December 11th, 2008 by K. T. Bradford
Anyone who has been keeping up with netbook news is bound to notice that mechanical hard drives are becoming far more common than solid state drives (much to my annoyance, by the way). Our observations are borne out by hard data, it seems, as DRAMeXchange revealed.
According to the company’s research, in Q1 2008, 70 per cent of netbooks came with an SSD. The following quarter that figure dipped to around 66 per cent before plunging to 30 per cent.
This quarter, the ratio will fall further, to 20 per cent, then down to just ten per cent in Q1 2009. By this time next year, the forecaster forecast, it’ll be down to eight per cent.
There are a lot of benefits to SSDs — no moving parts, more shock resistant, etc — but they’re more expensive per GB and the cheaper SSDs which netbook vendors use tend to have worse performance than 5,400 rpm hard drives. The bottom line is that consumers want a lot of space and they want it for less money, just as with traditional notebooks.
I’m personally sad to see SSDs slipping behind because I appreciate not having to worry about my hard drive as my netbook rattles around in my bag. Then again, I don’t need Windows XP, a bunch of programs, or a lot of storage space. Consumers have already shown that they do prefer XP and buyers in general seem to think that more hard drive space equals better… something.
JKOnTheRun feels that this indicates that netbooks will soon become “simply small notebooks” that have similar capabilities to regular ones.
source : blog.laptopmag.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment