Solid-State Drives Get Warmer Reception From Businesses

While high prices are keeping consumers away, solid-state drive technology is finding a more receptive audience at businesses.

A flurry of announcements preceding the annual Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., which began Tuesday, are putting the technology in the limelight this week. Intel, Micron Technology and Toshiba have all announced drives in the last two weeks with larger data capacities and better performance.

Solid-state drives, similar to the flash cards used in digital cameras, first caught consumers’ attention in the spring of last year, when they were used Apple’s MacBook Air laptop and in the initial wave of netbooks — small laptops priced under $500 — from companies like Asustek and Acer. The technology typically provides faster performance but more limited storage capacity than traditional hard drives.

However, in second-generation netbooks, some of which sell for less than $300, PC makers reverted to the tried-and-true hard disk drive because of its economics: more data at a lower price.

Indeed, high prices — solid-state drives typically cost at least twice as much as a hard drive with the same storage capacity — have relegated consumer use of the technology to luxury laptops, where buyers are willing to pay more for the faster performance.

Prices need to approach $1 per gigabyte of storage before there is mass adoption by consumers, said Gregory Wong, an analyst at Forward Insights. This may not happen until 2011, according to Mr. Wong.

Businesses, however, are beginning to warm to the technology as the largest server computer makers, including I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, all get behind solid-state drives due to their overwhelming performance advantage compared to hard disk drives.

Because SSDs are composed of flash memory chips, not mechanical spinning disks, they offer instant data access. In the argot of server makers, this translates to more IOPS or input-output operations per second. Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io recently disclosed that it had achieved about one million IOPS, many times faster than is possible with a hard disk drive.

Wine.com, an online retailer, switched to H.P. using SSDs from Fusion-io and has never looked back. “We have an incredible holiday volume spike. We’re shipping 20,000 orders a day,” said Geoffrey Smalling, the chief technology officer at Wine.com. Before using SSDs, it took four minutes to post a batch of 100 invoices. “After Fusion-io, it was 10 seconds. It was the first time that every night we were able to post everything from order to invoice to general ledger,” he said. Over all, the upgrade resulted in a 400 percent improvement in speed, according to Mr. Smalling.

Other specialty SSD suppliers are also seeing success. STEC, whose share price has more than tripled over the last six months, offers enterprise-class solid-state drives to I.B.M., Fujitsu, and Hitachi.

Businesses are also beginning to look harder at SSDs for laptops, according to Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel. “We have upgraded our entire sales force, almost 4,000 strong, with SSD-equipped notebooks,” he said. He noted that some PC makers were also upgrading their mobile users to SSD notebooks.

Solid-state drives are finally catching up to hard disk drives in data capacity. Toshiba recently announced it was shipping a 512-gigabyte version of its drive, rivaling some of the largest hard drives, and Micron announced last month that it was shipping a 256-gigabyte drive.

Intel and Micron, who jointly manufacture flash memory chips, said Tuesday that they had developed NAND flash memory capable of storing 3 bits per cell. This allows greater data density than the
2-bits-per-cell flash memory chips the companies are offering now and will result in high-capacity flash drives for digital cameras and other consumer products, according to Micron.

“I think it’s safe to say that the value of SSDs are now clear” to business customers, Mr. Winslow said.

By Brooke Crothers