and a leg that doesn't even make sense. If and SSD is selling for $100 one newegg the OEM will charge you $150 or more to upgrade. The kicker is they take your hard drive away. So it didn't cost them $150 to give you that SSD in fact they should be buying it cheaper they just made a lot more profit lets say $90, and they paid $50 for the hard drive so the net difference is $40 but instead of charging you $60 or $80 for the upgrade they screw you over with a $150 upgrade. As long as OEMs keep trying to milk higher profit out of upgrades people are going to be shy about it. OEMs are still tying to make SSDs a feature of premium upgrades and as long as they continue that SSDs will not deploy as mainstream.
"What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market?"
Having not read any other comments: get PC OEM's heads collectively out of...um, the sand. Yeah, the sand :). Apple seems to be the only one with sense (hmm, and look at their sales and margins...coincidence?). Even if you want an SSD, many series won't have the option, or the cost will be outrageous for the size, as an upgrade. Where I work, we're buying SSDs separately, and cloning the HDDs, after resizing the partitions, because the cost difference is just so huge, and/or an SSD is not an option at all, and/or an SSD will add weeks of delay to shipping. Much like a better display, I see no good reason for SSDs, if not in a base model, to not at least be in each middle tier and higher of any given series. At our normal prices, the costs are less than double that of an HDD, typically.
Users may appreciate one once they get it, but they don't have a clue about the technology, and most I deal with don't want to get one. They just want it to work, and be faster than their old one. The demo systems at places like Best Buy need to have them , at the least, but to make them sing and dance, they also need to not have all the regular junk software running. An HDD system of similar specs beside it might be good, too. Some users will always get cheap, but others simply aren't going to pay extra for a smaller drive, when they don't see why they might want it.
"This is actually the part where we ask for your, our readers, help. What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market?"
I've bought 1TB EVO 840, and I would never, ever made such mistake again. I would buy 840 PRO 512 instead, and currently I'm searching for old SSDs, that had very short access times. My Dell's PM 830 (830 Sammy) 128GB is "doing circles" while EVO (yes... after FW update) is noticeably slower (yes, I am VM user). I'm currently looking only into consumer SLC (4KB 1QD super high IOPS) SSDs like Fujitsu FSXtreme 240GB SLC. EVO managed SSD-like bechavior only for a month. TLC is not (and never will be) and option for enthusiast.
My office has only just picked up its first two desktops with SSDs from Dell. They've been given to the serial offenders who forget to save things to the server and save everything locally. The solution? Tiny SSDs (120GB or less I think) to encourage them to do so. Sadly despite asking since I started I'm still on a 5400rpm HDD. Average start up time (to a point where work can happen): 5 minutes. The one they just replaced took closer to 10 minutes. I got in a full round of drinks for everyone before it started up most days.
Pair a Core i3 with a 128/256GB SSD and, for the vast majority of mainstream users, it'll feel far better than an i7 with a huge, slow drive. I'm fairly certain one of the main reason people love their Mac's so much is simply the easy and enormous improvement to UX provided by SSD's. Most people won't notice the crappy build quality and screen, but what they will notice for sure is how slow their brand new laptop is, thanks to that 5400 RPM drive it came with.
The problem? In the mainstream PC space, big numbers and marketing sell. UX isn't even on the radar.
M500 240GB: $81 MX100 256GB: $105 Ultra Plus 256GB: $102 Ultra II 240GB: $107 840 Evo 250GB: $114
I don't particularly hate TLC, if implemented well (like the Ultra II), but when it can be 40% *MORE* than a similar MLC drive, why on Earth should I bother? It has so far been *MLC* drives, like the M500, and Ultra Plus, helping to drive down prices. TLCs are being sold for the same or higher prices, and have been since the Samsung 840's release. The 840 was not cheap, nor has the 840 Evo been, compared to typical M500 prices. Sandisk followed with lower price with the Ultra Plus. If you didn't catch sales, the 840, 840 Evo, and now Ultra II, have not been lower than other MLC drives, even discounting Sandforce integrators, from release to today.
TLC drives should be 15 or more cheaper, considering every day prices, before I would buy or recommend one to anyone, enthusiast or not. I bought an Ultra II this BF week, for example, and it's a nice snappy little drive. But, I would not have bought it without those sales, because I could get an MLC drive, that I know will *maintain* its access times well, instead (I must admit, Samsung and Sandisk both getting WA down to Sandforce levels, with no compression or dedupe, using pSLC, has basically removed the longevity issues, for all but the top few % of data abusers).
what keeps me personally from upgrading to i.e an ssd-equipped ultrabook is that while 128gb and 256gb models are ubiquitous, it's hard to even get your hands on models with 512gb, or they let you pay through the nose.
i'm using laptops with 250gb hdds since 2008, if i'm getting a new machine in 2015 i sure as hell want something slightly more future-proof.
for the average joe the problem is that he probably doesn't even know what an ssd is and why he should spend a good chunk of money on something with maybe a quarter of the storage space of a normal hdd. others might not even care, as long as their computer is cheap and they can surf facebook and youtube.
in-store demonstrations might be a good idea, but it''ll be hard to reach a substantial share of the notebook and computer buying market.
the best way to get word out on the street though would be ssd vendors, or even a consortium consisting of intel, samsung, micron, sandisk, toshiba etc, to produce ads for tv showing the difference between ssd and hdd in 15-second clips. e.g. the ssd-laptop booting up, opening the browser, receiving emails, while the hdd-laptop still is on the windows loading screen.
or loading and importing/exporting stuff in lightroom in seconds, while the hdd-computer hasn't even started lightroom yet.
I’m somewhat disappointed by the article, because it fails to mention 4 bit per cell tech that Sandisk sells on SD cards since 2009. I expected some word about introduction of 4 bit per cell on consumer SSD.
“What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market?” A lot of PCs are assembled by local city stores, for non geek people. They would welcome these features:
- Bundle HD with a SSD. Not a hybrid disk, but a pair of disks on the same box. Of course, that should save some money, so it would encourage assembling PCs with a SSD for OS, and HD for storage. Having both using the same space than a single HD would also be convenient, because many PC have space and power cables limitations. - Sell expandable SSD. A SSD with SD card slots (or something faster), so the user is able to buy a cheap SSD, and expand it as needed. Selling the expansion memory should be much cheaper than selling the entire SSD, and would increase future income. - Sell an USB INTERNAL SSD. Create a standard. Permanently plugging an USB SSD (or pen drive) to a notebook, netbook, or any portable is dangerous, because it is easy to break, and annoying. The USB device should be conveniently inserted inside, on a hole, like SD cards. - Bundle software to move OS directories between the SSD and HD. A lot of space used on SSD is wasted with files that are rarely used. For example, Windows “winsxs” folder, is huge, and mostly useless, only accessed during software installation and uninstallation. Also, I moved “My Documents” to HD, but that also move some OS subdirectories inside “My Documents”, like save game files. That defeats the purpose of the SSD, because those files are read from HD. MS offers some tools, to move those directories, but they are hard to get, and to use. A simpler, downloadable software to do it would increase the value of a small SSD.
I decided to replace my laptop's HDD with an SSD this weekend. I'm a pretty tech savvy guy, but even I was apprehensive. How was I going to clone a 512GB drive to a smaller SSD? All of the migrations I've done in the past were from a smaller drive to a larger one, and involved partition resizing, which usually ran into problems. And then there's messing with bootsectors. Yikes. I've done this once with Samsung's migration software (Norton Ghost), but I was only able to use that because it was a retail package that I was able to charge to my employer. This time I just have the bare drive.
But luckily I found my USB3 drive enclosure to image the SSD to and things are progressing. Fingers crossed.
Education, education, education. Of consumers, and to an extent sales. Well, and not targeting the cheapest of the cheapest ones. But slightly above that mark should work.
Mid-to-heavy office use is actually (in my opinion) by far the best case for SSD use. Having opened Outlook + 50-200 page PowerPoint/Word document with lots of charts and pictures taken from several of sizeable Excel files (which source data span from hundreds to tens-of-thousands lines). I personally like to have opened only the files I use (which leads to rather frequent reopening, at time), while some of my colleagues have like 30+ files opened at once (which leads to heavy HDD swapping). All of this highly taxing on storage performance, and exactly at the kind of where the SSD shine the most (lots of random reads and writes).
At home, we talk a lot about buying a new notebook for my wife. When I fire up my favorite local e-shop, I come to something like $1.2k price-tag (pre-VAT). She says (mind you, I am coming from country with $1.2k average and $1.05k median salary) that an el cheapo notebook for ~$400 (pre-VAT) should be more than enough. And at that point I tell her: but that one does not have SSD, and without SSD, it as slow as your old work notebook (ok, $2k, but 8 years), so it won’t start quick, and you won’t use it either! And you will rather use our el-cheapo $125 (pre-VAT) 7” tablet. And we end up buying nothing.
My ideal light-office-use notebook config would actually be: Intel Atom (or AMD’s variant, if they step up the game) + 4 GB RAM + 128 GB SSD/eMMC. Asus is almost there with their T100 line, but for the eMMC storage.
So what should be shown? (light Office use and gaming)
1) Make ads, side by side HDD vs SSD: 1.1 Boot time 1.2 Opening a browser and loading not-super-simple-webpage 1.3 Opening a fresh Word 1.4 What if you need to find specific Word document, but you are naming it not-really-well? Let’s do quick sequential check of what is inside 10 Word documents? 1.5 Show how long it takes from saying “I would like to show you my [insert occasion] pictures” to actually seeing them 1.6. How long does it take switching apps between, say, some The Sims and e-mail client/web broser
2) Educate the retail chain heads of sales depts in following sense: Show ppl that SSDs can and will significantly improve your customer’s experience. If you sell them the HDD just on price&capacity hoping for shorter upgrade cycle, they will most likely end up at Apple next time around.
3) Educate everyone around that SSDs are, apart from the much greater speed also: 3.1 Totally quiet 3.2 Not sensitive to vibrations/quick movements/etc. 3.3 Now highly reliable (see Techreport’s SSD endurance test)
4) Have M$ and/or others to finally make solid seamless SSD+HDD drive experience (i.e. SSD is the BIIIIG cache).
You will have to deal with the big data storage. In my opinion, the right answer for that is a NAS, but it has also its limitations.
Cloud, as a counterargument, is quite weak, because for any kind of mobile, cloud is pretty much utterly useless, because: 1) There are places in this world with very weak and very slow mobile data coverage 2) In places, where the coverage is good, the networks are often overcrowded, so you are as well as in the case above 3) Anything non-LTE is unacceptably slow for serious media (ok, HTSPA might be passable – but compare with your full-HD downloaded data) 4) For those living outside US, the insane roaming data fees make cloud completely useless (I am talking about $40 for 100kB, which happened to me in Switzerland), and hotel/airport Wifi is often quite slow 5) Remember X-Box One (i.e. something attached to a fixed line) always-connected-outcry?
In offices, there's also downtime issues. ScanPST on large PSTs can take hours on HDDs, but mere minutes on SSDs. Same with CHKDSK. Major updates are quicker, too, as are OS re-installs/restores. Document backups are slow enough that 100Mbps LAN is barely a bottleneck, too, with HDDs. People don't like their PCs being unusable, but there's not much that can be done to speed up the existing HDD, which is usually what causes anything that takes a long time to take a long time.
I don't think the masses will ever accept upgrading to an SSD. There are just too many variables to consider if you're not a techie. Which means there would need to be a program for someone else to install the SSD, load it with Windows and get all the drivers and software back on there for them.
