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Most SSDs Now Under a Dollar Per Gigabyte

Posted by Soulskill on from the more-bits-per-buck dept.

crookedvulture writes "SSD prices continue plummeting. In just the past quarter, street prices have fallen by double-digit percentages for most models, with some slashed by 30% or more. We've reached the point where the majority of drives cost less than a dollar per gigabyte, and that's without the special coupon codes and mail-in rebates usually attached to weekly deals. Lower-capacity drives seem more resistant to deep price cuts, making 120-256GB offerings the best values right now. It's nice to see a new class of devices go from prohibitively expensive to eminently affordable in such a relatively short amount of time."

37 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Don't let it fool you by EmagGeek · · Score: 2, Informative

    The reason they've come down so much in price is because of the smaller process sizes being used, requiring less silicon for the same capacity.

    Of course you pay for it with reduced endurance and drive lifetime.

    There's no such thing as a free lunch.

    1. Re:Don't let it fool you by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Would you claim the same for processors? They use less silicon for the same speed. Just curious. I have no idea how this relates to reliability.

    2. Re:Don't let it fool you by LordLimecat · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, it absolutely does with flash memory. This is a known issue-- just google the write endurance of 25nm flash vs 34nm.

      Whether or not it is a sufficient difference to worry about is another issue-- but absolutely a 1GB flash stick will last longer on 34nm process than it would on 25nm process. Of course, that also ignores that smaller processes will generally have higher capacities, which causes the endurance of a particular cell to be less important.

    3. Re:Don't let it fool you by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The difference is in price. Even discounting inflation, that 1997 laptop likely cost you (or whoever bought it first) well over $2500 or more. Now you can get the same relative level of bleeding-edge badass for less than half the price. Hell, look at the 1980's-era machines... At the high end, those things cost you almost as much as a new compact car at the time. Nowadays, you can use one to scare the kids into eating their vegetables, but that's about it. ("Now Johnny, you either eat that effing broccoli or you'll be talking to facebook over a 9600-baud modem for a month - you hear me, boy!?" )

      One other thing, though - not all new items die off in 5-6 years. Instead, we just get bored with it and move on. I have an old 1994-era dual G5 Mac that I can pull out of the closet and, in full confidence, expect it to come right up. Same story with the 2001-era Dell Inspiron 8100 I bought, then eventually gave to my mother - and she still uses the damned thing almost daily (yes the battery is pretty much dead weight by now, but it still works just fine otherwise).

      --
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    4. Re:Don't let it fool you by fustakrakich · · Score: 2

      The difference is in price.

      And that's why I expect these 'low priced' SSDs to last about as long as any other chaff. And now, with almost the entire process being mechanized there's no justification for it.

      --
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    5. Re:Don't let it fool you by Guspaz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Despite all the, errm, uninformed ladies and gentlemen responding with kneejerk reactions, smaller process sizes really do reduce the program/erase endurance of NAND flash. At 50nm, MLC was at about 10,000 cycles. 34nm took us down to about 5,000 cycles. 25nm took us down to 3,000 to 5,000 cycles, which is where we're at now. So, technically, we are reducing cost at the expense of reliability.

      There are mitigating factors, however. Over the same timespan, SSD controllers have improved, substantially reducing write amplification, and capacities have increased, preventing the total *writable* lifespan of drives from decreasing.

      As an example, a 60GB drive good for 10,000 cycles with a write amplification factor of 2.0 has a total theoretical write lifespan of 300 TB. On the other hand, a 120GB drive good for 3,000 cycles with a write amplification factor of 1.1 has a theoretical write lifespan of 327 TB. Despite having less than a third of the "reliability" (on a cell level), the drive can actually handle slightly MORE activity overall.

