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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.
The /. title is "Why Aren't SSD Prices Going Down?" and the summary quickly provides and answer with "But after the economic meltdown, fabricators pulled back on production and investment in new facilities".
There's a difference between price collusion in a mature market like LCDs versus a lack of capacity in a new market like SSDs.
But congrats on your semi-paranoid stance.
Why look at facts when you can just say "I'll never trust again".
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The same 60GB drive I paid $230 for 6 months ago is now $130 after rebates and $160 before.
Whether he is right or wrong really depends on how large a disk you want.
Barring truly revolutionary advances in silicon device fabrication, and(I'm not sufficiently up on my physics to know for sure) possibly a change in physics, sputtering a thin metallic film with the appropriate magnetic properties will always be cheaper, per square centimeter, than fabbing a complex integrated circuit. Further, it is quite likely that the smallest possible magnetic domains will continue to be smaller than the smallest possible flash cells, so you get more bits per square centimeter, and you pay less per square centimeter with the magnetic stuff.
However, as you note, Flash is pretty much ready-to-go. Virtually all the cost is the silicon. Packaging and soldering are relatively cheap(and, since every HDD also has a controller board, both technologies pay the "assemble a PCB" cost). With magnetic storage, though, whether HDD or tape, you have to build a fairly complex and expensive machine to enclose the cheap magnetic medium, and read/write, and keep dust off, and so forth.
If you adopt the naive strategy of comparing each technology's "sweet spot cost"(ie. the cost/GB of the device with the lowest cost/GB of each tech), I suspect that Mr. Unsworth is correct, if not forever, at least for a long time. However, a great many applications don't actually care about that metric. If you know how many GB you need, you don't care about "what is the lowest cost/GB?" you care about "how can I most cheaply get X GB?"
In the case of HDDs, the "sweet spot price" is somewhere between 5 and 10 cents a GB. However, the sweet spot is measured in 1-2 TB devices. If you, say, only needed 20GB, you would be unable to find anybody to sell you a 20GB drive for $1-$2. A quick look a newegg suggests that the cheapest retail HDDs are around $30-$35. You do get 80GB to 160GB for your $35; but you basically can't spend any less. The cost of a machined housing, hiqh quality spindle motor, packing, shipping, etc. just make that impossible. For the same $30-$35, retail, you are looking at around 16GB of flash(less if you want AES encryption and stuff, a little more if it is on sale). Thus, for any application that needs 16GB or less, SSDs are, in absolute $/GB terms, actually cheaper than HDDs(in addition to their other virtues: quiet, low power, shock resistant, small size, etc.)
I suspect that, over time, HDDs will be cheaper than SSDs in "sweet spot price" more or less forever; but the capacity(currently around 16GB, was more like 8GB the last time I wrote something like this) below which the absolute cost advantage lies with SSDs will continue to creep up. If it manages to creep up faster than software bloats, we may reach the dramatic tipping point where an SSD is cheaper, as well as better, than an HDD for the boot volume of a "normal computer", as opposed to just embedded systems, the occasional netbook, and space/power constrained devices.
While I'm sure the geek here at /. will probably have their jaws drop at me saying this, I think there is an even simpler explanation, although price fixing may be adding to the equation. The simple reason is this....most folks don't want them, period.
While the geeks and gamers are probably having heart attacks at saying this, the simple fact is most PCs have gone waaaaay past good enough several years back, and for most have reached ludicrous speed. I offer SSDs as an option on my new builds, and even after explaining the speed benefits don't have any takers, why? Because folks want bigger more than they want faster, that's why. And frankly with 2 Windows 7 PCs sitting here the difference in wake from sleep between SSD and HDDs isn't enough to worry about. My own Windows 7 PC at home wakes from sleep in about 8 seconds from cold to desktop, how much faster do you want?
So I would say it is simply the fact that machines are crazy fast now, and with adequate RAM there simply isn't a need for SSDs unless your a gamer wanting the biggest ePeen. The smallest build I sell ATM is an AMD dual with 3Gb of RAM and Windows 7, and my customers just rave about how fast it is. For the same price as a 32Gb SSD they can get over a Tb of HDD space, and my customers would simply rather have bigger than faster. Plus with Windows 7 all you need is a fast 4-8Gb flash drive for Readyboost and you gain a lot of the SSD speed benefits without the SSD prices, at least in my experience. With games easily coming in at 5-7Gb a piece installed you really need at least 64Gb to see the benefits of SSD anyway.
So I'd say the simple fact is SSD simply isn't needed on the desktop. Mobile is another story, with the non volatile nature of SSDs making them a good choice, but since most of my customers are simply doing the basics on their laptops (word processing, surfing) they really don't need anything bigger than the basic bottom of the line SSDs, which means there isn't the demand driving prices down. Even my hardcore gamer customer decided to go RAID 0 with a couple of Raptors rather than give up space for an SSD. Most folks would just rather have more than faster at this point IMHO.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.