Short of creating local computer shops, like Discount Computers in Sarasota, FL, everywhere in the US I don't think it is going to happen. Perhaps you could work with Best Buy to offer a program where they sell the SSD's at Newegg prices and perform the install and load for $20 or so, can't be much of a cost premium for the labor otherwise people won't do it. Best Buy would have to be willing to accept very low margin's, so maybe specific partnerships could be formed to work out a "kick-back" of the SSD profits to participating partners, local stores or Best Buy's. Like how car dealerships earn nothing on new car sales but get bonuses for reaching certain sales quotas. Just spit-balling ideas here.
Short of that massively expansive program which would probably cost more to start up than you'd ever make from it, OEM's just need to include SSD's. They need to do so, more or less, at cost as well. 256GB M-SATA SSD's in ALL laptops would be huge, but they can't go around charging $200+ for the feature, like they overcharge for RAM. Mushkin prices, basically.
Hands on demonstrations would be helpful, boot up 2 computers, one with HDD one with SSD, load gmail and Word for instance. Let them feel the difference.
I also think it's important to not sell computers with ONLY an SSD. In the age of multi TB hard drives to go into a store and see a laptop with "128GB Storage" is confusing and off-putting to normal consumers. "Why did we go so far back? What is this? 2005?" So you have to include a 1TB hard drive with that 128-256GB SSD.
Maybe a new feature on the feature sheet for these as well, reflecting load times. This would need to be standardized to mean anything. Kind of like the Windows rating index actually, 7200rpm hdd's always max out at 5.9. Use a scoring system like that to reflect the increased responsiveness of the computers with SSD's. HDD=59 SSD=458 Expensive SSD=512, etc...
With M-SATA SSD's used in conjunction with 2.5" hard drives there's no reason at all for ANY laptop to be sold without an SSD. I think we should completely avoid anything under 128GB as well, unless it's being used strictly as a caching SSD.
But then with a dual storage solution you have to introduce people to the idea of managing their data on multiple drives. Which, sadly, is still a "strange new concept" to most common consumers. This problem will take time as it will require educating the masses to a certain degree. If they don't value the upgrade they won't be willing to pay anything for it.
I'm looking for a replacement of my server HDDs.Transfer speed on par with fast HDD is ok, size is what matters *g*
I'd like to have a 'slow' SSD with 2TB+ and wouldn't mind if it's build for 3,5" size. SATA is fine, all those faster, newer connections are non-existant outside some high price environments.
SSD with: high capacity, ok transfer speed, low price.
Honestly, I don't let any family member spend $x000 on a computer anymore, I tell them to buy cheap and I'll get them a $100 upgrade that will make it as fast as the computer that is 3x more expensive.
Youtube videos would be helpful. Get a vast array of older computers and show them running side-by-side with and without an SSD. People need to see a computer they can relate to, and they need to see the difference an SSD makes. Get popular models of computers going as far back as 6 years.
Incentivize the tech-savvy member of the family to upgrade the computer for relatives and friends.
Swapping an ssd into an old computer makes it feel like a new computer. The problem is that the majority of consumers don't know what an SSD is and even fewer have the technical capability, free time, and confidence to attempt the upgrade by themselves (disassembling the computer, dealing with acronis, ensuring 4K block alignment, running crystal disk mark to verify performance, etc). The only reason that any of the computers owned by any of my relatives contain and ssd is because I installed it for them. If you want to sell more ssd's the best way would be to incentivize tech-savvy family members to do the installation for all family members. Perhaps have a incentive program whereby if you buy 3 SSDs you get a 4th SSD free would do the trick.
Manufacturers could of course do a better job of simplifying the process. Samsung's ssd magician does a pretty good job, but it doesn't cover every step in the upgrade process. For example it won't walk you through the computer disassembly / re-assembly steps and all the tools required which of course depend on your model of computer.
Also, i think the SSD manufacturers should offer spacious 1, 2 and 4TB hybrid drives. And I'm not talking about the disappointing Seagate models with a puny 8GB read-only ssd cache, but rather models containing at least 128GB SSDs with read and write caching. There's a big gap I. The market here (at least until ssd pricing becomes on par with mechanical drives).
Personally, I don't really think speed is going to be all that convincing. I feel that most people who are not tech savvy will not understand why they have to pay so much more money for less storage. For most average consumers, they're going to want the (ooooh shiny!) 1 TB of storage because it's alot, whereas it's going to be difficult to tell them that just 256GB of storage is actually better even though it's less. An average joe is going to want the more storage just because it's more storage, even though they will probably never just more than 300 GB so they would be fine with a 256 SSD
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hojnikb - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
>This is actually the part where we ask for your, our readers, help. What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market? Would live demonstrations at malls and other public places help? Or upgrade programs where you could take your PC to a store and they would do the upgrade there for you? Let us know your ideas in the comment section below and I'll make sure to bring them up with SanDisk and other SSD manufacturers. Remember that we are talking about the masses here, so think about your parents for instance – what would it take for them or other people who are not very comfortable around computers to upgrade their PCs with an SSD?Try before buy or something similar. Let the user try the ssd for themselfs and they are not satisfied with the performance and responsivness, then they can bring it back. Obviously live demonstrations and help with install would greatly help aswell.
As far as OEMs are concerned; they should start offering base models with ssds instead of HDDs. I bet that a cost efficiently designed msata/m.2 ssd of 64/128GB size could potentialyl be cheaper than 500/1TB harddrive.
FITCamaro - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
A demonstration would have to show real world results showing the difference. Merely booting up faster isn't that big a selling point to most. An extra 30 seconds of faster boot (something you do once a day) isn't worth the drastic cost per GB difference for most. Even as an enthusiast for me it still isn't. Granted now I have all the HDD storage I'm going to need for a long time (two 3TB drives), I'm just waiting for the extra cash to pick up a 240-256GB SSD for games to replace my 120GB one since space is becoming an issue. But my OS is still on a traditional 1TB drive. That will eventually change but it's not a priority.At the end of the day, SSDs are still largely too expensive for most. They see the small size and are like "what the heck?". More are adopting cloud storage as a viable option, but that's the real sell. Convincing people they can make do with only a 64-120GB drive onboard while using cloud storage for everything else. People are spoiled with being able to keep their entire music collection on their laptop.
hojnikb - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Considering that consumer space is moving towards cloud and streaming, having less much much faster storage makes a lot of sense. Who really needs a 1TB drive and actally _uses_ it ?Probobly not a lot of people. And by giving base models ssds instead of hdds this could potentially mean lower prices if done right. And consumers love lower prices.
paddytokey - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Completely agree with that, additionally a lot of people have bought external Harddrives over the last couple of years to store all their stuff on. I think having a 128GB+ SSD in a low-priced pre-built computer makes a ton more sense nowadays as it will benefit you in everyday tasks and makes the machine feel so much snappier.nathanddrews - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Three benchmarks in store or on YouTube that would likely impress Average Joes:1. Opening and editing pictures/slideshows/movies on something like PS Elements
2. Playing and MMO like WoW or Marvel Heroes, something that is disk intensive that actually affects gameplay
3. Opening, editing, and saving large MS Office projects
StevoLincolnite - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Unfortunately, games are starting to balloon in install size.50Gb+ is the norm going forward.
SSD's simply aren't cost effective for a "games" drive.
My Steam Library for instance, with over 500 games consumes almost 3 Terabytes (And that's JUST Steam!), yes I like to have everything installed and ready to-go, always, with a backup on another drive.
I simply do not wish to waste time, downloading/transferring/copying/moving games all the time to an SSD, just click and play.
So, I just use a mechanical for everything else and a several-year-old 64Gb OCZ Vertex 2 SSD for my Windows install.
I did just picked up a Sandisk Readycache drive though, hopefully I can configure it to cache my games drive, otherwise it's going into my grandmothers PC.
Stochastic - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
I don't have the time or interest to play 500 games. At any given moment I'm usually actively playing no more than one or two games. If Gigabit internet ever becomes ubiquitous this will become a non-issue as downloading games will only take a handful of minutes.amddude10 - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
You can also backup and restore backups with steam very easily to and from hard drives, whenever you decide to switch what games you're playing. One of the nice things about SSD's is that they can easily handle reading or writing to or from a hard drive as fast as that hard drive can go, whilst also still being able to load or save other programs or files onto it while you wait for your backup or backup restoration to finish. It's way faster than a gigabit internet connection.fokka - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
i think booting windows and autostarting programs like browser, itunes etc would get the biggest wows from novices. many people are used to waiting 1-2 minutes and more until they can even use their hdd-equipped computer, with a nice ssd-equipped system that should take less than 20 seconds.JeffFlanagan - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
>Who really needs a 1TB drive and actally _uses_ it ?Anyone with a video library on their media PC. 1TB is actually very small.
cjs150 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Complete agree. My 6TB NAS is starting to feel a bit small.As for cloud and streaming, this is what the industry wants not necessarily what consumers want. There are many places where there is no or limited access to the cloud and mobile networks are not going to reduce data transmission costs sufficiently anytime soon
hojnikb - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Nothing is forcing you not to buy extra storage. But for lots of people 128GB/256GB is more than plenty.Spawne32 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
If you don't want to listen to what people are telling you is the problem, I don't know what to tell you. Cloud storage is not "mainstream" by any sense of the word. It is something that the younger generation of users are just starting to embrace, but for the vast majority of us, we would rather keep our information stored locally then over a network for security reasons alone, not to mention the fact that cloud storage can be costly. The average user has roughly 500gb of information stored on their computer between games, photos and music, that would not be traded off for cloud storage. Yet the price of a 500gb SSD is still between 175 to 200 dollars.piiman - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
"cloud storage can be costly."And it's SLOOOOOWWWW why even compare the two.
One is a drive for active files and games one is for inactive and seldom accessed files.
You want to make SSD's more popular? Get the price and size to match HDD's and you're golden.
Shadow Cat - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
I agree with piiman, commercial cloud storage is not a sensible option.As long as SSDs stay at the back end of storage capacity race, they will stay at the bottom of the consumer adoption rate.
amddude10 - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
True, although it's nice to have at least two drives, so that you can backup important things much more quickly and conveniently than using cloud services.amddude10 - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
Yep, I've got a 2TB and a 1TB drive plus a 256GB SSD, and I find that I keep needing to go through my files and deleting them to make space every couple of months now. I could definitely use another drive.groundhogdaze - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Games are taking a lot more space nowadays. Recent games can take 30-50GB each. My STEAM library alone is already 1.5TB and I haven't even installed all the games I've owned yet which probably bring it closer to 3TB of games.Sabresiberian - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
It's an easy thing for those of us that have reliable and fast internet service to say, but the fact is a large portion of the population has neither. I think we are still a decade or two away from that being a reality.Wwhat - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
I know of a few adult non-IT women who do use plenty of storage. And they normally don't like the cloud at all and have internetspeeds that really make the cloud a silly proposition. For clouds to even start replacing drives you'd need people to be a) really out of the loop and stupid regarding privacy issues b) people must have at least fiber and with equal up and download speeds.The cloud at this moment is a dumb illusion some poorly managed companies try to bet on.
