Why in 2010 have we still not seen Solid State Drives (SSD) in copiers?

A quick retail check reveals an 80GB SSD $235.00 vs 80GB HDD $99.00

I am sure an MFP manufacturer buying many thousands of drives would get a better price.

Maybe an SSD would require a re write of copier firmware?

Besides price, what's the difference between them?

Much faster access time, 100% reliable, no moving parts, can't crash the drive head with sudden loss of power corrupting drive. Much smaller, lighter, much lower power consumption. Much less heat generated. Much less headaches for Service Dept compared to HDD as there is virtually no service required.

An SSD can fit mechanically into the same hardware slot as a HDD.

Just started showing up in laptops last year.

MFP Copier vendors are always jostling to say they were first to market with some new gizmo, the SSD would be an easy first.

There was some conncern in the past about Read Write endurance but that has been solved. The concern really only applies to high volume server applications. Copiers would read/write much less.

I would say you answered your own question.

Why would you double the cost of a component of your copier when the benefits are negligible?

You mentioned faster access time which is true. Don't you hate standing at the copier while the screen is saying "Please wait, Accessing Hard Drive?"

You mentioned 100% reliable, which is not true. They are certainly more reliable, and there's no concern about drive heads, but once again, not a lot of problems there. The most common issue with hard drives failing is impact. Lots of people drop Laptops. Not many people drop copiers (Art is an exception to the rule).

As far as the "volume purchasing" aspect, that is true, but it is true with the normal Hard Drives as well, and probably to a larger extent.

I have absolutely no data on this, and am only taking a wild shot based upon my experience with previous "new technology" waves, but I'm going to say that if we take your numbers as "Market" then the "Volume" price would be something like $100 vs. $25.

Toshiba announced today that they will go into volume production of 128 GB NAND flash memory around Dec 2010.

Although primarily designed for things like smartphones and iPads, ths could be the future of copier storage devices.

Besides selling copiers, I sell Toshiba telephone systems.

Toshiba has been using SSD in our voicemail systems for several years now. I would say they are 99.9% reliable.