Information Week reports that SSD prices are falling fast and capacity will surpass HDDs in 2016. I hope this is true, as that will mean that we can finally have affordable silent home storage solutions, something I’ve been waiting a long time for.
Currently, I use a NAS (Network Attached Storage) for my home storage needs, namely the Synology DS415+ with a few Western Digital Red 3TB Drives. It works well, but is definitely not silent due mainly to the spinning hard drives as well as the fan noise required to keep them cool (although the latter can be tweaked to be quieter).
The Next Frontier of Storage
I’ve been dying to replace them with an all SSD solution in a smaller, fanless Mini-ITX case like the Akasa Euler M. The main obstacle has been price, followed by capacity limitations. It is still too expensive to buy enough SSD storage space (say, 4TB or more, with redundancy), and the max capacity readily available and “affordable” these days is 1TB per drive. Since Mini-ITX boards and cases typically have drive limitations (the Akasa Euler M supports 4 2.5″ drives), it is expensive and difficult to build such a system.
However, if SSD capacity really does exceed HDD next year, then perhaps only 2 drives mirrored would be enough. Silent, small, and fast! Seems almost impossible, doesn’t it?
