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Tuesday March 18, 2008
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Early adopters about to shell out a hefty premium for the expected speed boost and reliability of a solid state disk might want to head over to Crave before heading out to the store. According to an analyst at Avian Securities, an unnamed "large computer manufacturer" is getting 20 to 30 percent of its SSD-equipped laptops returned by unhappy customers experiencing drive failure, and lackluster performance. That's about ten times the average failure rate for those old-fashioned spinning disk drives.
Crave threw its journalistic rune stones into the air and proclaimed Dell to be the most likely candidate to be experiencing the reported return problems, and a representative for the company admitted that their current SSD drives, manufactured by Samsung, can be slower than traditional drives when streaming video or running Microsoft Outlook and other programs that exchange data via small packet sizes. Dell expects the performance issue to be solved by Samsung's next generation of SSD drives, but there's no word from Samsung yet as to when that might be.
There's no doubt that flash-based SSD drives will eventually replace most traditional laptop drives, bringing increased speed and reliability. But considering the limited capacity, hefty price premium, and apparent reliability issues of current solid state disk drives, a smart option might be to get a laptop with a traditional hard drive now, and upgrade to SSD in a year or so, when these issues (hopefully) get resolved.
Posted By:
Matt Safford
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