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SSD Prices Down 46% Since 2011
crookedvulture writes "Hard drive prices have yet to return to normal after last year's Thailand flooding. There's good news on the solid-state front, though. The current generation of SSDs has steadily become much cheaper over the last year or so. SSD prices have dropped an average of 46% since early 2011. Intel has largely shied away from discounting its drives, but the aggressive competition between other players in the market seems to have forced its hand. There's no indication that competition is waning, suggesting the downward trend will continue. Right now, an impressive number of drives are available for less than a dollar per gigabyte."
SSD prices just fell from completely ludicrous to ridiculous as part of the normal drop in prices per GB of storage
I stretched a little bit to make the purchases but they were worth it for the low seek latency. The last two I bought for my laptop were over 550$ each.
Recently we put some higher-end drives in our servers and we love the hell out of them.
It's great to see prices coming down. Along the same lines RAM is becoming ever cheaper too. We just bought 192 gigs of ram for 3 machines without breaking a sweat.
It seems to be the nature of things that prices go up and rarely come down. Interesting for manufacturers, in that they were all forced to raise prices at the same time. Now you have a situation where they can all keep prices high as long as none of the big players steps out. Almost like a natural price fixing scheme.
On the SSD front, the technology has finally matured so that reliability is good enough and cost is low enough for the mainstream. I think it is important for anyone in the market to make sure that they purchase the latest generation of drives. Speed doesn't matter that much (the rest of your computer is probably couldn't utilize it) but the newer firmwares are much less likely to corrupt your data. The parts are also more fault tolerant.
Really, the biggest issue is probably the difficulty of moving existing OS installs to a new drive. Too bad, because a completely solid state PC is so nice to use.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Compared to Just post flood, spinning disk prices are down sure. But pre-flood prices were significantly lower than now, whereas SSDs have just been dropping like a stone recently.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
SSD means Solid State Disc, a faster permanent storage type than HDD, however lacking capacity-per-dollar of HDDs.
SSD means Solid State Disc, a faster permanent storage type than HDD, however lacking capacity-per-dollar of HDDs.
Solid State Drive *
You're just inventing words as you write, aren't you?
Or it could mean Solid State Drive.
Slashdotter who doesn't know what an SSD is.. Really?
Well, WD and Seagate better still be price gouging to save up funds to buy out a flash chip manufacturer or they're screwed. At my repair and custom builds shop, it's down to a simple rule that if you don't need tons of storage, go with the much faster high lifetime SSD option and if you do need tons of storage, a 500GB-1TB drive is the way to go and they're around the same price. At this rate, I bet WD and Seagate have about 6 months to start making SSDs or they're bankrupt.
the problem with SSD for high performance storage is you have to over allocate almost to a factor of 10 to get the advertised speeds ....moving from 10% occupancy to 94% occupancy can degrade performance by more than 90%. To avoid dramatic performance loss, manufacturers often “over-capacity” devices in order to ensure sufficient pre-erase “buffering” for performance. Regardless, running storage capacity at 10% will yield one performance level, 35% a lesser performance level, 75% still a lower level, and 95% capacity nearly grinds performance to a halt. DRAM is the way to go maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan
Salsa Saturated Dorito
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Based on consumer feedback, they also seem to be lacking the reliability of HDDs.
That's kind of sad when you think about it (Seagate).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Please leave your /. geek card at the door before you leave. SLAM!
I was wondering how long it would take, but I guess the ubiquitous nature of hard drives and the fact that normal users don't understand what the big deal about SSDs is about, manufacturers are having to fight the take-it-or-leave it nature of SSDs.
I for one, won't put one in my laptop until I see a 500 gig drive for at most $300. My hard drive works fine right now. I'd love to have the power-efficiency, accident-proof, and high speed features in my laptop but I'm not going to down over $200 for 200 gigabytes. The larger size of my hard drive and low price balances that out quite nicely.
My kingdom for a donkey!
