Spindled Based Hard Drives Are Getting Scarce – An Opportunity For SSDs

Hard drives through pretty much all channels at this point are either in limited supply, require us to purchase a motherboard and CPU with each, or a server that can hold the number of drives we require.

We are also seeing prices going up as a 2TB Seagate XT drive we paid $150 for a few months back is now $210 and rising sometimes daily!

What this means is that we are looking to SSD to fill in the gaps.

At the smaller capacities the overall system cost to include an 80GB or 160GB Intel 320 series SSD is not too much higher with the performance benefits far outweighing that cost.

Thus we have an opportunity to possibly sell SSDs into client situations where we may not have had that option before.

And, once the client’s users have worked on an SSD based system for a while they will probably notice the performance differences when working on systems with spindle based storage. From thereon in we will probably be deploying SSDs in almost all workstations going into those clients.

On the server side, where we once had a $150 difference between the 300GB 15K 2.5” Seagate SAS drives and the Intel 300GB 320 Series SSD that gap has pretty much been eliminated. Now, selling 300GB Intel 320 Series SSDs into a server setting has become quite easy.

Not only that, we can demonstrate quite clearly to our server clients that the SSDs have a clear advantage over spindled drives in performance but also in lower power consumption and less heat (means less cooling required).

In the end, if SSD demand does indeed rise significantly we win in that the higher volumes means the costs for those drives will come down. With lower costs, we will see even greater SSD adoption.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer