By Chris Hall

The IT industry is seeing a surge of new interest in Solid State Drives (SSDs).As companies wrestle with charts of price and performance, a number of market segments, not the least of which are notebook PC users haunted by constant fears of a hard drive crash, are hoping that if the price of flash memory manages to maintain the spectacular declines of 2006, SSD drives might finally be within budgetary reach.
     One of the first companies out of the gate with new SSD offerings has been Super Talent, a San Jose based spin-off from US distributorship Ma Labs. Eurotrade spoke with Joe James, Super Talent's director of marketing, at Computex, in early June. James outlined the tremendous market potential of the technology and Super Talent, the pluses and minuses of the SSD approach to storage, and the advantageous position of Super Talent, which is able to leverage the resources of its parent company, including a 200-strong worldwide sales force.

EUROTRADE: When and why did Super Talent decide to move into the solid state disk (SSD) market?

James: Super Talent decided about a year and a half ago to get into the SSD market, and we launched our first IDE SSD at CeBIT, in March, 2006. We had started development three or four months ahead of that, towards the end of 2005.
Why did we move into solid state drives? Well, we see SSDs as potentially a very big market. If you look at the total size of the storage market, just the PC sector alone represents around 200 million hard drive units, simply assuming one drive per system. The total hard drive market must be somewhere around 300-400 million units a year, so the potential market for SSDs is massive. Even if you only occupy a small percentage of that market, it's still a very large market. So there are opportunities. That's basically why we got into that market, and fortunately we're one of the early entrants in that space.

EUROTRADE: Which segments do you see as potentially key buyers of SSDs?

James: Right now, traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) are still big and cheap, but the SSD offers the advantage of reliability since there are no moving parts. Basically, the SSD fits any market that is willing to pay a large premium for extreme data reliability. Markets where we currently see it fit include industrial markets, such as mobile medical workstations; ruggedized laptops, such as the Panasonic TuffBook, and the military. For example, if you're using a laptop in a tank, using an SSD ensures the data will be protected, even if the laptop is thrown around. Another example might be in-car navigation. Typically, in-car navigation systems don't require a lot of storage, but they must be reliable since they're often exposed to a lot of shock or vibration.
     So those are the markets we're targeting right now, the high reliability markets, that can afford to pay a premium for the product. Longer term I think SSDs have a much bigger target market, so certainly I think that as the SSD eclipses the HDD in performance, a large market will develop. Right now, SSDs and HDDs are about on par, but if the SSD can overtake the hard drive (HDD) in performance within the next 6-12 months, then that will open up a big market, and then of course as the price continues to decline, as the price delta closes, the SSD market will grow further.

Low-power advantage
     Other markets we expect to see open up, probably within the next 12-18 months, include server environments, where if you need extremely high speed, the SSD could operate rather like a cache. Server farms, on the other hand, including web servers, servers for web portals and so on, might use SSDs not simply for high speed but also for low power. That's because the amount of power consumed in data centers is just massive. They have huge air conditioning bills, and the cost of energy is constantly going up. SSDs consume about one sixth to one eighth of the power of a hard drive, which makes them really good from a power consumption perspective. So I think that in the server market, there's definitely going to be an opportunity for SSDs within the next 12-18 months. I don't think they'll replace the hard drive completely, but I do think a percentage of the hard drive market in servers is going to shift over to SSDs.
     There are other target markets that may be one to two years out. For example, I think that video on demand (VoD) is a huge potential market. Right now, typically the cable companies have a central hub, let's say for a large city, so maybe there are one or two central hubs or a few regional hubs for signal transmission. But my own opinion is that at some point in the future, people are not going to want to watch TV whenever a certain show is scheduled to appear. Instead, they going to want to turn on the TV and see maybe the Friends episode that was on last Thursday, when they had no time to see it. In future, all TV is going to go to VoD for that reason.
     That means the cable companies are, basically, going to have to localize the programs that are more popular, for VoD. With a cable or cell system, maybe one station serves a few hundred houses within that neighborhood. VoD could be localized in a way similar to that, where you have a server located within a few blocks, a few hundred houses, and it services those, with all the popular programs stored locally on a server. SSDs could certainly fit in that space. They'll be high speed, relatively high capacity, reliable, capable of being exposed to high temperatures and so on, so I think that VoD alone could be a huge potential market for SSDs.

EUROTRADE: So there's going to be huge VoD-driven demand for storage?

James: We believe so.

EUROTRADE: How is the Super Talent product lineup developing, in terms of capacities and industry standards and so on?

James: We've been shipping IDE SSD drives in capacities of up to 16GB for over a year now. We introduced a SATA drive in March, at CeBIT, and we began shipping those in April. Wee now at the point where we are shipping both SATA and IDE drives at 64GB and down - 32-, 16- and 8GB capacity drives are also available. Actually, we're probably one of the only companies in the world, that can ship 64GB SATA drives right now. Currently, we're seeing no competition in that space.
In terms of size, we have 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch SATA drives, and on the IDE side we also have a 1.3-inch model. And now we're coming out with 3.5-inch versions---- standard PC size, in other words.

EUROTRADE: Do you use those form factors simply for convenience because they're known within the industry? Could you in fact make the drives much more compact?