PeterMorgan573 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
For people who use their computers only intermittently (which is perhaps the target of this question), the difference between quick startup and slow is that they turn off their computers instead of leaving them on all day. Microsoft is responsible for decades of many millions of computers being left on all day, perhaps 100 GWh/year per million computers (30 Watts for 8 hours, say, that could be saved per day), because of slow startup, which is potentially ameliorated by SSDs. People who use their computers all day aren't affected by this, of course.bigboxes - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
I leave my PC on 24/7. It's doing work all of the time. If I'm out I can remotely access it and all of my documents. I leave my file server on 24/7. Do I really want to boot it up only when I know I (or anyone else on my network) want access to the files? That's what convenience is for. Now, my wife turns her pc off at night, but she's not a power user.sheh - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Hibernation is pretty quick, and sleep is quicker even if not as power efficient.Jalek99 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Hibernation on my Windows 8.1 machine only ends in blue screens within minutes. It was that way in beta and clean installs made no difference. If I leave it on all the time, it never seems to crash.Hrel - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
This is an excellent point. Before I had an SSD in my desktop I would leave it on all day while I went to work because I didn't want to have to wait for it when I got home. Sleep mode always causes problems so I avoid that and strictly use Shutdown.Now I don't care about shutting it down, hell, I even do Windows updates a lot more often because it's not so painful to restart the computer.
20 seconds is what I believe the threshold for this is, the machine needs to be usable, as in booted, responsive with at least one program open, within 20 seconds of me hitting "restart".
paradeigmas - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Actually I think the real problem is that the consumers are not educated on the impact of having an SSD. Today's consumers are trained by advertising to look for "1080p", "Intel i5+", and "6+GB" of RAM. They are certainly not aware of the fact that having an SSD will increase their relative performance by a significant margin. What SanDisk needs to do is to get a "Relative Performance Rating" into consumer's mind, and have the bulk of the score weighted heavily by an SSD (which is true). Then, setup demo units in Malls and Best Buys that include a SSD laptop with mediocre spec, and a top-spec laptop with a traditional hard drive and do a side-by-side demonstration of exactly what SSDs does when it comes to boosting speed. SanDisk should aim to shift the paradigm of what is important for consumersa to have when purchasing a computer.nirolf - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
This. Many people I know that are computer literate don't really know what's up with these SSDs and what are they good for. They don't realize how much time they would save in their everyday tasks if they would use a SSD.Jalek99 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
I recall the early days when people warned that they were only good for 50,000 writes or something, then they would be unreliable. Clearly something changed with so many people using them as boot drives now, but like the initial worries about plasma televisions, those things linger even if they're obsolete concerns.Cerb - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
Now, we're down to 1,000! But, in hose early days, there was not wear-leveling. Then, there was wear-leveling that was very bad at handling small writes. Even at 50,000 writes, those 50,000 writes going to the same page over and over again could kill them much quicker than a modern TLC drive rated for 2% of that, due to spreading out the writing across pages and blocks.Cinnabuns - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Yep. Consumers are absolutely not trained at looking for SSDs. The only thing they look for in storage is the number next to overall capacity, and advertising for stores happily oblige in providing only this info.SSD manufacturers should get together to push for a rating system that demonstrates how much faster it is for most people in everyday scenarios.
mkozakewich - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
Few people trust rating systems, though. What they rely on are hard capacity numbers, like sizes. GB, MP, GHz, HD or 4K...We need to push the speeds instead of the sizes. Sell computers with 500 MB/s transfer speeds, not computers with 120 GB storage.
Stochastic - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
This seems like a solid idea.stephenbrooks - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
YES. The disk speed statistics are really important to show because (A) they are often the performance bottleneck and (B) there are very large variations even between SSDs.desolation0 - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
I wish we could find a single speed number, have it make sense, have all the manufacturers use it and not cheat, and have it be useful for day to day comparison between two drives. We may need some collaboration through an independent industry speed rating body. As is, a product may list a different read speed based on the compressability of the files or any of a number of other things that can heavily sway how useful the number the manufacturers are using actually is. It's a pain to see a cheap drive advertising the same maximum mb/s as the premium drive, when the difference between the two in real use can be obvious to even a moderate user. Then there's the traditional issue of changing components without changing the model number, so you may get a relatively large gap in performance even from what should be the same device.Personally, I'd like to see how useful an SSD would be in a university computer lab setting, with multiple users on the same machines with no need for large storage since the files get wiped from each system periodically. Make user verification pretty much the only bottleneck to swapping from user to user.
Really though, I think it's the business route to home user success. Where time = money, you have to make it pay to switch. Make the technology cheap enough and useful enough that businesses adopt it even for their low value employee computers. As in, even if the computer is getting used exclusively by a low wage employee, it will pay for itself to have an SSD instead of a spinning disk. At $10 per hour wage, a $100 SSD pays for itself if it saves 10 hours of work for the user. Of course, the plan also has to pay for any technical overhead from the IT department to implement and maintain the new drives. If you also save them time, the drive pays itself off sooner. Add to their workload, and it takes longer to reach the point of paying itself off. Once in the hands of business users for their everyday workload, then it's a matter of having the users notice the difference from their home computer and associate the difference with having an SSD. If you can pull that off, then you'll get more adopters at home. They will want to save themselves time/money to do more important and fun things, like watch cat videos on Youtube.
Then, you still need the computer manufacturers in on it. Make it an easy way to segment their market. Multiple storage drive base systems may be a market area the manufacturers should encourage. Maybe design a chassis to allow a novice user to easily swap in a better drive. Just get the main niches going, however you can.
Minion4Hire - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Showing a side-by-side boot comparison is actually a really easy way to convince the average person of an SSDs benefit. It's visual, it's tangible, and something everyone can relate to. Such a comparison is how I convinced my group to only purchase new systems that include SSDs.With Windows 8 I'm not sure how good such a comparison is anymore, but 2 years ago it was impressive enough.
MikeMurphy - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
It matters in an enterprise environment, which is described in this article as a large part of Fusion-IO's business.Primum - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
Once you use a computer with a good SSD, you'll never go back. It's not just the start up time, it's installation time, time spent writing to disk, time applications take to start up, and any other activity that requires accessing the disk. Nothing makes a PC better than a SSD. Nothing. After that it's probably at least 8GB of RAM, then you can worry about CPU/GPU.If you don't use a SSD every day then try to use a slow HDD, you don't know what you're missing.
Wwhat - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
Personally I'd be hesitant to advise a non-technical person a SSD due to the unknowns regarding lifetime of a cheap SSD. I would feel bad if someone bought a SSD and the thing got warnings of imminent failure a year and a half later and they would not know how to recover from it and how to replace it and move their OS to a new drive.As for demos in malls.. that seems extremely silly.
Hrel - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
This is horrid advice, how can you possibly recommend cloud storage in light of nude leaks and NSA spying and the government currently trying to push through the TPP in secret?You must either work for a cloud storage company or the NSA. Worst advice EVAR!
M-SATA plus 2.5" hdd is the solution, period. Cloud Storage is not an option, at all, for anything of a personal nature. Business, sure, but certainly not anything sensitive or secret.
spidey81 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
"64/128GB size could potentialyl be cheaper than 500/1TB harddrive." This is what I've been wondering for some time. But my theory is it's all in the marketing. Will an unknowing consumer buy a laptop with a terabyte of storage before they buy one with 128GB? Of course they'll opt for the terabyte even though they'll never use it. I can't tell you how many PC's I've looked at for friends and family that don't scrape the surface of their storage capabilities. So to that end, it would be a combination of a good marketing team and well engineered internal specs. It will have to happen sometime I suppose.hojnikb - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Yeah, mindset in consumers really needs to change. terabytes, gigabytes, cores and gigaherts are just meaningless for avarage user. What it counts is the user experience. And with ssd out of the box, its surely better.PPalmgren - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Education of the sales droids is a big factor. Say if Toshiba decided to outfit all their entry level laptops with 256gig SSDs instead of hard drives at cost for the first year of implementation. If they educated the sales reps at best buy/etc., and honestly they'd probably already know, it'd be a gimme. "This gives you better battery life and significantly faster performance, load times of your programs/internet, etc."Either that, or sell all of their retail-style SSDs with FREE disc cloning tech and an adapter. The disc, without cloning tech, is one of the absolutely biggest pain in the ass peices to replace. I'd rather get a new motherboard. Of course, now I have a cloning tool, so its easy as pie. I buy low level laptops for family and swap a SSD in and they get good performance for about $300 less than they'd pay for the premium.
crimsonson - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
"This is actually the part where we ask for your, our readers, help.....Let us know your ideas in the comment section below and I'll make sure to bring them up with SanDisk and other SSD manufacturers."Why would you ask such question? That is not your job as a tech journalist. Why would you ask your readers to help a manufacturer to market their product?
This article reeks of paid advertisement.
kevith - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
+1 That was I thought immidiately. If I were to answer that, I would want to be paid. And it doesn´t suit a serious site."How do you think we could shove this SSD down your computer-illeterate grandma´s throat?" Hmmmm...!
madwolfa - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
You guys are interesting... it's done to help market penetration, which in turn will drive the prices down. Consumers win.crimsonson - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
that is short sighted.This is Anandtech - supposedly one of the most respected tech sites. Articles like this undermines their main purpose - INDEPENDENT, honest and transparent reporting. Price is only a concern when evaluating a product versus another product. It is not their job to MARKET for a company.
What happens if they give a great review to a mediocre product to help Sandisk? Would you feel the same way then?
'nar - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
While this article is about Sandisk, the problem is about SSD penetration into the computer market in general. The question what not asking how to sell Sandisk SSD's specifically, but SSD's generally. It just happens to be Sandisk that brought the question to the table.When the supreme court hears a case to rule on a law, somebody needs to actually bring the case before them. Some person or company has the be sued, or charged, or something. I think you are being too judgmental. Just my opinion.
Kristian Vättö - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
This is what I replied to another comment, which I hope clarifies the situation."SanDisk sponsored my trip to FMS and in return we agreed to do an article about what SanDisk presented and showcased at the event. AnandTech doesn't cover international flights, so finding a sponsor was the only way I could attend the show. Note that this is the case with every trade show and is thus nothing new or out of the ordinary.
However, SanDisk wasn't involved in the editorial process at all. The only condition they had is that the article needs to be linked to FMS and the meetings/presentations at the show, so I decided to write about TLC NAND and the Fusion-io acquisition as both are big things for SanDisk and the market in general, and one of SanDisk's presentation had interesting data about TLC as shown in the graphs in the article.
We also talked about SSD adoption for a lengthy period of time and I thought it makes sense to reach out to you, our readers, for input. SanDisk did not request or demand this -- it was all my idea. SSD is without a doubt the biggest upgrade that can be made to improve user experience and I'm genuinely interested in what can be done to increase the adoption rate. It's not for the marketing departments, but for all the people that could have better user experience if they knew about SSDs. I also think it's an excellent opportunity for you to be heard and there already great comments, which I'll definitely bring up when I meet with the companies at CES.
I hope this explains the situation. I'd like to emphasize that we are and will continue to be editorially independent and the purpose of sponsorships is to provide you with better content, for which attending trade shows and building relationships is crucial."
Chapbass - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
A big one for me is just plain old consumer knowledge. I've talked to many non-technical people, you know how many people have heard of a solid state drive? Exactly zero. Hard to get adoption when the general consumer doesn't even know your product exists.MrSpadge - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
To answer the same question:For somewhat tech-affine people who want to stick to their current OS installation (many people do) we need software to transition smoothly to a SSD. Samsung already ships it by default, but I suspect most people simply don't know about this.