You're an odd one. Smart enough to find Slashdot... too stupid to use google.
Got any more info on this? I am looking at getting one some time in the coming months. From what I can gather, some of the 'lesser' products with older tech suffer from reliability problems, but the higher end stuff does not?
As a field that I have not researched enough yet, I find that there is a terrible amount of choice as to which ones are available. Hard to know which ones you should/should not get, which ones are faster/slower etc.
And it's changing fast, so every time I *google* it, I find older comparisons and not much up-to-date info.
I would buy that!
This is just a big plan by the manufacturer's to move away from traditional drives.That why drive prices havent come down. They make much more profit from SSD's so why lower the prices on regular drives where they make very little profit..
Sounds soggy.
There are concerns that first generation SSDs fail after a couple thousand writes. There is a bit of controversy over it, and it may be FUD or just outdated re: modern SSDs, but operating systems and programs have come up with optimizations for SSDs, and users continue to come up with their own solutions.
I'm (just this week) building a custom and paid $180something per 256fakeGB drive on Newegg. (I'm sure someone will come along and shatter the price I'm bragging about.) A couple years ago the prices just didn't seem worth it -- something like $3-5/gb.
I'm actually glad this topic came up. I bought two SSDs and plan to install both Windows and Linux. On Linux it's easy to stick user data on the whirly drive I got, but with Windows I'm not sure how I'll be able to stick user data, system logs, etc on said drive. I might just stick the entire OS on the whirly drive and put games (since it's a gaming rig) for both OSes on my SSDs.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Stick with Intel, and you'll be fine. Intel had some slight firmware issues a while back on one or two of their models, but otherwise every single one of their SSD offerings as been bulletproof. I've deployed hundreds now over the past 2-3 years, and I've yet to see one fail. I've seen loads of other brands (such as Kingston) have weird stuttering/hanging issues, bad write speeds, etc.
Going SSD is near life changing in terms of the apparent feel and speed gains. I've even got a number of cheapskate clients on 4-5 year old Core 2 Duo machines with SSDs that feel faster than modern 2nd gen i7 systems with traditional drives in terms of boot up time, application loading speed, etc.
I've seen so many problems with other brands, that I don't really trust anything but Intel SSDs anymore. Even when using the same controller, Intel manages to avoid issues, like the BSOD problems with the sandforce controllers that only Intel bothered to fix.
I don't know why TFA says Intel isn't discounting things, though. They're constantly doing mail-in-rebates for their products. I bought an Intel 160GB X25-m G1 for $700 roughly three years ago. Today, you can buy from newegg an Intel 180GB 330 for $120 after rebate, and it's enormously faster to boot.
Maybe a project got canceled? Or did a big supply for NAND flash just come online?
The 120GB SSD I picked up from NewEgg for about $120 weeks ago dropped to $80, so I picked up two more.
I don't see how I can not use SSDs as my primary drives.
This is not my experience. If you steer clear of the fastest of the cheaper lot, OCZ you will be fine.
I thought Maxtor and those... DeathStar, erm, DeskStar things were considered the worst. I actually never had a problem with a Seagate drive, but perhaps I've just been lucky.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
At the rates prices are falling, 512 GB SSD drives will be common in laptops soon, which I think is a very comfortable size for a laptop drive. 256GB (common base laptop SSD now) is OK but anemic.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... small (I don't need more than 60GB) but fast SSD (250MB/sec sustained write, 400MB/sec sustained read) that plugs directly into a PCI-Express slot (4x or larger to get some speed), and works reliably in Linux (e.g. NOT a Marvell controller). Given the larger capacities generally available today, it would seem to make more sense to achieve this smaller faster design with some redundancy.
