Solid state hard drives = energy savings, for a price

Seagate is enjoying some buzz right now with the release of its new solid state Pulsar drives and while it’s a relative newcomer to the space, it claims business are just now ready to begin investing in the technology. What would make businesses hesitate on buying a new method of storage that’s more reliable, faster, and more energy efficient? You guessed it: price.

As an example, consider a regular external Iomega hard drive that costs $95 for 1 terabyte of storage and a Cavalry solid state drive that costs $200 for 64 gigabytes of space. The Iomega drive rings in at $.0095 $.095 (thanks anonymous!) per gigabyte while the Cavalry drive costs $3.13 per gigabyte. Granted there are many advantages to solid state drives, but this sort of price difference drives decision making both for businesses and consumers.

Primarily, Seagate is targeting large enterprise systems with its Pulsar hard drives and they’re taking a point from Eestor’s enigmatic playbook by installing a supercapacitor to supply energy for finishing write operations in case of power failure. That means easy energy storage with a shorter burst of power output, perfect for this application.

On a wider scale the implementation of solid state drives on servers running the web could mean faster downloads for users and and overall reduction in the carbon footprint generated by using the Internet. Google’s stance is in clear support with ChromeOS only supporting solid state drives. With Google pushing for low cost web hardware some sort of price efficiency is bound to happen.

After all, providing a superspeed user experience won’t win out if consumers can’t afford it. As with most products a big part of the success or failure of solid state drives will depend on marketing efforts driving it. A smart logo and a set of benefits in everyday language will go a long way toward convincing buyers with the potential to significantly reduce energy usage on a global scale.