And for less tech-savvy handling different storage locations (OS SSD, other internal drive, external drive, cloud 1, cloud 2 etc.) is cumbersome. Anything that eases this pain could help. I'm thinking about hiding the complexity of the storage system from the user. This could e.g. be automatic caching (with write caching and generous cache sizes - I'm not talking about 8 GB!) or manually or automatically creating relocating specific content to the HDD via hard links. SSD vendors could provide a software to statically assign this to certain folders like for media files, folders marked by the user via the explorer context menu or automatically to old & big files (service pack uninstall etc.).
MrSpadge - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
BTW: I know this could already be done relatively easily using the libraries of Win 7/8. But I'm pretty sure most people are not using them, let alone have given relocating the corresponding storage locations a thought.Conficio - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
I think what would work for new OEM laptops with SSD is a "SSD inside" kind of campaign with jingle and pretty face. Add a few real benefits like longer battery life and you are good to go.Or how about bundling the new SSD with online backup secure and encrypted and hassle free. May be even cold storage for life of all those pictures and documents. To get out of the big spinning rust disk vs smallish SSD? Add it some automatic download and archive of the paper-less bills and CC statements and tax returns, etc. and you are golden.
My parents or other mainstream PC users can't be convinced to "upgrade" their PC by anything until the next PC. The labor cost of servicing is just to high. They are easier convinced to buy a new laptop/PC if they can see the tangible benefits above.
oxwax - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
One word: INFOMERCIAL. If the general public can be pursuaded to buy junk like My Clean PC to make his or her computer faster, a very well structured infomercial that actually "informs" the general public that his or her PC is hampered by the slow hard drives installed by OEM should do amazingly well. The general public does not even know that SSDs exist, let alone the benefits(60 - 120MB/s vs 300 - 550MB/s). Showing side-by-side comparisons would help. Include cloning software and ***** A FREE OPTICAL DRIVE BAY CADDY **** would almost ensure success. Could possibly be bigger than the George Foreman Grill, if correctly implemented!sheh - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
The major improvement from SSDs is usually not the linear read speed, but the random access.oxwax - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
I strongly agree, but we are considering the general public. Steve Jobs had it correct with the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) template for marketing. Have you ever sat down with a professional that has a degree in a very advanced science(like a neurosurgeon or endocrinologist), and he or she wants to explain things to you thoroughly in professional jargon? Most people get lost and tune out the conversation. The only thing that general public wants is for the product to perform as expected as easily and simply as possible with as few hiccups as possible. You can even break it down in layman's term. I like to use cars to explain computers to my clients. The CPU is like the engine, RAM is like the fuel injection, and storage are like tires. If you put cheap tires on your Ferrari, your Ferrari will only go 120 MPH. If you put the best tires in the world, your Ferrari will perform to the top of its capabilities. Adding an SSD like putting 550 MPH tires on an electric engine. Sometimes I'll even go as far as describing how having a Core i infrastructure is like having a drag strip between the RAM and CPU vs an Indy car track for Pentium processors. Everytime, people seem to appreciate that I know these things, but he or she usually begins to just state "I just want it to work like your saying." So, yes. We geeks will completely understand the finer details, but the general public just wants to KISS it!name99 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
"This is actually the part where we ask for your, our readers, help. What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market? "Stop chasing benchmark speed at the expense of everything else. Streaming r/w speed is nice, yes, but it appears to be coming at the expense of other things that, for AVERAGE users are more important. This primarily means:
STABILITY/SAFETY. This is a huge one. I mean, for crying out loud, it is STILL an issue. Samsung, supposedly the safest brand in terms of firmware that works, had to release an update two months ago to resolve firmware issues. It's 2014, not 1011. This shit should not still be happening.
If the industry as a whole wants to expand, it should create some sort of "Designated as not a PoS" certification program which takes drives, tortures them in a variety of ways, and certifies that they are SAFE SAFE SAFE. They don't screw up when they lose power randomly. They don't screw up when they are running at 99% full capacity. When they DO fail, they fail by telling you that writes no longer work, and by allowing reads to access 100% of the drive so you can recover (even if you were too foolish to run a continual backup). etc etc.
And if the industry is so damn short-sighted that it insists on crippling this certification program, so that its tests aren't demanding, aren't trustworthy, are full of loopholes, well then, boo hoo --- it damn well deserves to be stuck in its current ghetto of limited sales and desperate attempts to try to grow.
After this (by far the most important) issue of stability and safety, the second most important issue is
- optimize for random r/w rather than streaming. Yes streaming is nice and you can get big studly multi-100MB/s numbers that sound good. But what actually matters for MOST users' daily performance is the random access numbers
- get the maximum power draw down. As long as the maximum power draw (usually for random writes) is over 2.5W, these devices are basically not usable as external drives because they are too dangerous to use when connected to USB2. They'll seem to work just fine, then hang as soon as a stream of writes hits them. The external drive market may not be huge, but it's not negligible either.
- The second aspect of the external market is that, where possible (which I assume means USB3) you still need to support TRIM and SMART. Just because a drive is external doesn't mean I no longer care about its performance or its longevity/safety.
Basically, vendors need to spend less time worrying about dick-measuring benchmarks and more time thinking like Apple about what is best for the average customer.
stunta - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
> what would it take for them or other people who are not very comfortable around computers to upgrade their PCs with an SSD?Friends and family who are not tech-savvy don't know what an SSD is. Solve that problem first.
Dadofamunky - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
If you have an SSD, CPU speed becomes less vital to overall performance. If the BOM is 430-$50 higher with an SSD, you can easily make do with an i5 instead of an i7. Easily. Most CPU cycles on these clunky laptops are completely wasted. Fatter CPUs and spindle drives also are heat bombs in every laptop. An SSD solves all of these problems. The OEMs can keep buying their contracted Intel chips - they just get to build better-balanced cheap laptops that their users will actually like to use. I don't get why SanDisk and other companies don't recognize this.beginner99 - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
demonstration of same laptop one with ssd one with hdd. Both have same windows image installed and it should be a heavily used, old installation not a fresh one. Then users can compare directly how much faster the SSD laptop will be down the road in 1-2 years.dareece - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
To comment on the the last paragraph; the industry is not ready to offer lower performance/lower cost SSDs to the consumer market just yet (You can already purchase laptops with SSDs in limited configurations). It's all about getting as much revenue up front before selling out to the masses who always want the lowest price. The manufacturing cost associated with creating larger capacity drives and faster speeds needs to be paid for by the OEMs first to allow the overall costs to be reduced so that they can be passed on the non-OEM end-user. This is standard industry practice in the technology sector.bernstein - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
since even my granma now uses a notebook with an ssd i can only speculate... we as a family only use harddisks in nas (note that excluding videos & backups an 1TB ssd could replace it easily) & as a second large storage drive where needed (2TB steam library being one example)however most people i know a) have no clue how much space they actually need & b) play it save (when buying a notebook now and they think they might use 256GB in five years they buy the 2TB because they might need it and it's often the cheaper notebook)
nandnandnand - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
VNAND or diegaradante - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
An easier/cheaper way to migrate the OS and software from an HDD to an SSD would be nice. Most SSDs don't include something like Acronis and buying it separately is cost prohibitive when using a smaller capacity SSD as it adds something like $30 to the effective cost.I think one thing that would be very nice to see though would be OEMs selling desktops and laptops with a SSD as the default drive rather than the HDD. Otherwise personally, when I buy a laptop with an included HDD but not an SSD and only 1 drive bay, taking the HDD out and replacing it with an SSD is a tough pill to swallow when it means the cost of the HDD as part of the laptop purchase price (probably something around $40-60) was wasted. Or encourage laptop manufacturers to include easily accessible bays for more than a single 2.5"/mSATA drive, and still have the default one an SSD so the OS doesn't have to be migrated afterwards.
Also, moving mobile devices (phones/tablets) away from the godawful slow eMMC controllers to proper SATA/comparable controllers and half decent NAND could help. If the snappiness of the average user experience on a well advertised mobile device increased significantly to where average people could notice the difference in an overwhelmingly positive manner, with proper marketing the everyday appreciation for SSDs could increase and therefore make average consumers more interested in making sure their nonmobile computing devices have fast storage. People seem to be willing to pay a lot more for a flagship smartphone while simultaneously skimping on a crappy laptop/desktop. And people seem to be spending more and more time interfacing with a smartphone than a desktop or laptop these days.
TemjinGold - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
When Apple explained what "x GBs of ram" meant to the masses, they did it in terms the masses would understand (i.e. "It's this many songs or this many movies." If SSD makers want to get the masses onboard, they need to create a "metric" that the masses will understand. As the main benefit is speed, they should start labeling their SSDs as "x seconds to start the average program." This way, with HDDs also labeled as such, the masses have clear concrete metric that they understand.Doomtomb - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Isn't it obvious? The reason NAND capacities aren't increasing is because people (consumers) aren't demanding more. Why is that? Two words: CLOUD STORAGE.MrSpadge - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
But what about the ones who're notusing SDDs yet? Bet they're not using cloud storage in any serious way either (I'm not talking about those 2 GB Dropboxes).WelshBloke - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Really? People aren't choosing the fastest storage medium over a more expensive, slower, more insecure medium?Seriously nothing against cloud storage but if grandma doesn't know the benefits of an SSD she aint gonna know how to use cloud storage.
Cerb - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
That doesn't make much sense. Cloud storage makes the HDDs they are buying less important. It's less 1TB SSDs v. 120GB SSDs as it is 250GB SSDs v. 2TB HDDs.XZerg - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Well those who are tech savvy know about SSD and its benefits, and have already picked it up. Those who are not tech savvy and buy their systems from OEMs (eg: dell, hp, lenovo, acer, ...) do not know about it. To make matters worse the OEMs are charging a massive premium to switch to SSD and are not designing most of their systems to be able to contain both SSD and standard HDD at the same time. So those non-tech savvy users end up going for the big numbers, i.e. TBs, and not the performance, even though they barely use 200GB in total.So to get a higher penetration or sales, get the OEMs on board to start designing their systems better, promoting and stop charging insane premiums on SSDs.
TelstarTOS - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Even cheaper prices are the only way to ensure penetration in the lowest end of the market.Now, what I would REALLY want to see instead is the prosumer segment to be given the attention it deserves. I know several people from various HW forums including myself that want BOOTABLE NVMe pcie SSD with performance that makes them a worthwhile upgrade vs the top end SSD such as Sandisk Extreme pro and Samsung 850. For over a year there is complete silence in this regard. And yes, prosumer means way under 2$/GB with performance in line with intel P3600.
designerfx - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
I concur. Price is still a barrier. SSD's provide a substantial improvement, but they are still a price premium.When 240GB SSD's get to around $50-60, we'll be at price. Until then, we explicitly aren't.