An interesting alternative (but still needs to be NOT based on a Marvell controller) would be a PCI-Express card that can hold a small 2.5 inch laptop style SATA3 drive. Even better if you can slide the drive in from the rear through an open slot as long as it goes almost all the way in and has a clip to help hold it in place. I would be using this for the OS and use the rotating platter drives entirely for bulk data.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Sounds Soggy, Dude.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
What does "256 fake GB" mean? Does it refer to 256 GB as opposed to 256 GiB? If so, I think SSD makers reserve 7% of the 256 GiB raw capacity for spare sectors to fill in for factory defects and worn sectors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
2^32 bytes = 4 294 967 296 bytes
how you get 3.2 gigabytes out of that is beyond me.
Some devices on the bus, especially the video card, reserve some address space for memory-mapped I/O.
I find that having large monitors creates problems (especially when designing web applications), because you have to be careful that you aren't making the page too wide.
How so? If your monitor is 1920 pixels wide, and you're running Windows 7 or certain Linux window managers, try dragging a web browser window to the left or right edge of the screen, and it'll snap to cover the left or right half. Or you can focus your browser, Ctrl+right-click something else in the taskbar, and choose Tile Vertically. If a web site displays well in this 960px wide window, it'll display well on a 1024px wide netbook or a 1024px wide iPad.
46%? Thats about the expected chances of having a functional SSD 6 months after you install it.
This simply isn't true. While solid state drives will ultimately fail, they are reliable enough that you will have exhausted that storage device and have upgraded to something else long before physical failure.
What's really sad about all this is that mechanical drives are still the way to go for large amounts of storage, but 2tb drives are more money in the middle of 2012 than they were in 2010.
SSDs don't lack capacity-per-dollar. Both SSDs and HDDs have capacity-per-dollar attributes.
RAID is pretty common for HDDs, because drives do fail and RAID gives you instant (for RAID1) and automatic recovery. Is there a point to have SSDs in RAID? For most setups the speed benefits are not important (>200 MB/s is enough to move the bottleneck to the CPU for most workloads). Combining multiple smaller devices into a large volume is useful, but that is more "volume management" than "RAID". I find that bit-rot is overhyped on HDDs, but it's also mitigated by scanning for it (i.e. reading all sectors with data), so it's hard to gauge. I'm going to move my 4 TB array (8 TB raw) to SSD sooner or later, so I'm curious if people think RAID1 for SSD is good practice or superfluous. I have regular offline backups + offsite backups every 6 months of the important data, but some of it is not backed up. No strict reliability requirements.
If you're planning on getting one, it's worth looking at your OS, too. If you use Vista or an earlier Windows OS, you're not going to have support to TRIM commands (without which future write operations can be slowed).
It's also worth looking at some settings. If you have concerns about the shelf life of your drive, you could be exacerbating that if your SSD is used for virtual memory, since there's a significant amount of reading/writing going on with the paging file.
From a purely anecdotal standpoint, I can say that the reliability is not an issue. I've had an OCZ 60GB SSD for my operating system and a couple of frequently used games, while using an HDD for the volume storage, and have been using it for almost two years without running into any issues from the drive. The performance impact is noticeable (as far as games go, load screens go by much more quickly, other than that, the big issue is that it will take your system a hell of a lot less time to boot up).
SSDs are the rockstars of mass storage: They live fast and die young.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
But even that is a misnomer. It's not a drive at all. A hard disc drive, has a hard disk being driven (spun) by a motor. SSDs should really be called SSS (Solid State Storage), or similar.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This simply isn't true. While solid state drives will ultimately fail, they are reliable enough that you will have exhausted that storage device and have upgraded to something else long before physical failure.
Depends on the drive. Mine destroyed itself in just under a year, and that was with it 50% full, with noatime, swap on an HDD and various other things to try and keep it going. It was a Kingston, mind you, but there also seem to be a lot of unhappy OCZ users and even Intel did this thing where the drive suddenly became 8MB.
The other thing is that the more modern drives are using higher density flash, and by virtue of how it works, flash is less and less stable the smaller the charge gates are.
Soggy Sounding Depository?
SS +1 S? ;)
You could always say "metric MB" or "metric GB" if you want to be precise.
