I have been talking about SSDs and rotating hard drives for many years now. The inability of SSDs to overtake the mainstream hard drive space has been inhibited by the ability to produce them at an affordable price point (as compared with rotating disk). SSDs has gone through many different iterations, from SLC (single-level cell), MLC (multi-level cell), eMLC (enterprise multi-level cell) and now TLC (triple-level cell).

If you haven’t noticed, the consumer market is unloading 128GB drives at sub $50 and 256GB SSDs are under $100 dollars. This is a steep drop in price and is an indication to the release of the next wave of SSD drives. SSDs are poised to go mainstream because of TLC SSDs. SSDs in general are still, and still will be, expensive and incredibly complex to manufacture, but due to market demands, the TLC drive is now positioned to take the market by storm. So what has changed? Has the manufacturing process changed? Yes, but not so much. The biggest change was the market strategy of the TLC SSD. The drive is manufactured to sacrifice durability in exchange for density. To the point where we can see TLC drives very soon with density in the 2TB, 3TB even 10TB+ capacities. Drive technologies will leverage better drive failure predictability logic algorithms and other “fault tolerating” technologies to augment the lower MTBF.

So what does this mean for the rotating disk? Is it possible that the rotating drive will disappear altogether? I don’t think so. I predict the availability of the TLC drives will virtually eliminate 10k and 15k drives and then over a much longer time period the 7.2k drive will go. This is because the cost per GB still a great value on the 7.2k drives and the densities will grow in tandem with the TLC SSDs. There is also a comfort level of having magnetic media around holding data (for those old-schoolers like me).

It’s been a long time waiting but it is exciting to finally see SSDs making its way into the mainstream.