Michael Bay - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
This.Somewhere around 50 is the psychological barrier for an impulse buy, too.
moretoys - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Capacity and performance and the way operating systems are designed to me is a barrier. Most people want simple, are not techies. IMO most PCs would want performance on key things like OS boot, commonly used apps, but they also want space for long term storage, things more read than written. To use an SSD with a Hard Drive is complex to implement like this, not automated. If small SSDs could be installed and automatically take on the activities needing the performance boost without users needing to manage it, making a small SSD, practical for the masses, then they would have something.Please note I am not talking about likely 80% or more of readers here, who like me can do this themselves, but really, it is a pain.
hojnikb - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Windows coult implement this. When it detects an SSD and HDD combo, it should automaticly move programs and other stuff that can benefit from ssd to the actually ssd and movies/music to the HDD (Ie Documents folder to the HDD by default).SilthDraeth - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
I work for a retail company that does upgrades like this, unfortunately we charge quite a bit unless someone has one of our "support" plans. Which all said and done isn't a bad deal for most of the masses that can't be bothered to figure out how to install a SSD. I think, if OEM started releasing more laptops with SSDs in them without a $300 premium for it, we would see more adoption as well. Seriously the majority of "regular" people PC that I work on have around 30gb of data at max. A few outliers have close to 100 GB. Instead of throwing 1tb HD into all systems, why not use 250gb SSD. Your budget machines will perform better, thus giving people a better experience and less likely to go buy brand B next time. Maybe a kiosk with a budget machine running a 5400 rpm drive, and one running an SSD. With a few easy to demonstrate programs geared to take advantage of the SSD would help.Cloakstar - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
The way I have convinced people to purchase SSDs, especially in conjunction with a new computer:For people who use the PC for "office"-type work (Web, e-mail, Word, Excel, etc), an SSD is the one component change that will make a significant difference in computer "speed".
-An SSD responds to the computer 2 orders of magnitude (>100x) faster than an HDD, because:
-Other than a fan, the HDD is the last mechanical component in the modern PC.
-SSDs act more like RAM than the HDD.
-So, an SSD:
-Makes the computer feel much faster.
-Prevents the PC from getting slow as quickly
-Makes the computer last longer
-Is the one and only component change that can prevent the kind of slowdown your old PC is giving you. Not a "fast" CPU. Not more RAM. An SSD.
If you don't rip DVD's to your hard drive on a regular basis, a 256GB SSD is big enough, and it will make your computer feel much faster for its entire life, especially as it ages.
PeterMorgan573 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
I'm just about willing to opening up the box and install a new SSD, but not if it requires the operating system to be significantly tweaked for it to be used effectively. Given my 3-6 year computer replacement cycle, I'll almost certainly wait for my next computer purchase and include an SSD as well as an nTB hard drive if possible. [Probably needless to say, I've just created this account, I've been following Anand for 3 months only for background, not because I'm ever going to build my own or an enterprise system.]For new computers, a fast SSD could be cheap if its use were optimized just for fast start/restart. Not that that usage helps SSD manufacturers.
earl colby pottinger - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
Why do you need to tweak it.Yes, that gets max performance but I already see a huge speed up if I "DD" the hard drive over to the SSD and just plug it in as the boot drive.
All the tweaks can be done at a later time or not at-all and you still see a big speed boost.
Cerb - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
The operating systems already are tweaked. For Windows, just do a fresh instal to the fresh SSD. It will handle the rest. All the shenanigans some people go through are entirely unnecessary, and the few good (or bad, if you use the related features being disabed) tweaks are as good for an HDD-based system as an SSD-based one.Cliff34 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Your question about how to for Sandisk to penetrate the consumer market is a hard one. At the end of the day, SSD is a geeky tech that most people do not (or will not) understand or care. For someone who is into IT, they definitely see the need and excited about the fast speed load time and transfer files. But for most consumers, they do not know worry so much about that.Unfortunately, I see this is how the adoption from CD to DVD is like. When DVD first come out, the consumers weren't crazy getting new DVD drives for their computer. They only do so because there's a need (DVD movies). They buy DVD players and not everyone rushing to bring their computer to a store to have it upgrade to a DVD drive.
Given time, price decrease and what not, DVD becomes a standard. I see is the same for SSDs. The driving market for SSDs (consumer end) is still those who are IT savy. For your consumer, like my dad who only use the laptop to read the news and watch youtube video, they don't mind the slow boot time and will not be willing to invest in a SSD. He might as well get a new computer after a few years.
The good news for us, consumers, is that through the years because of competition, the price per GB gone down significantly. But for the manufacturer, they either have to mass produce (low cost) or create very fast drives and sell at a premium to make a profit. Anything else it will be hard for them to survive.
Icehawk - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
The big OEMS don't even offer SSDs on their desktops below ~$2k in my recent experience trying to help a friend out - or if they do it is at an insane markup (like 128gb for +$300).I have a friend, Unix admin for 15yrs, a super nerd... and he is still afraid of SSDs dying like the first ones he had 5 years ago.
Hard to convince non-techies that the key to unlocking performance is using an SSD since traditionally all they think about is the CPU. Did my mom buy an SSD equipped laptop after I explained the new one she was looking at would basically perform exactly like her old one? Nope.
NatePo717 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
2TB+ SATA SSDs at reasonable prices. Need solid state at high capacity.PPalmgren - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Just another thought, maybe the consumer OEMs like Dell are at odds with SSDs because of the massive increase in product longeivty they cause. The #1 thing making a computer feel 'slow' after a few years, especially cheapo laptops, is crappy hard drives burdened with too much cruft. The hard drive is also the part in a computer with the highest failure rate and the lowest life span. Maybe the SSD manufacturers and the OEMs are at an impasse, well, until one of them disrupts the market. I think when/if that happens, it will play similarly to the way T-Mobile destroyed cell phone contract prices.mickulty - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
>What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market?Cheaper SSDs. If an SSD could be used for the same cost as a basic hard drive, it would be much more attractive to OEMs. This might mean simpler, cheaper controllers as well as an effort to drop nand prices and the use of less nand dies - the performance would take a hit, but could still be more than a mechanical drive. Right now 64GB ssds are still around £5 more expensive than 320GB 2.5" hard drives at retail.
Also, personally I'd be tempted by decent cross-platform caching software.
zodiacfml - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Problem with the OEMs. They intentionally left SSD only as an option instead of a default because the computing device would perform well for years, making the upgrade cycle longer.To solve it, the consumers has to specifically look for devices with SSDs before OEMs scramble to place SSDs as the default on their products.
But, how do you educate the consumers now that they spend more time on a phone or tablet instead of an x86 machine? I saw Samsung a few years ago giving effort to educate consumers with the benefits of an SSD and yet the adoption rate still remains very slow.
Even the company I work for does not have an idea of SSDs. They still kept on buying new machines which are pretty much overkill for 99.9% of their use. An SSD will help will greatly with Windows updates which is a pain for everyone in the company and my job to deploy applications and maintenance.
Sushisamurai - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
From my personal experience and my parents, I think SSD's have a few hurdles before they become mainstream. We're fairly tech savvy, but even for myself, I only put in an SSD on my new built system (2013; 128GB OS drive), but everything else is still on a HDD.Even at the time, not seeing any SSD's in action, I merely had an extra $300 to see what the hype was all about. Do I regret my purchase? No. Do I think it was necessary? Not at all.
1) I think the main issue is OEM market penetration. I've grown up with multiple systems all HDD based, even my 2011 laptop is HDD based. My family and I are so use to 1-3 minute boot times that a 10 second boot time is just an unnecessary luxury (but yes, launchin applications is faster) - we keep 3 of our desktops running 24/7, so boot times is essentially non-existent.
2) price. i wouldn't mind swapping my Ivy bridge laptop HDD for an SSD, but I've grown rather accustomed to my 750GB storage. Spending an additional $300-400 for a 512GB SSD seems unnecessary - I might as well save that money for a new laptop that comes with an SSD when this one dies.
3) Demos are needed. If consumers can't see real life examples of an SSD and HDD side by side doing the same thing. People won't be convinced. I certainly wasn't prior to buying one. It's almost like an ios vs android issue. Simplified interface of iOS won the masses initially compared to android, and now it's a price war.
Sushisamurai - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
3.5) this is more of an after thought, but I think apple's going to have an edge for the next few years in terms of laptop sales. Most of their laptops are all on SSD's, increasing speed of responsiveness. Theyre on PCIe SSD's, a fact u don't see heavily marketed by Apple. The common person is going to use their laptops, and realize how snappy it is without knowing why, attributing the difference to apple/OS and not the SSD.They also don't offer an HDD to SSD upgrade option, instead the cost is "bundled". Smart marketing move, higher margin/priced laptops, with the consumer not really knowing the cost of parts (eg: adding $200-300 for an SSD in a laptop, would mean that SSD costs $200-300 - consumer would shop elsewhere for an SSD, probably not buy it due to the hassle or install/switch)
Klug4Pres - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Confession: I only own one SSD, which is a 120GB boot drive (a Sandisk!) in my HTPC. For that specific application, I could see that a snappy response was helpful and perhaps key to spousal adoption.For my main laptop, I use an old Thinkpad with a 4:3 screen (T60, SXGA+), and I know an SSD would help a lot, but I still won't spend the money. I'd like at least 240GB, and I'd stick a big hard drive in the second spindle. Maybe when I can pick one up for £50 in the UK. Cheapest I have seen so far, for periods of about 10 minutes on Amazon, is £65 for a Crucial, was it M500 or MX100, I don't recall.
Don't fancy TLC either, or tiny lithography. An end-of-line M500 is what I am hoping for.
Runamok81 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Sandisk, please quit focusing on how to penetrate the broader consumer market. Focus on your core market, the enthusiasts. The 21% market share you have represents people that can do the data transfer and hardware upgrade themselves. And we're saturated. We've had SSDs commercially available for five years. And now that 128GB and 256GB are more palatable for the thriftier geeks, you can bet your mechanical keyboard we have an SSD in every device. Until you can scale operations -and SSD prices- into a true price-parity with HDDs, then OEMs will be unable to afford integrating these -relatively speaking- expensive SDDs into the lower levels of their product stack, and that untapped 79% will remain so. Why isn't SanDisk courting the margins of their captured market? SanDisk makes fantastic products. Among enthusiasts they have name recognition, reputation and brand loyalty. We will buy new SSDs, but we need a reason to replace our 3-year old SanDisk SSDs. If we can't have size, then we want SPEED! We like you, but where are your ultra-fast PCIe SSDs? We will upgrade for that. We might even pay a nice premium. Mom and Pop? Not so much. And these "market penetration" suggestions... a consumer education campaign? Good luck. A "geek squad" like HDD to SSD data transfer service? Ill-advised. What wet-behind-the-ears marketeer concluded that process wouldn't be a logistical and liability nightmare. As for Anandtech, slow news day? I enjoy market analysis, but acting as the mouthpiece for the SanDisk marketing department by trolling your visitors for "market penetration" ideas is a new low. Get back on track.
Kristian Vättö - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
SanDisk sponsored my trip to FMS and in return we agreed to do an article about what SanDisk presented and showcased at the event. AnandTech doesn't cover international flights, so finding a sponsor was the only way I could attend the show. Note that this is the case with every trade show and is thus nothing new or out of the ordinary.However, SanDisk wasn't involved in the editorial process at all. The only condition they had is that the article needs to be linked to FMS and the meetings/presentations at the show, so I decided to write about TLC NAND and the Fusion-io acquisition as both are big things for SanDisk and the market in general, and one of SanDisk's presentation had interesting data about TLC as shown in the graphs in the article.
We also talked about SSD adoption for a lengthy period of time and I thought it makes sense to reach out to you, our readers, for input. SanDisk did not request or demand this -- it was all my idea. SSD is without a doubt the biggest upgrade that can be made to improve user experience and I'm genuinely interested in what can be done to increase the adoption rate. It's not for the marketing departments, but for all the people that could have better user experience if they knew about SSDs. I also think it's an excellent opportunity for you to be heard and there already great comments, which I'll definitely bring up when I meet with the companies at CES.
I hope this explains the situation. I'd like to emphasize that we are and will continue to be editorially independent and the purpose of sponsorships is to provide you with better content, for which attending trade shows and building relationships is crucial.