Hot wet islands full of hookers might be an interesting place to have an office, but manufacturing sensitive hard drives seems like it would want an arid climate. Why are there so many HD makers in Thailand then? Besides the obvious.
Slashdot sucks more & more
It's a good thing you're here to raise the bar a bit.
Seagate HARDDRIVES lack the reliability of HDDs... at least over the last 3-4 years.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Here are the salient hardware points:
-Intel SSD drives now carry a 3 year warranty. Now as good as any platter drive (sadly).
-Drives have built-in error correction and failure tolerance with replaceable blocks if one cell dies.
-Newer processing techniques have greatly improved reliability
-Many bug fixes to early firmware problems. Things such as wear-leveling that prevents certain cells from getting hammered while the rest of the drive sits unused.
Some of the software points:
-OS's have long be optimized for the slow platter performance. Newer OS's (Win7 is one) detect the use of an SSD and turn off the features that actually hurt drives. What are those things? Turn off disk defragmenting, optimizing the use of the system so that caches and data live on a platter drive while the OS and programs you want mostly read access are on the SSD.
There are many good articles and write-ups on these topics. I finally made the jump and would never look back. I just got a 180gb Intel SSD for $129 and it's the single most trans-formative upgrade to my computing experience I've made since the Core line of processors were released. The sheer speed your machine runs at, how apps just instantly start and the system boots in a few seconds, is just mind boggling. You start feeling the power of modern processors like you never have before.
No. It is not a complete misnomer, but merely a morphing of terms with historical implications. These devices support interfaces originally designed for Hard and Optical Disk/Drives. Traditionally the underlying storage medium has fluctuated drastically, using everything from rotating magnetic platters to LASERs and plastic discs. We already have Solid State Storage that does not support drive electronics, e.g. USB sticks. The market continues to use the term drive to indicate that these devices support a "Drive" interface, such as SATA interface for example.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You don't know what "misnomer" means, do you?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I have one word for you. Samsung 830 series. OK, that's three words, but that's totally where the performance, life, and reliability come together.
Why, yes... It turns out that I do I in fact do know what a misnomer is, to wit: a wrong name or inappropriate designation. Again, Drive is the appropriate designator here. Is not inappropriate at all, because it indicates a hardware interface, not the specifics of the underlying medium. This is true for historical reasons, and you will realize the wisdom the first time you want to search worst buy.com for ... oh let's see ... what search terms should I enter to indicate I want a device to replace my current SATA drive, but with a different underlying media ...
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Nobody would ever suggest Seagate's own designs lately were any better than garbage fit for the sewer. Samsung HD204UI 2TB was the ultimate. I currently have 22 of them running 24x7; never the slightest hiccup from them in three years. The last six were under the Seagate banner, with a Seagate part number but still stamped HD204UI as well, and running the exact same firmware (so they can't be too different - yet). Once the Samsung line succumbs to the inevitable crappy design, workmanship, and QC of Seagate drives in general, I'm not sure what I will do. Because the only thing worse than Seagate is -hack- WD -spit-.
Among several other things, "SI" is the abbreviation for International System of Units, commonly called the metric system: 256 SI GB vs. 256 KiB.
Not only are you illiterate, you're a Googletard, unable to find any info on SATA devices without adding "drive" to the search. Meh.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You're right that only 256G isn't much, but at least with an SSD you can use pretty much all of that space. With conventional hard drives, once you pass around 90% full your performance will degrade very noticeably due to fragmentation.
haha, I'm using that. :)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
No, it means "Super Star Destroyer", a kind of starship in Star Wars.
I hope I've helped.
As my country was occupied during the WW2 and we suffered around a million of life loss, I strongly disagree with this acronym.
I created some back-of-the-envelope predictions in July 2009 about the cost for 10TB of storage using either type of drive technology. Unfortunately, neither technology has kept pace with my predictions, but SSDs are making much better progress.
