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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."
What is SSD? Is that a new form of LSD? Context please editors.
Yes my SSD HD is working well Frostr piss
Slashdot sucks more & more
This is why gas prices are the way they are.
The spike them up several dollars, watch people moan and groan about it, then slip a dollar off and watch as everyone rejoices.
But you fail to notice that they're still charging you too much.
Wake me up when prices are back down to normal on hard drives. Until then, I'm not buying.
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
You're just inventing words as you write, aren't you?
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
a facT: FreeBSD Baby...don't fear
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!
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..
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Among several other things, "SI" is the abbreviation for International System of Units, commonly called the metric system: 256 SI GB vs. 256 KiB.
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.
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!
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.
SSD Prices Down 46% Since 2011! But will ssd prices continue down ?
I really love club dresses ,
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.