Runamok81 - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
My chief concern here is not with an improper vendor relationship. The relationship is fine. I understand Anandtech will NEED vendor relationships to continue providing stories about new technologies. It's not about that. It's about the content. I read the story. This is all FMS had to offer? Nothing about super fast PCIe drives? NVMe? SanDisk didn't send any engineers to talk about how their acquisition of FusionIO is going to make for some new kickass products? No, they only sent the B team marketing crew to give SanDisk's account of their own market challenges and the projected cost of Toggle NAND? Who cares? Don't you think it's a bit presumptuous and naive to think that our "marketing ideas" --and don't delude yourself.. that's what you asked us for-- are going to somehow outfox the prevailing market forces? No, sorry. Bootstrap up and lower Prices or increase capacity / speed. I'd much rather read about those types of advances. Until then, I could care less about "the state of Sandisk"Kristian Vättö - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
I did talk about SanDisk's NVMe strategy on the second page, but you have to understand that no company is just going to spill out all their secrets and roadmaps. John is the head of the enterprise team (including engineering) while Kevin leads the client side, so neither of them is part of a "B team marketing crew".Runamok81 - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
I get that you're establishing credibility, but I care as much about John's and Kevin's titles as they do. Where's the news here.. and what is this Page 2? What Page 2? .. *looks* oh ... OH! Well, then, uh.. that uh explains a lot. *readingreadingreading*...NVMe..FusionIO...UltraDIMM.....*Final Words... ffffffffffffffFFFFUUU!I owe you one beer. I'll go bang my head on rock. Thank you.
Runamok81 - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
Also, thanks for replying to me. Sorry for being an ass.eanazag - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
The problem is the OEMs. They let accounts run product development and wonder why the experience sucks. OEMs have their heads up their ___es. There is no good reason why Apple's market share has risen so much on the PC. The reason is because they have innovated AND marketed. They add something and tell why it's good. Apple is not perfect at all, but they haven't ruined their premium branding.HP bought Voodoo and killed the brand.
Dell bought Alienware, but didn't kill the brand. Dell hasn't done great at promoting it either. Dell has XPS, but lacks the balls to standardize SSDs in that series. Partially because of capacity. Whereas Apple has the fusion drive (128GB SSD + 1TB HDD). This is the idea that will enhance adoption in cost sensitive areas. MS Windows needs to help the OEMs out here as Intel has already done their part.
Samsung's product lineup is asinine. I looked at their 900 series laptop about a year or two ago and it had that software caching. I think it was an 8GB cache.
Lenovo does decent in product features. I just don't trust a totally China owned company. I don't trust the others much either, but Lenovo even less.
Sony had great battery life before Haswell and Broadwell, but who knew about it. Their service was meh.
Speed is not the only benefit of SSDs. Durability is another when it comes to drops. PC OEMs have jacked up the prices too high for the SSD upgrades. It is often cheaper to buy and upgrade yourself and save money then the upgrade fee Dell was asking and you get the retail bells and whistles that Samsung provided (software utility). Intel did a crappy job of getting OEM wins for their SSDs in the client space, which I can't explain.
I have ensured all the PCs I support have SSDs in them as we have replaced since 2009. It makes my support call much faster. 4 year old PCs aren't total dogs in the last year.
Take note PC OEM an AMD APU plus an SSD is a perfect low cost laptop. AMD CPU performance is almost good enough; the GPU performance is good enough. Add a decent screen 1600x900 is enough to differentiate in this current market.
Apple has been first to PCIe SSDs after dropping HDDs in their laptops altogether. Apple will lead the pack in WiFi AC spec roll out. Apple has made Intel worried that they would put Arm cores in their notebooks, so Intel has been driving down power usage. Who is using the overpriced Crystalwell SKUs? Apple. Crystalwell is a gem that Intel has priced too high and then keeping it from the channel was nonsensical too. Apple is the reason why PC OEMs even consider putting high res and IPS displays. I have pulled apart an Apple device (x86) or two and I like the build quality. I don't like non upgradeable innards especially on the Mac mini; that was uncalled for. The Mac Pro is priced way too high.
Congratulations PC OEMs! Your crappy build quality has made Apple's hardware seem reasonably priced.
The real problem is people are dumb. They buy something and then complain about how slow it is. You tell them that they could have upgraded and you get a blank stare. The black Friday deal didn't have an SSD.
All over the place when I'm rantin' and rollin'.
azazel1024 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Honestly I don't know that there is a way, other than doing what they are now, pushing the prices further down. I love cheaper of course, but I am waiting for the tipping point of capacity versus price where it makes sense to replace bulk storage with SSDs instead of using HDDs.I don't need much, but I still have ~2TiB of storage and call it 3TiB for short/medium term growth (say, 24 months of growth capacity). Times 3 for desktop, server and then backup to mirror my data. At current prices, that is around $3,000. Also many drives. My price point would be much closer to $.10 per GB instead of .30-.35 per GB. At $1,000 for all of it, I could seriously consider it. Take out the backup and leave that spinning disk and for my desktop and server, ~$600 for both for the reliability, long life, low power, no-defrag requirements and high speed of SSDs and I'd jump on SSDs for bulk storage.
Still 3-5 years away from that the way things are going. Until then, all you'll see me do is the "minimum" to get my OS and applications off spinning disk (which I've already done). 120GB SATA3 and 60GB SATA2 drive in my desktop, 128GB SATA3 drive in my laptop. Maybe in a future upgrade I'll get a couple of 128GBs in my desktop in RAID0 for performance. Maybe.
eanazag - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Where are Sandisk's OEM wins with SATA drives in the client space? Why the hell is Dell packing Liteon SSD drives in their Latitude lineup? Dell uses Samsung also, but I get that. Apple has been known to roll with Samsung and Toshiba SSDs. I don't see why Sandisk couldn't have done better in the OEM space.OEMs need to up the ante on at least one of their product lines and then communicate that to customers. OEM to customer: "We're including SSDs, display, and build quality. Hey! We're even going to support you 18-24 months with North America support and a replacement device in a week as opposed to 3-4 weeks. In this series you can expect cutting edge tech, quality, and support." What PC OEM is doing that? That is why they fight over the bottom. There has only been cutting corners over the years.
metayoshi - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
"This is actually the part where we ask for your, our readers, help. What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market?"It definitely has to be getting the OEMs to start dropping HDDs. I mean, you mention the masses, and I believe it's really just that. The masses don't go to Newegg or Fry's and buy an SSD to upgrade their systems, and they also don't go to those sellers to build their own computer. They go to Best Buy, Target, etc. and buy the cheapest pre-built system they can find, and as long as it does Office and go on the internet, they're pretty much set. They don't care that it has a 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM HDD or SSD in there. They see 500 GB, and believe it's good for them.
At any given capacity, an HDD will always be significantly cheaper, and that's where OEMs will go because that's where their systems sell. Just as you said, they also use low res 1366x768 TN panels because it lowers the price even more. We call it a bad user experience. To the masses, it's just another cheap laptop that can do Microsoft Office and go on the internet. That's all they need. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but that's what's on the market today.
In the end, it'll be OEMs that will cause the client market to start adopting SSDs at a higher rate. Once OEMs can offer products in the $200-$500 and only have SSDs, that's when client SSDs will really boom. For now, I think it's expected that only enthusiasts or people willing to spend closer to $1000 or more on a system will be getting SSDs by default. As SSD prices go down, that may probably change. Even Apple is providing SSD only options for its recent Macbook Air/Pro line, but they are still in the $1000 and above range. Eventually, it should reach the Dell Inpirons and HP Pavilions of the future, and that's what the masses will get. I don't believe HDDs will go away entirely, as they will always be cheaper for more capacity, and that's where big datacenters are moving and external storage is always great, but I can see SSDs becoming cheap enough that the consumer products may just be SSD only. We'll see though. It's only a matter of time when SSDs become really cheap. I just don't know how long that time is.
toyotabedzrock - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
The problem is that on the low end machines you do not have any SSD options. Even on midrange machines there is no SSD option.Second problem is uefi and how do you move your laptop to an SSD without loosing recovery partitions etc. With older systems I only had to worry about Windows activation.
Third, people still want big storage, where are the 128gb SSD / 1TB drives and why is MS not implementing software to handle the drives as one?
toyotabedzrock - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
One last suggestion rebrand the prosumer products as Fusion io. When I think of sandisk I think of cheap thumb drives and memory cards.mojoxer - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Quit thinking about consumers. Partner with a major OEM (Dell or HP) to manufacture desktops for government and enterprise workstations. Use mSATA or SATA SSDs in the 64-128GB range for the OS install, as most government and enterprise users store the majority of their data on the enterprise server farms. Heavily market the automated hardware encryption for the local storage, as well as the increased reliability over the rotating disks. Reduced startup time is also a significant resource opportunity if you shave 2 minutes off the startup of 1,500 workstations in a single government office.Concillian - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Concincing OEMs is your biggest issue. I recently bought my wife a laptop. What I wanted was a low end CPU, IPS screen and SSD. You know what I found? ZERO OPTIONS. Can't get a low end CPU with a nice screen, only an i7. The model we settled on was nearly $1k and DIDN'T HAVE AN OPTION FOR AN SSD... I guess that's an upgrade down the road.'nar - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
I am reminded of LCD panels and why they went to wide-screen formats. A 19" square cost more, and typical users did not understand why. When you do not know why, you only choose what you do know, price.I can understand OEM reluctance to add to the base cost, but they should add the option to the base unit. Many OEM's do not even have an SSD option that is priced anywhere near what they cost individually on the market. Many users just buy whatever is in the stores, or they insist on a "Dell" or whatever. They defer technical specifications to the OEM since they do not or cannot understand them.
You cannot hope to get the low-price segment until SSD's surpass HD in price per GB. You always get what you pay for. Better off targeting the discretionary spending on computers in the mid to high end where they are adding discrete graphics, beefier PSU's, water cooling, and higher-end computer cases.
It really should be easy when you speak to someone. What is the number one complaint about computers? They are slow. What is the slowest component in computers today? Spinning hard drives. Are you willing to pay more for a faster computer? End of discussion, that question is rhetorical. They have to make their own opinion.
Wall Street - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
I just upgraded from a ReadyCache SSD accelerator to a 480 GB Ultra II during the Black Friday sales. I think that up until this year, for me, price was a primary deterrent to buying an SSD. Also, I think that a lot of people have been watching the bad press generated by OCZ, the Intel 8 MB bug, and Samsung;s recent TLC problems. I actually chose the Sandisk Ultra II because there products seem to have not experienced these bugs so far. Until it is clear that SSDs have passed their teething problems, everyone is going to view them as the potential new IBM GXP 60 Deathstar model that has potential future reliability problems.One of the tech guys at work asked how my SSD experience has been. I have honestly had to say that while I as an enthusiast found the ReadyCache to work well and the Ultra II is good so far, it is hard to recommend upgrading SSDs wildly given the bugs and the reputation risk of such a recommendation.