Actual July 2009 Prices for 10TB: Platter = $750, Flash = $28,125
Actual June 2012 Prices: Platter = $567, Flash = $8200
Previous Prediction for July 2010: Platter = $528, Flash = $9,868
Previous Prediction for July 2012: Platter = $262, Flash = $1,215
Previous Prediction for July 2014: Platter= $130, Flash = $150
Previous Prediction for July 2019: Platter= $23, Flash = $0.80
It's a shame to see that after three years, the prices are closer to where I hoped to see them in a single year. I think it's time to update my predictions based on what has happened over the previous 35 months. (Yes, I know this in unscientific and silly!)
New Prediction for July 2012: Platter = $562, Flash = $7916
New Prediction for July 2013: Platter = $511, Flash = $5188
New Prediction for July 2014: Platter = $464, Flash = $3400
New Prediction for July 2015: Platter = $422, Flash = $2228
New Prediction for July 2019: Platter = $287, Flash = $411
New Prediction for July 2024: Platter = $178, Flash = $50
These predictions seem much more achievable than last time. In fact, I expect that platter drives will exceed this pace as the industry recovers. I can't believe that platter drives will only see around a 50% price reduction per TB over the next seven years. However, that's been the pace of improvement from July 2009 until now.
The most interesting date will be when the technologies reach price equivalence. This would be August 2020 according to my model, at the price of $260 for 10 TB. My gut feeling is that equivalence will be reached a couple of years earlier than that, but who knows? We'll just have to watch and see!
Well technically, an SSD remaps LBAs to physical memory cells for wear leveling. You could say the unit is "driving" the data to its proper storage area.
Life is not for the lazy.
Ditto for the Intel SSD recommendation. I've got an X-25m in my MacBook (OSX hacked to enabled TRIM). I'm always running my WinXP VM off it along with creating ISO files and moving them off to the network. So my SSD gets a substantial amount of writes each day.
I have been eyeing OCZ Vertex lineup though for my home workstation. I love Intel's reputation, but OCZ seems to have their act togeather in a serious way with a great product lineup with insane speeds. Anyone recommend for or against OCZ around here? I want a reliable plan B.
Life is not for the lazy.
Sorry, I can't let this go. Yes, IBM/Hitachi had a bad run of the Deskstar series. The faulty production run and QC didn't last very long. And yes, every fucking HDD manufacture goes through one of the nasty little phases. Maxtor means "Crapster" to me. WD used to be king, but many of their drives have been failing a lot more normal. Seagate drives are good. Though I've ran into a bad rash of SAS drives last year. The point being, Deskstars are great drives and have been for a long time. It's old news your clinging on to. Get it a rest and stop spreading FUD!
Life is not for the lazy.
Got an Asus G73JH whose boot time was in the 2 minute range (from bios menu to desktop plus another
30+ seconds to be usable once on the desktop...ack) on a > 1.5 year old windows7 install.
If I were not in .edu, wipe and reload...as is, did a system image (had to fight that, too)
Pure SSD was still too pricey and storage too small, so I tried a hybrid drive (8G SSD attached).
One word: "Wow".
Fresh install of win7, 20 seconds flat and ready to go.
Restored image as mentioned above: 45 seconds +/- 10 sec and off to the races.
Now, granted I could have gotten a cheap and small SSD and put it in the second bay, but until I
can get a 750G+ SSD for less than $200 *aaaand* boot in 20 seconds, I'll likely stick with
straight mechanical but I'm really liking the hybrid route.
A hybrid with enough room for a complete OS (128G or so?) would more than give me what I seek
if done right.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Four times Belgium triple IPA, a style which I don't believe I've ever had before.
A slashdotter who says - Really ?
It's like people calling cable modems - modems. That stands for something like modulator de modulator, all analog functions dealing with digital to analog conversion. Modem is not the correct word but seems unlikely to ever change now.
SSD Prices Down 46% Since 2011! But will ssd prices continue down ?
