Notebooks Without Anymore Optical Disc or HDD?

A respected storage veteran of the optical industry told us few days ago:" I don’t believe anymore in the future of the optical disc technology". We too. The life of HDDs will last longer. But silicon without moving parts will finally kills these two mechanical storage technologies on the long term.

A good sign of this evolution is the recent announcement by Apple of a thin notebook without any DVD or magnetic disk drive, the latest MacBook Air.

Optical discs are used less and less frequently. People look now at movies on Internet and backup on external HDDs or eventually using online backup services.

As we wrote formerly, SSDs have all the advantages compared to HDDs, but one: the price. They use less power (35 or 50 watt-hour for the MacBook Air against 63.5-watt for a standard MacBook with HDD), need less cooling, are much faster and more reliable. And more and more smaller. Another key point: flash chips can be embedded in any customized form factor, not like HDDs.

But look at the price of the MacBook Air: $999 with 11-inch screen and 64GB SSD, exactly the same for the MacBook with 13-inch LED, ODD and 250GB 5,400rpm 2.5-inch HDD. The 13-inch MacBook Air costs $1,299 with 128GB on flash. The difference is not so big and can only decrease in the coming years.

                         At the same $999 price:

              MacBook                          MacBook Air
  
         13.3-inch LED                       11-6 inch LED
      2.4GHz, 2GB RAM                  1.4Ghz, 2GB RAM
  250GB, 5,400rpm HDD                    64GB SSD
    Optical SuperDrive                    No optical drive
      63.5-watt-hour                          35-watt-hour

It’s interesting to note here the recent incredible announcement of Toshiba: a 128GB MLC SSD in a blade chassis only 2.2mm thick with a mere 9.8gram and a one million hour MTTF. There is no HDDs with such an height. The thinnest 1.8-inch drive from Toshiba is 5mm thick (at 120GB only). Maximum sequential read speed of 220MB/s and write speed of 180MB/s are much faster specs for this blade SSD. Access times are in microseconds, not milliseconds. Users of notebooks with SSDs will never come back to HDDs.

That’s the trend for all the notebooks and sub-notebooks: just flash as main storage – and nothing else. Future portable Macs will probably also have no built-in optical disc or hard drives. You cannot even imagine today an iPad with HDD. We continue to expect that they will be practically no more notebooks with HDDs in 2015.