      It will always be a balancing act between cost and reliability when it comes to SSDs. As compared to Single Level Cells (SLC), Multi Level Cells (MLC), used by all consumer drives, has a tenth the endurance, but half the cost (storing two bits per cell rather than one). Basically, SLCs store data by trying to differentiate between two voltage levels: high, low. MLC increases that to four states (high, medium-high, medium-low, low). The reduced endurance is because it becomes harder to differentiate the levels sooner. Triple Level Cells (TLC) is starting to show up, and this stores three bits per cell using eight states. It helps density, but once again, at the cost of endurance.

      This might be a good time to point out that cell-level "reliability" has no real bearing on the reliability of the entire SSD. Reduced cycle endurance means your drive will wear out faster, but it will still take years to wear them out (if ever), and when they do, they don't lose data, they just stop being able to write. If you're having your SSDs just up and die on you out of the blue, that has nothing to do with the trend towards decreasing write endurance.

    6. Re:Don't let it fool you by AHuxley · · Score: 2

      Warranty on trusted brands is still 3 years. 5 years if you shop around.

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    7. Re:Don't let it fool you by franc0ph0bic · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I am an engineer at an SSD company and I would like to vouch for this being a great explanation. Thank You.

    8. Re:Don't let it fool you by 0123456 · · Score: 2

      Completely filling the disk and deleting it is a pretty easy life for an SSD. Creating lots of small files, such as repeated compilation, can easily kill them within a year.

      Of course the savings in programmer time from faster compilations easily outweigh that. But there are plenty of use cases which will kill an SSD much faster than an HDD.

    9. Re:Don't let it fool you by citizenr · · Score: 2

      Reduced cycle endurance means your drive will wear out faster, but it will still take years to wear them out (if ever), and when they do, they don't lose data, they just stop being able to write. If you're having your SSDs just up and die on you out of the blue, that has nothing to do with the trend towards decreasing write endurance.

      1 try using Bcache and you will be swapping SSD drives every month
      2 when SSD runs out of write cycles it usually dies, there is no graceful degradation

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    10. Re:Don't let it fool you by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2

      Please tell that to Apple.

    11. Re:Don't let it fool you by Adriax · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Modem connected to the sound card of a better machine on broadband running an emulator to go bridge it to skype, which dials another computer in the same house running an emulated modem bank connected to the house broadband.

      Oh how I wish I had thought this up as a joke and not seen it in production to keep a 20 year old piece of software happy...

      --
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    12. Re:Don't let it fool you by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If you are an engineer at an SSD company I'd like to ask you a question that has been bugging me for awhile...WTF is it with the controller chips and just dying? I've got gamer customers that buy all the big name SSDs trying to stay top dog on the benches and frankly no matter what brand you buy its NOT the cells dying that bites you in the ass, its the controller chips.

      Hell if it was just the cells dying? I honestly wouldn't care because as others have pointed out when the cells die you basically have a DVD ROM, you can still get the data that was there off, you just can't write more data to it. But when the controller dies? Give it up chuck, everything you had is gone, bye bye, adios muchacho.

      So why can't the OEMs seem to fix the controller issues? Or at the very least have a backup controller that will insure the drive fails to read only? It just seems to me like a problem that should have been licked by now but you hit the forums or check Google and you'll see there is still plenty of folks getting bit in the ass by this issue. I'm sure i speak for most folks when i say I don't give a rat's ass about the drive, that's easily replaceable but my data? Is not.

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    13. Re:Don't let it fool you by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      Actually I'd say you are both right and both wrong. yes parts like cheap HDDs, cheap DVDs, cheap SSDs, hell cheap everything, do die a hell of a lot quicker but are cheaper as a result the reason most stuff gets shitcanned is you can't get the parts at a price that makes it worth fixing. hell I have 2 laptops sitting in the shop closet right now, one a nice C2D 17 inch, the other a nice Athlon dual core netbook (boy you can't find netbooks with real Athlons anymore) and in both cases the cost of replacement parts? Cost more than they are worth. I'm gonna take the Athlon over to an engineer friend as a last ditch attempt to save it (customer fried the power input by cutting the power cable with his chair) but the replacement board costs more than the entire unit would on the used market and have you ever priced a 17 inch laptop screen? Holy shit do they gouge the hell out of you!