I really love club dresses ,
What are you blathering about? Are you making some specious tie between the three letter acronym SSS and the two letter acronym SS, representing SchutzStaffel? Or was there some secret organization called the Solid State Storage during WW2?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If you could read and understand english you would have noticed a number of things. The first is that you are a moron. The second is that I never mentioned Google. Finally, you would realize and understand that I am not the only person on the internet searching for things. I would enlighten you further, but the earlier cast light has not even landed yet, and shows no sign of any potential to reach its target.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It is still the right word. It is still modulating and demodulating between digital signals and analogue signals (the carrier on digital cable is still analogue).
I was actually about to ask about OCZ. Seems that they are in the limelight in my local computer shop. Samsung too.
I guess I should pretty much ignore any other brands...?
It wold be for my newish laptop, so Win7. Previously it would have been some flavour of Linux but I got back into gaming again with this new laptop so haven't uninstalled Win7 yet. I don't plan on using virtual memory - I haven't got anywhere near full memory utilisation yet (It has 8GB).
I guess I will either be looking at a current Intel or OCZ, probably in the ~128GB range. It would be tight, so maybe need to go to ~256GB
Samsung's are actually the only other brand I'd probably trust enough to buy, but they're almost impossible to find at retail, so I largely ignore them. They're mostly into OEM stuff. Anandtech did some impressive reviews of their stuff, and I looked around trying to find them, and didn't have much luck. Even on newegg, at the time, there was just a handful of Samsung parts, and at the time they were outdated models.
Samsung is actually decent, they do a huge amount of OEM work, so their validation requirements are pretty decent. Other than that, I'd stick to Intel.
OCZ is hit or miss. Their stuff is fast, but reliability isn't great compared to Intel.
I could give you some horror stories (one friend bought a Vertex 2 and is now on his fourth one as they keep failing and needing RMAs), but the general feeling out there seems to be that OCZ stuff is fast, when it works, but has a higher failure/bug rate than companies like Intel or Samsung.
If you want a fast drive, Intel's 330 and 520 series use the same controllers as OCZ's sandforce stuff, so the performance is similar. They can also be quite cheap since Intel is throwing mail-in-rebates around. I bought a 180GB Intel 330 for $145 after rebate, only to see them drop down to $120 after rebate not long after. Looks like they're back up to $145 now.
My high end intel died with maybe 1.5 years of use. No swap, no logging
I was joking about german SS.
But even that is a misnomer. It's not a drive at all. A hard disc drive, has a hard disk being driven (spun) by a motor. SSDs should really be called SSS (Solid State Storage), or similar.
Just shorten that to "SS" have we have a Godwin Moment already!
Let's hope that drive prices fall faster than our economy. No race to the bottom needed or wanted here.
How much does it cost to add 256GB of storage to the new, non-user-serviceable MacBook Pro with non-standard SSD drives?
Well as soon as OWC finishes making them just like they did for the Air, probably a bit more than $1/GB (but not much more) and with better performance.
So I guess you didn't really think through that "non user serviceable" part very well.
For those who don't know, SuperKendall is an Apple fanboy.
Wheras you wear your Hater label on your sleeve as a badge of honor.
An even someone who didn't know knew after reading your simply ignorant post...
So odd how Apple Haters are willing to make themselves look so stupid, every single time.
The answer is $500, or $1.95/GB.
I never said Apple's upgrades were not expensive, but it's why it might be good to air just a bit longer until that is the default, or you can just buy the upgrade.
And people say Apple laptops aren't vastly overpriced.
The laptops are not. The upgrades are expensive, stupid Apple Hater. We all knew that already so why did you even bother to post? If you have nothing to add just drool to yourself.
I'll let you have the last response because Hater.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, if I see the sky is blue, & I state it, that doesn't make my anecdotal experience and findings reported non-viable & factual. Whenever I see someone try that puny tactic to invalidate what was stated, it just makes me laugh. See example above.