Are Motherboards With Solid State Hard Drives The Next Step?

Solid state disks are making a splash. Their gradual decrease in cost is making it finally affordable* for end users to have one in their machine, although this market segment is still generally limited to enthusiasts with high-end rigs (gamers with too much money, media developers, and techies that simply like things fast) that are looking for ultra-high performance out of their storage media.

The cost of adoption is still prohibitively high, but this will change – and soon. Because of this I can definitely see motherboards with onboard SS hard drives in our future.

Crazy? I don’t think so.

I can still remember the days when you had to purchase a separate I/O controller to hook up your floppy disk and giant 5.25″ hard disk that only held 125MB. It wasn’t too many years ago that video controllers weren’t standard issue either. With the price of flash memory steadily dropping, and more and more people funneling money into the manufacturers by purchasing the now ubiquitous flash drives for their portable storage; I honestly can’t see any good reason for the motherboard manufacturers not to eventually throw a 500GB solid-state chip next to the southbridge.

Think about it – from a performance standpoint it makes perfect sense. The mobo manufacturer could interface directly with the memory using whatever bus system they see fit, and could tune said system to squeeze as much speed out of it as possible. It also makes sense from a laptop manufacturer’s point of view as well – having no separate drive means that space is saved for other items, which means that more features could be packed into a small area where space is already at a premium. I shouldn’t even have to mention the obvious power savings – another boon for portable computing. Not only would their product have an inherently fast storage solution, but they can add more features all the while advertising an increase in battery life.

So keep an eye out – I will not be at all surprised if we see the first mobos with on-board solid state hard disks within the next four years.

*At ~$650.00 for a 256GB solid state disk purchasing one is certainly feasible, but the term “affordable” is still pretty subjective.