The days of standard hard drives in laptops are numbered, according to Flash memory maker SanDisk. The company believes the industry has reached a tipping point where the price of Flash-based storage is no longer an issue, especially for enterprise users that have an eye on total ownership costs.

While solid state disk (SSD) modules based on Nand Flash memory chips are still costly compared with conventional hard drives, the gap is narrowing. SanDisk’s 32GB SSD carried an OEM price of $600 (£298) in January 2007, but this had fallen to $350 (£174) by March, the company said.

“Over time, SSDs will be price competitive with hard disks,” said SanDisk marketing director, Doreet Oren. A move to SSDs has been predicted to take off once the cost of Flash memory falls to about five times that of a hard disk, and this has now been reached, she added.

“I believe there will be very high adoption this year, particularly among road warriors and executives,” Oren explained. This is because enterprise customers look at the total cost of ownership rather than the purchase cost, according to SanDisk. Flash SSDs have higher performance and are more robust than hard disks, which account for nearly half of all laptop failures.

“Failure of a hard disk is more significant in an enterprise [than for consumers],” said Oren. “If you can’t work, you’re not being productive, and if you have to call the helpdesk to get it fixed, their time is money also.”

One firm already offering SanDisk modules as an option is Dell, and the company’s European head of client products, James Griffiths, agreed that they boost reliability.
“We’ve seen a four-times increase in mean-time-before-failure when going from a device with moving parts to solid state,” Griffiths said. Dell’s Latitude D420 also shows a 23 percent increase in disk performance when using the 32GB SanDisk part.
Griffiths said that Dell has seen “considerable interest” in SSDs for ultraportables, such as its new Latitude D430. However, he added that some applications, such as video editing, required the greater capacity offered by hard drive technology.

SanDisk currently has a 64GB SSD in both 2.5in Serial ATA and 1.8in ATA drive formats. It expects to have 128GB units in 2008 and 256GB models by 2010. Research firm Gartner has already predicted that SSDs will make up 20 percent of the laptop market by the end of the decade.