If I were SanDisk, I would focus on both speed and reliability. For example, the Ultra II that I bought is a relatively new drive and really only the second manufacturer on the market to use TLC. I think that the two pronged approach is needed to sell SSDs: 1) speed, which is easy to show based on the boot times and 2) reliability which would rely on customer testimony, warranty and data points lie Tech Report's SSD endurance experiment.
truongpham - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
As I see around the web what is manufacturers want is not exactly customer want. The customer I mentioned here is casual customers. Who need faster start up, short program load and less shutdown time. In my personal viewpoint the hydrid HDDs is the best. The common size I think 1TB or 02 TB mechanic with 32GB SSD is enough. With my a amateur gamer I need 4TB or 6TB mechanic with 32GB SSD is ok. We need 300MB/s sequence read or wirte. 50k IOPS is enough.stancilmor - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
Getting non-computer people to upgrade a mechanical harddrive to an SSD isn't going to happen unless they have a computer friend that does the upgrade for them. I've personally bought and paid for 6 upgrades from mechanical drives to 256 GB SSDs for my non-computer friends...still have 3 or 4 more friends to upgrade. I buy the drive, borrow their computer, clone the drive, and then install the SDD, and give them their mechanical drive in a USB enclosure.From and industry stand point this means a (likely a free) service (either bring your computer in to the store and we'll upgrade it or we'll send a tech to your house and upgrade it).
The real battle is to get OEMs to quit using mechanical drives and start using SSDs. We still have the problem with not enough RAM. Before I upgraded to Windows 8.1 with 32 GB RAM, I had my XP machine tuned to boot with less than 180MB RAM, so that the remaining 3.2GB could be used for programs...I was almost always running out of RAM. I have friends that would complain that their system was slow...1GB RAM, but 4GB of virtual memory running all this software grinding away on the mechanical drive. Most of the time they had no idea what the software was or why it was one their machine.
My system is setup with hot plug system drives. One is an SSD and the rest are mechanical drives. I have an i5-3570k with 32 GBytes of RAM. I can tell you first hand there are times when the system is busy for 10s of minutes waiting on the mechanical drive (processor is nearly idle, but drive is at 100% busy), but when I do the same tasks with the SSD I don't notice the slow down (I'll still see the SSD at 100% busy, but the system remains functional for other drive access related tasks). I have the same problem at work only worse...slow mechanical drive that is encrypted, constantly backing up, constantly scanning for viruses, and constantly being monitored by the company IT security...That computer is also an i5, but it can take up to 45 minutes to boot. I've often thought about swapping the drive for and SSD, but my job isn't worth the risk of altering company property...so I just sit there and wait on the mechanical drive.
cm2187 - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
From my point of view, I don't need faster SSDs. Beating the SATA 3 specs won't have any visible impact on my usage. What I need is larger capacities and lower prices.StrangerGuy - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
Exactly, SSD performance is already good enough for the average user. The only thing left to work on is the price.KingCobra_14 - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
I think that in lesser developed countries like India where I live, the awareness of NAND storage is very less. As said above in the article, live demonstrations in Malls and shopping centers especially in metro cities would be a huge boon for consumers who want to make their PC faster just by a simple upgrade. There are not many high end PC users in the Indian market so they would most definitely consider the cheapest option. Processor: No, Graphics Card: Not worth unless you are a gamer, RAM: Probably if you have very less RAM to start with, SSD: YES.Rocket321 - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
Thinking about my parents, they need to really see it in action. They also don't buy much online. So I think to target the baby boomer and average Joe, having a well educated staff at retail stores is going to be the best. Price is high on the list as well - they were looking to spend just enough to get something that works, but not more. So an informed associate at Best buy with a demo station which lets buyers compare a ssd to a hdd side by side.Thinking back a few years when many people were on dial-up internet, there was a lot of success marketing DSL and cable as 10x, 30x, 600x faster than dial-up. I think putting the added performance in simple terms like this could also go a long way to reaching the average user.
Negger - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
If companies like Sandisk want to grow their market share they need to provide better support to their end users. I have yet to see Sandisk provide a 2.5 to 3.5 bracket with an SSD, even though it's a $1 part with free shipping on ebay. Look at the crummy software Sandisk gives with their SSDS. The Sandisk SSD Dashboard is among the worst I have ever seen on Windows. It requires a minimum screen resolutions, it really shouldn't for what it actually does. It doesn't accurately detect firmware updates, and erroneously marks older drives bad. Sandisk is also extremly slow to provide firmware updates to their SSDs. It took six months to fix a TRIM error bug that was well documented and I get the feeling the only reason they bothered patching it was because of customer uproar on their forums and other forums. Sandisk seems to orphan their older SSDs in terms of firmware, and the overall experience buying a Sandisk product is underwhelming. The packaging feels like a small deck of playing cars and the labeling itself looks no-name. Put a holographic sticker or something on it for chrissake so it doesn't look so much like an off-brand. I realize most of Sandisk's customers are large OEMs and wholesalers, but the end user experience is what will drive the sales. There is a lot of weight in IT hobbyist and professional channels and their brand loyalty, many companies live or die by their reputation.jameskatt - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
Interesting. Consumers - other than Apple customers - can't get SSDs because Manufacturers don't want to risk their bottom of the barrel profit margins by using higher dost SSDs.The only way SSD manufacturers can get more SSDs used is to:
1. Increase Apple computer sales
2. Lower SSD prices more to the point that they are equivalent to hard drive prices.
Duken4evr1 - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
It is an admittedly smaller market perhaps, but SSDs make wonderful upgrades for older computers and particularly laptops. Older laptops with a C2D processor are "enough" for most users, even though they are 7 years old. The laptop I am typing this on is a 7 year old Lenovo R61 with an SSD in it. Gotta love the old Lenovos, they are built like tanks. Adding an SSD to Windows 7 and 4GB of RAM to the old workhorse makes it more responsive than my new work provided i5 laptop with a mechanical hard drive. Thus fortified, the old Lenovo workhorse will probably run another 8 years.PubFiction - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
One of the biggest problems with OEM SSD adoption is that OEMs simply do not offer well configured laptops. What I mean is they have purposely screwed over medium level laptops to try to force people up into higher end laptops. This technique is called upselling. Almost every manufacturer does this. And the same exact problem also applies to other components. We as enthusasts often know what a good value setup is. IE one that cost a moderate amount of money but gives you good bang for your buck. Interestingly go see if you can configure any major OEMs laptop to look like what you would pick. I bet you will find it hard or not possible at all. Instread you will be forced to upgrade past what you want to something higher for a lot more money.Now if you want to upgrade to an SSD the next problem is that it will cost you an arm and a leg that doesn't even make sense. If and SSD is selling for $100 one newegg the OEM will charge you $150 or more to upgrade. The kicker is they take your hard drive away. So it didn't cost them $150 to give you that SSD in fact they should be buying it cheaper they just made a lot more profit lets say $90, and they paid $50 for the hard drive so the net difference is $40 but instead of charging you $60 or $80 for the upgrade they screw you over with a $150 upgrade. As long as OEMs keep trying to milk higher profit out of upgrades people are going to be shy about it. OEMs are still tying to make SSDs a feature of premium upgrades and as long as they continue that SSDs will not deploy as mainstream.
Cerb - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
"What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market?"Having not read any other comments: get PC OEM's heads collectively out of...um, the sand. Yeah, the sand :). Apple seems to be the only one with sense (hmm, and look at their sales and margins...coincidence?). Even if you want an SSD, many series won't have the option, or the cost will be outrageous for the size, as an upgrade. Where I work, we're buying SSDs separately, and cloning the HDDs, after resizing the partitions, because the cost difference is just so huge, and/or an SSD is not an option at all, and/or an SSD will add weeks of delay to shipping. Much like a better display, I see no good reason for SSDs, if not in a base model, to not at least be in each middle tier and higher of any given series. At our normal prices, the costs are less than double that of an HDD, typically.
Users may appreciate one once they get it, but they don't have a clue about the technology, and most I deal with don't want to get one. They just want it to work, and be faster than their old one. The demo systems at places like Best Buy need to have them , at the least, but to make them sing and dance, they also need to not have all the regular junk software running. An HDD system of similar specs beside it might be good, too. Some users will always get cheap, but others simply aren't going to pay extra for a smaller drive, when they don't see why they might want it.
Christopher33 - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
"This is actually the part where we ask for your, our readers, help. What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market?"I've bought 1TB EVO 840, and I would never, ever made such mistake again. I would buy 840 PRO 512 instead, and currently I'm searching for old SSDs, that had very short access times. My Dell's PM 830 (830 Sammy) 128GB is "doing circles" while EVO (yes... after FW update) is noticeably slower (yes, I am VM user). I'm currently looking only into consumer SLC (4KB 1QD super high IOPS) SSDs like Fujitsu FSXtreme 240GB SLC. EVO managed SSD-like bechavior only for a month. TLC is not (and never will be) and option for enthusiast.
Primum - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
My office has only just picked up its first two desktops with SSDs from Dell. They've been given to the serial offenders who forget to save things to the server and save everything locally. The solution? Tiny SSDs (120GB or less I think) to encourage them to do so. Sadly despite asking since I started I'm still on a 5400rpm HDD. Average start up time (to a point where work can happen): 5 minutes. The one they just replaced took closer to 10 minutes. I got in a full round of drinks for everyone before it started up most days.Zertzable - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
I believe the biggest barrier is actually OEMs.Pair a Core i3 with a 128/256GB SSD and, for the vast majority of mainstream users, it'll feel far better than an i7 with a huge, slow drive. I'm fairly certain one of the main reason people love their Mac's so much is simply the easy and enormous improvement to UX provided by SSD's. Most people won't notice the crappy build quality and screen, but what they will notice for sure is how slow their brand new laptop is, thanks to that 5400 RPM drive it came with.
The problem? In the mainstream PC space, big numbers and marketing sell. UX isn't even on the radar.
Wwhat - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
The only acceptable thing about the current TLC is that its competition drives down the price of real SSD drives.I think though that the manufacturers should be forced to include that a product uses TLC in the name, and have it clearly on the packaging.
Cerb - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
No such thing has happened.M500 240GB: $81
MX100 256GB: $105
Ultra Plus 256GB: $102
Ultra II 240GB: $107
840 Evo 250GB: $114
I don't particularly hate TLC, if implemented well (like the Ultra II), but when it can be 40% *MORE* than a similar MLC drive, why on Earth should I bother? It has so far been *MLC* drives, like the M500, and Ultra Plus, helping to drive down prices. TLCs are being sold for the same or higher prices, and have been since the Samsung 840's release. The 840 was not cheap, nor has the 840 Evo been, compared to typical M500 prices. Sandisk followed with lower price with the Ultra Plus. If you didn't catch sales, the 840, 840 Evo, and now Ultra II, have not been lower than other MLC drives, even discounting Sandforce integrators, from release to today.
TLC drives should be 15 or more cheaper, considering every day prices, before I would buy or recommend one to anyone, enthusiast or not. I bought an Ultra II this BF week, for example, and it's a nice snappy little drive. But, I would not have bought it without those sales, because I could get an MLC drive, that I know will *maintain* its access times well, instead (I must admit, Samsung and Sandisk both getting WA down to Sandforce levels, with no compression or dedupe, using pSLC, has basically removed the longevity issues, for all but the top few % of data abusers).
