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Why Aren't SSD Prices Going Down?
Lucas123 writes "NAND flash memory makers took an economic beating from 2007 through the first quarter of 2009 due to supply outstripping demand. During that time, solid state drives dropped in price 60% year over year. But after the economic meltdown, fabricators pulled back on production and investment in new facilities and the price of SSDs have remained flat or increased over the past year, and that is not expected to change until 2011. Until that time, SSDs remain 10x more expensive than hard disk drives. SSD vendors, however, are using a few tricks to get sales up, including selling lower-capacity boot drives that hit a sweet spot in the techie/gamer market."
It's going to be really really hard to convince me that Asian electronics manufacturers aren't engaged in price fixing en masse against the rest of the world whenever a technology cost remains unnaturally high. Hell, after realizing how many times I was the victim of it with LCDs I pretty much expect it.
I mean, really, I feel like a moron for ever knowing that they allowed price fixing -- even promoted it -- inside their borders and then believing that stopped at the rim of the continent. Right now the only question is how many markets is this happening in? They're obviously very good about it, little chance the regulators in other countries will catch it let alone the easily bribed authorities isntalled there.
My work here is dung.
A 5.25" drive would have significantly higher stresses placed upon the platter. There would also be more area to have to physically move the head across.
Reserved Word.
Thanks to everyone shutting down factories during the recession, there is a severe shortage of analog parts, electrolytic capacitors, and some FET's. It is typical to see a 4-8 week lead time on an order of 20k. A 16 week lead time makes you Very uncomfortable and you start looking for second sources or redesigns.
Some analog/digital companies are shipping at 16-24 week lead times.
Some electrolytic capacitors are at a 40 week lead time.
And at least one major company stopped accepting new orders.
In the mean time, some distributors are starting bidding wars on parts that they do have.
Right now, demand is far greater than the supply. It is going to be at least another year before prices start to come down.
A lot of the cost is the raw cost of the processed silicon wafers. Making the pure crystals and then slicing/cutting/polishing them to a workable state takes a lot of time.
Where the processing technology comes in is the ability to make more chips for a given wafer size.
When you have something spinning, the smaller the better.
Let's do some simple Math:
For a 7200RPM Hard Drive@ 3.5" Diameter or .0889 meters you have a velocity of
V = Pi*D*RPM = 3.14*.0889*7200 = 2009m/min or 33.5m/s.
Now the centripetal acceleration:
a = v^2/r = (33.5m/s)^2/.04445m = 25243m/s^2.
Or in other words: 2573g
Yeah, that's a hell of a lot of acceleration at the outer edges. The smaller the better.
I think your facts are out of date. The latest SSDs beat hard drives in every category, sequential reads/writes and random reads/writes. SSD random write performance has been superior to the fastest hard drives for quite a while now. Performance is even better with TRIM and 4K alignment in Windows 7. It is sequential write performance that has typically been weak, but even that is no longer the case.