Solid state disk is getting a bigger play in the enterprise. IDC released findings on their testing that reports the differential between SSD and traditional mechanical drives may not be all that the industry has made it out to be.

IDC claims that normal tests are between SSD devices and 4,200 RPM drives. IDC differed in that they tested 7,200 RPM drives – drives commonly used in enterprise storage -- against SSD drives. They found that the differences in performance are nowhere near as great as vendors have said they are.

Dave Reinsel of IDC also said in the report that SSD drives aren’t often compatible with existing storage systems. He said that many storage systems will need to be redesigned to accommodate SSDs. Since SSDs write data more slowly than they read, Reinsel says that systems will need to be able to recognize when they are communicating with an SSD.

In a prior report from July of last year, IDC estimated that SSD revenue would grow from $373 million in 2006 to $5.4 billion in 2011. That SSD growth rate is primarily attributable to the PC market’s use of SSDs in laptop computers.

While IDC failed to disclose specific benchmarks, they tested 2.5 inch 7,200 RPM drives against both single-cell SSDs and multilevel SSDs.

Several vendors including EMC, Pillar Data, Fujitsu, HP and Sun have said they will incorporate SSDs into their server and storage products. Sun and HP will integrate SSDs into servers. EMC was the first to offer SSD support for their Symmetrix arrays. Sun will used single-cell NAND Flash in its servers in opposition to EMC who uses multilevel NAND Flash.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.