Cerb - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
...15% or more...fokka - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
what keeps me personally from upgrading to i.e an ssd-equipped ultrabook is that while 128gb and 256gb models are ubiquitous, it's hard to even get your hands on models with 512gb, or they let you pay through the nose.i'm using laptops with 250gb hdds since 2008, if i'm getting a new machine in 2015 i sure as hell want something slightly more future-proof.
for the average joe the problem is that he probably doesn't even know what an ssd is and why he should spend a good chunk of money on something with maybe a quarter of the storage space of a normal hdd.
others might not even care, as long as their computer is cheap and they can surf facebook and youtube.
in-store demonstrations might be a good idea, but it''ll be hard to reach a substantial share of the notebook and computer buying market.
the best way to get word out on the street though would be ssd vendors, or even a consortium consisting of intel, samsung, micron, sandisk, toshiba etc, to produce ads for tv showing the difference between ssd and hdd in 15-second clips. e.g. the ssd-laptop booting up, opening the browser, receiving emails, while the hdd-laptop still is on the windows loading screen.
or loading and importing/exporting stuff in lightroom in seconds, while the hdd-computer hasn't even started lightroom yet.
starting games would be another good comparison.
antialienado - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
I’m somewhat disappointed by the article, because it fails to mention 4 bit per cell tech that Sandisk sells on SD cards since 2009.I expected some word about introduction of 4 bit per cell on consumer SSD.
“What is it that we or manufacturers like SanDisk could do to boost the SSD penetration in the market?”
A lot of PCs are assembled by local city stores, for non geek people. They would welcome these features:
- Bundle HD with a SSD. Not a hybrid disk, but a pair of disks on the same box. Of course, that should save some money, so it would encourage assembling PCs with a SSD for OS, and HD for storage. Having both using the same space than a single HD would also be convenient, because many PC have space and power cables limitations.
- Sell expandable SSD. A SSD with SD card slots (or something faster), so the user is able to buy a cheap SSD, and expand it as needed. Selling the expansion memory should be much cheaper than selling the entire SSD, and would increase future income.
- Sell an USB INTERNAL SSD. Create a standard. Permanently plugging an USB SSD (or pen drive) to a notebook, netbook, or any portable is dangerous, because it is easy to break, and annoying. The USB device should be conveniently inserted inside, on a hole, like SD cards.
- Bundle software to move OS directories between the SSD and HD. A lot of space used on SSD is wasted with files that are rarely used. For example, Windows “winsxs” folder, is huge, and mostly useless, only accessed during software installation and uninstallation.
Also, I moved “My Documents” to HD, but that also move some OS subdirectories inside “My Documents”, like save game files. That defeats the purpose of the SSD, because those files are read from HD.
MS offers some tools, to move those directories, but they are hard to get, and to use. A simpler, downloadable software to do it would increase the value of a small SSD.
ZGRADT - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
I decided to replace my laptop's HDD with an SSD this weekend. I'm a pretty tech savvy guy, but even I was apprehensive. How was I going to clone a 512GB drive to a smaller SSD? All of the migrations I've done in the past were from a smaller drive to a larger one, and involved partition resizing, which usually ran into problems. And then there's messing with bootsectors. Yikes. I've done this once with Samsung's migration software (Norton Ghost), but I was only able to use that because it was a retail package that I was able to charge to my employer. This time I just have the bare drive.But luckily I found my USB3 drive enclosure to image the SSD to and things are progressing. Fingers crossed.
ppi - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
Education, education, education. Of consumers, and to an extent sales. Well, and not targeting the cheapest of the cheapest ones. But slightly above that mark should work.Mid-to-heavy office use is actually (in my opinion) by far the best case for SSD use. Having opened Outlook + 50-200 page PowerPoint/Word document with lots of charts and pictures taken from several of sizeable Excel files (which source data span from hundreds to tens-of-thousands lines). I personally like to have opened only the files I use (which leads to rather frequent reopening, at time), while some of my colleagues have like 30+ files opened at once (which leads to heavy HDD swapping). All of this highly taxing on storage performance, and exactly at the kind of where the SSD shine the most (lots of random reads and writes).
At home, we talk a lot about buying a new notebook for my wife. When I fire up my favorite local e-shop, I come to something like $1.2k price-tag (pre-VAT). She says (mind you, I am coming from country with $1.2k average and $1.05k median salary) that an el cheapo notebook for ~$400 (pre-VAT) should be more than enough. And at that point I tell her: but that one does not have SSD, and without SSD, it as slow as your old work notebook (ok, $2k, but 8 years), so it won’t start quick, and you won’t use it either! And you will rather use our el-cheapo $125 (pre-VAT) 7” tablet. And we end up buying nothing.
My ideal light-office-use notebook config would actually be: Intel Atom (or AMD’s variant, if they step up the game) + 4 GB RAM + 128 GB SSD/eMMC. Asus is almost there with their T100 line, but for the eMMC storage.
So what should be shown? (light Office use and gaming)
1) Make ads, side by side HDD vs SSD:
1.1 Boot time
1.2 Opening a browser and loading not-super-simple-webpage
1.3 Opening a fresh Word
1.4 What if you need to find specific Word document, but you are naming it not-really-well? Let’s do quick sequential check of what is inside 10 Word documents?
1.5 Show how long it takes from saying “I would like to show you my [insert occasion] pictures” to actually seeing them
1.6. How long does it take switching apps between, say, some The Sims and e-mail client/web broser
2) Educate the retail chain heads of sales depts in following sense: Show ppl that SSDs can and will significantly improve your customer’s experience. If you sell them the HDD just on price&capacity hoping for shorter upgrade cycle, they will most likely end up at Apple next time around.
3) Educate everyone around that SSDs are, apart from the much greater speed also:
3.1 Totally quiet
3.2 Not sensitive to vibrations/quick movements/etc.
3.3 Now highly reliable (see Techreport’s SSD endurance test)
4) Have M$ and/or others to finally make solid seamless SSD+HDD drive experience (i.e. SSD is the BIIIIG cache).
You will have to deal with the big data storage. In my opinion, the right answer for that is a NAS, but it has also its limitations.
Cloud, as a counterargument, is quite weak, because for any kind of mobile, cloud is pretty much utterly useless, because:
1) There are places in this world with very weak and very slow mobile data coverage
2) In places, where the coverage is good, the networks are often overcrowded, so you are as well as in the case above
3) Anything non-LTE is unacceptably slow for serious media (ok, HTSPA might be passable – but compare with your full-HD downloaded data)
4) For those living outside US, the insane roaming data fees make cloud completely useless (I am talking about $40 for 100kB, which happened to me in Switzerland), and hotel/airport Wifi is often quite slow
5) Remember X-Box One (i.e. something attached to a fixed line) always-connected-outcry?
Cerb - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
In offices, there's also downtime issues. ScanPST on large PSTs can take hours on HDDs, but mere minutes on SSDs. Same with CHKDSK. Major updates are quicker, too, as are OS re-installs/restores. Document backups are slow enough that 100Mbps LAN is barely a bottleneck, too, with HDDs. People don't like their PCs being unusable, but there's not much that can be done to speed up the existing HDD, which is usually what causes anything that takes a long time to take a long time.Hrel - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I don't think the masses will ever accept upgrading to an SSD. There are just too many variables to consider if you're not a techie. Which means there would need to be a program for someone else to install the SSD, load it with Windows and get all the drivers and software back on there for them.Short of creating local computer shops, like Discount Computers in Sarasota, FL, everywhere in the US I don't think it is going to happen. Perhaps you could work with Best Buy to offer a program where they sell the SSD's at Newegg prices and perform the install and load for $20 or so, can't be much of a cost premium for the labor otherwise people won't do it. Best Buy would have to be willing to accept very low margin's, so maybe specific partnerships could be formed to work out a "kick-back" of the SSD profits to participating partners, local stores or Best Buy's. Like how car dealerships earn nothing on new car sales but get bonuses for reaching certain sales quotas. Just spit-balling ideas here.
Short of that massively expansive program which would probably cost more to start up than you'd ever make from it, OEM's just need to include SSD's. They need to do so, more or less, at cost as well. 256GB M-SATA SSD's in ALL laptops would be huge, but they can't go around charging $200+ for the feature, like they overcharge for RAM. Mushkin prices, basically.
Hands on demonstrations would be helpful, boot up 2 computers, one with HDD one with SSD, load gmail and Word for instance. Let them feel the difference.
I also think it's important to not sell computers with ONLY an SSD. In the age of multi TB hard drives to go into a store and see a laptop with "128GB Storage" is confusing and off-putting to normal consumers. "Why did we go so far back? What is this? 2005?" So you have to include a 1TB hard drive with that 128-256GB SSD.
Maybe a new feature on the feature sheet for these as well, reflecting load times. This would need to be standardized to mean anything. Kind of like the Windows rating index actually, 7200rpm hdd's always max out at 5.9. Use a scoring system like that to reflect the increased responsiveness of the computers with SSD's. HDD=59 SSD=458 Expensive SSD=512, etc...
With M-SATA SSD's used in conjunction with 2.5" hard drives there's no reason at all for ANY laptop to be sold without an SSD. I think we should completely avoid anything under 128GB as well, unless it's being used strictly as a caching SSD.
But then with a dual storage solution you have to introduce people to the idea of managing their data on multiple drives. Which, sadly, is still a "strange new concept" to most common consumers. This problem will take time as it will require educating the masses to a certain degree. If they don't value the upgrade they won't be willing to pay anything for it.
Meinereiner - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I'm looking for a replacement of my server HDDs.Transfer speed on par with fast HDD is ok, size is what matters *g*I'd like to have a 'slow' SSD with 2TB+ and wouldn't mind if it's build for 3,5" size. SATA is fine, all those faster, newer connections are non-existant outside some high price environments.
SSD with: high capacity, ok transfer speed, low price.
xilience - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
#sellingSSDsHonestly, I don't let any family member spend $x000 on a computer anymore, I tell them to buy cheap and I'll get them a $100 upgrade that will make it as fast as the computer that is 3x more expensive.
Youtube videos would be helpful. Get a vast array of older computers and show them running side-by-side with and without an SSD. People need to see a computer they can relate to, and they need to see the difference an SSD makes. Get popular models of computers going as far back as 6 years.
sunbear - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Incentivize the tech-savvy member of the family to upgrade the computer for relatives and friends.Swapping an ssd into an old computer makes it feel like a new computer. The problem is that the majority of consumers don't know what an SSD is and even fewer have the technical capability, free time, and confidence to attempt the upgrade by themselves (disassembling the computer, dealing with acronis, ensuring 4K block alignment, running crystal disk mark to verify performance, etc). The only reason that any of the computers owned by any of my relatives contain and ssd is because I installed it for them. If you want to sell more ssd's the best way would be to incentivize tech-savvy family members to do the installation for all family members. Perhaps have a incentive program whereby if you buy 3 SSDs you get a 4th SSD free would do the trick.
Manufacturers could of course do a better job of simplifying the process. Samsung's ssd magician does a pretty good job, but it doesn't cover every step in the upgrade process. For example it won't walk you through the computer disassembly / re-assembly steps and all the tools required which of course depend on your model of computer.
Also, i think the SSD manufacturers should offer spacious 1, 2 and 4TB hybrid drives. And I'm not talking about the disappointing Seagate models with a puny 8GB read-only ssd cache, but rather models containing at least 128GB SSDs with read and write caching. There's a big gap I. The market here (at least until ssd pricing becomes on par with mechanical drives).
Mangosteen - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Personally, I don't really think speed is going to be all that convincing. I feel that most people who are not tech savvy will not understand why they have to pay so much more money for less storage. For most average consumers, they're going to want the (ooooh shiny!) 1 TB of storage because it's alot, whereas it's going to be difficult to tell them that just 256GB of storage is actually better even though it's less. An average joe is going to want the more storage just because it's more storage, even though they will probably never just more than 300 GB so they would be fine with a 256 SSDwrxguy2015 - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
Parents - "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."