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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
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.
Solid State Drive *
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.
Salsa Saturated Dorito
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Recently we put some higher-end drives in our servers and we love the hell out of them.
There have been a couple of reports that just came out that suggest that SSDs can pay for themselves in many server environments. It isn't just the power savings (remember that non-residential customers often get charged more per kWh), but that many servers are often disk I/O bound. When you replace spinning platter drives with SSDs, you might be able to cut your server count in half. Admins have found that they can completely eliminate caching web servers because the app servers can crank out so much.
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.
Doesn't seem to really hold true. Here's an example from my first generation SSD which is 97% full using AS SSD. If what you said was true, that would be reflected like a traditional drive. But it's not, even with benchmarks. It's speeds are nearly in stock bench wise still, even using other tools it's the same.
http://i46.tinypic.com/1zbcg43.png
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
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
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.
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
FUD! I have a 120GB SSD in my laptop that has been running for over a year and a half and has had a total of zero issues. According to SSD Life I have read over 7.2TB from it and written over 3.5TB of data to it. It shows that at my current usage rate I have over 8.5 years left until I run of of writes, and that is a low end estimate.
RAID is good if you got the cash to pick up two drives, but only really necessary if you have a massive need to keep the system operational 24x7.
Other than that, if the drive starts losing sectors (HDD or SSD) it's time to just replace it.
If it's a server, I'd say yeah. If it's a desktop, as long as your backing it up (time machine?), it's an overkill.
-- 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
Yes. You RAID SSDs for exactly the same reason(s) you RAID hard disks.
No, it's actually a refusal by everyone else
"Everyone else" not so much. Even my 68 year old mother picked up on 1kb=1024 bytes very quickly. (I say this because people always claim "it isn't for you, it's for mom" when arguing against even the tiniest amount of complexity) It's really more those with a vested interest in reduced capacities who were pushing it -- basically drive manufacturers for the most part.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
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!
Keep in mind that currently, the Intel desktop RAID RST does not pass TRIM command to the SSDs when in a RAID volume. Supposedly that will change in a newer version of the RST driver. Not sure when, but it's a feature to be added and has been in the works for some time now.
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)
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.