Notebooks with flash-based solid state drives cost more than traditional hard drives, are "an order of magnitude" less reliable and do not perform as well when using Microsoft Outlook.
A large computer manufacturer is getting around 20 percent to 30 percent of the flash-based notebooks it is shipping sent back because of failure rates and performance that simply isn't meeting customer expectations, said research firm Avian Securities in a report on Monday.
Approximately 10 to 20 percent of the flash notebooks shipping from the large manufacturer are coming back because of technical failure, which is far higher than the one to two percent of notebooks that come back because of technical failure with hard drives.
"There is an order of magnitude higher in failure rates," said Avi Cohen, managing partner of Avian Securities. (Avian is a research firm that does not have a financial interest in flash companies, Cohen said.)
The rest of the drives are coming back because of lackluster performance. Flash-based notebooks can't match notebooks with regular hard drives in terms of applications like video streaming, he said. These notebooks also cost a lot. Inserting a flash-based drive into a notebook adds about US$900 or more to the price.
Cohen declined to name the large computer manufacturer concerned. However, among the large manufacturers, Dell is one of the most aggressive promoters of flash drives in notebooks. Dell gets its flash drives from Samsung. Apple is just starting to ship flash-based notebooks.
A Dell representative declined to comment on failure rates or returns. However, Dell admitted that current flash-based drives can exhibit worse performance on some applications where data is exchanged in small packed sizes, and one of those applications is Microsoft Outlook.
"An SSD (solid-state drive) can be slower than a traditional hard drive [on Outlook]", the representative said. But flash drives are superior to regular drives for random access, the representative added.
To that end, Samsung is coming out with a new type of drive that corrects that issue, the Dell representative said. Other flash storage makers have reported problems with SSDs, on condition of anonymity.
While the returns are bad news for notebook makers right now, the problems also dim the outlook for the flash industry in general. Flash manufacturers are looking for applications that will suck up the large volume of chips coming out of factories, after the industry's building spree of the past few years. Many hoped notebooks would accomplish this.
Notebook makers are currently inserting flash that can accommodate a single bit per memory cell. Yet notebook makers and flash makers both want the industry to shift to cheaper flash that can hold two or more bits per cell, so the prices of these notebooks can be closer to conventional notebooks.
Multi-level flash, however, isn't as reliable, so if the industry is having problems with single-cell flash, it's going to be tough to shift to the cheaper type of memory, Cohen said. As a result, the oversupply in flash will linger and prices will continue on their rapid downward descent.
This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.
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