Do you know the new lessons that SSDs are teaching us?

IT Web recently ran a thoughtful article titled “Storage trends for 2012.” What struck me about this article is that it incorporates some pretty important lessons for anyone designing with SSDs or other forms of NAND Flash storage. Here are some of the lessons I took from this article:

1. Speed: “…in the second half of 2012, mass adoption of SSDs will reach a tipping point. He says last year saw a steady increase in SSD sales, adding that the increased interest was primarily newly ‘tech-savvy’ consumers and not only tech enthusiasts. The value of adding an SSD to a lagging computer is now in the thoughts of many mainstream consumers.”In other words, a wide swath of computer users and other consumers have tasted the performance benefits of NAND Flash storage and they’re not going back. Consequently, you must now divine the best approach for melding NAND Flash storage into all manner of designs or face the sales consequences to be “earned” from relatively sluggish performance across all consumer, computer, and communications end products.
2. Capacity: “worldwide sales of tablets are predicted to jump to 326.3 million units by the end of 2015… the high-quality content being consumed on mobile devices will continue to drive storage demand. Consumers who have tablets that do not feature card slots for extended storage are already experiencing storage limitations.”This is actually an old lesson made new by SSDs: there’s no such a thing as too much storage. Video, image, and audio files will grow to fill whatever’s available. Be sure to incorporate some sort of expansion facility into every product to meet customer needs and to pick more dollars up from the table.
3. Cloud: “… SSDs will gain traction in the data centre market. This market segment has built enough trust in SSD technology to consider the replacement of existing HDDs… High input-output operations per second (IOPs) results means that SSDs are far more suitable for the server environment than HDDs… the push to increase energy savings and optimize performance computing will see SSDs become a priority investment for data centers in 2012.”In other words, the cloud is where it’s at for many large application zones and SSDs give clouds more performance. Time is money.