Energy efficiency as a key feature of ultra-solid-state SSD shipments will surge in the future

According to IHS iSuppli, low power consumption will be an important factor driving the growth of SSDs, and SSD shipments are expected to more than double next year.

It is estimated that the shipment of SSDs in 2013 will reach 92 million, and this year and last year were 41 million and 17 million, respectively, as shown in the figure. After the next year, it will continue to grow strongly and maintain double-digit speed until 2016, when it is expected that SSD shipments will reach 240 million.

These shipment forecasts include single-use pure SSDs, as well as SSDs used with hard drives—as separate cache SSDs, or integrated NAND flash in hybrid drives. Although the number covers all applications including the corporate sector, Superbooks and other so-called ultra-thin computers will be the main SSD application areas.

SSDs can use power more efficiently and are a major trend highlighted by the Intel Information Technology Summit (IDF) in San Francisco in early September. At this meeting, various industry plans related to Superbooks were displayed. This ultra-thin notebook is based on Intel-approved specifications and has been launched and sold by several vendors. It is the PC industry's biggest hope. For years, the lack of exciting designs in the PC industry has led consumers to turn to smart phones and tablets.

The ultrabook will have innovative features that were rarely seen on traditional laptops, including touch screen functions similar to tablet PCs. At this conference, we also discussed minimizing power consumption, which may lead to thinner and longer battery life. Long and more reliable PC design. At this conference, SSD vendors discussed a multi-pronged approach to energy optimization from the ground up, covering the host, software, interface, and equipment levels.

As NAND flash memory becomes more and more efficient, the ultimate contributor to low-power storage will come from the device level. Compared with hard disks, SSDs also have high parallelism and therefore have faster activation bandwidth, which greatly increases the time spent on idle mode, and power consumption in these modes is reduced by an order of magnitude. However, if other storage stacking layers cannot take advantage of this advantage, the effect of device-level optimization is minimized.

So far, the most popular method of matching device-level power adjustment is to start with interfaces such as PCI Express and SATA, and NVM Express that may replace SATA has a low-power mode.

At present, host computers and software have always lagged behind in pursuit of low power consumption. But this time the Intel Information Technology Summit shows that this is also catching up. For example, the upcoming Windows 8 will add new storage optimization features, including device idle time of more than 15.6 milliseconds, fewer metadata flushes, and SSD boot time of 15 seconds. At the host level, the 12th release of Intel Dynamic Acceleration Technology releases a higher-powered C-state for optimal SSD burst performance to help achieve shorter activation cycles.

IHS iSuppli believes that as the PC industry shifts away from an ecosystem based entirely on power-intensive rotating storage, optimizing PCs, software, interfaces, and devices will help PCs improve energy efficiency. By using NAND flash memory, tablets have gained longer battery life. Similarly, ultrabooks with SSD as a storage method will also be able to provide users with similar low-power advantages.