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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 means Solid State Disc, a faster permanent storage type than HDD, however lacking capacity-per-dollar of HDDs.
Solid State Drive *
Only if it's Win 7 32-bit. If he's using the 64-bit version (which is a good bet) he'll get the full 8.
Technically PEA is available for regular Windows, as DEP needs it, but Windows refuses to let you make use of PEA to extend the address range. I only semi-recently learned this myself. Not that it matters much with 64bit everywhere.
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.
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
I got the 4 Samsung 2TB drives in my main tower in a semi regular newegg sale for $65/each back pre-flood, and even without the sale they were ~$80. Now they're ~$120, with sales to ~$100 :-/
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
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.