      This is why I've always preferred desktops and tell customers not to sink a lot of money in laptops, because at least with the desktops you are talking bog standard parts made by a half a dozen companies and the competition keeps prices low. Motherboards, GPUs, CPUs, drives, its all plentiful and cheap. With the damned laptops its all proprietary as hell, nothing fits anything else, and because of that the OEMs, which don't want you to fix anything but buy a new one anyway, can gouge the living hell out of you on replacement parts.

      I just hope my engineer buddy can save the netbook, as a real Athlon dual with a real separate GPU with 128Mb of its own VRAM in a 12 inch FF? Man you just can't find something like that anymore.

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    14. Re:Don't let it fool you by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That still don't explain why they don't have a backup emergency controller, something that will come on if the main controller fails, mark the whole drive as read only and say 'Your controller has failed, get your data off NOW".

      Because right now the SSD OEMs are really shooting themselves in the face as it only takes one "flip the switch and poof! Your data is gone" to turn people off your product for years. like I said we really don't care about the drive, that's easily replaced. the data? Not so much.

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    15. Re:Don't let it fool you by aralin · · Score: 2

      80% of those controllers are from LSI (Sandforce) and the VCs fired very early the CTO and with him went the chief chip designer and most of the senior engineering staff. They are just coasting on what they had 3 years ago. So there. A bit of insider news.

      --
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    16. Re:Don't let it fool you by franc0ph0bic · · Score: 2

      What it comes down to is that if a drive was something like $15 more expensive, but had failure protection, the consumer market would simply not buy it. Right now we are really forced into making drives as cheap as possible and as fast as possible, with reliability being a lesser concern. This issue is mostly that once a single SSD company makes a less reliable, but faster and cheaper drive, they will outsell the companies that make the slower, expensive, reliable drives, so everyone has to follow suit. There are lots of very reliable drives out there though - they are just made as enterprise drives. They will have better controllers, more reliable firmware, more over-provisioning, but will be much slower, and cost roughly double that of a consumer drive.

  2. Still need a big data drive in most uses by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Still need a big data drive in most uses

    as 120GB-256GB is small for some uses and the cloud is slower and ISP data caps suck.

    1. Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses by corychristison · · Score: 2

      I do agree, but the 120-128GB range will do the average Joe now.

      Its been a while since I've used Windows but the OS only takes around 20GB. 100GB is useful for most peoples word documents, some music, movies, etc.

      Its the media hoarders like myself that need the big "Media" drives.

      I am personally looking ti move to an SSD. Even with my workload an amount of data in my /home partition a 128GB drive is more than enought for my OS/personal data/work data. I currently have about 1.3TB of movies, music and Televison episodes I've collected over the past 10 years or so. A lot of them purchased or gifts from friends/family on dvd/bluray that I have ripped for use on my media center somy kids don't destroy the discs. I have most of the discs still packed away. The kids ruined a few of them though.

    2. Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses by epp_b · · Score: 2

      So? Get an SSD for OS, software and frequently accessed files and an HDD for large capacity.

      I've been seriously toying with the idea of buying an SSD for my laptop and installing a media bay adapter for an HDD to replace the optical drive that I almost never use.

    3. Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      Pictures, videos, and music? I can tell you I've had to swap out drives for a LOT of customers because of those three, HD cams and camcorders are frankly dirt cheap now and when mamma is filming everything junior does? Tends to suck up some space. Ripping your CD collections to your PC is pretty old hat now, even my older customers had either already ripped their music or asked me while I had it in there to show them how to rip their music and 20 years worth of CDs? Again not easy on the space.

      This is what i tell my customers when it comes to SSDs...if its gonna go in a laptop, where you have everything backed up to a USB drive and need the extra battery life and improved performance? Sure SSD works there. if its gonna go in a desktop as an OS drive while leaving the HDD for backups and data? Again not a bad use case. if its something mission critical or is gonna seriously hurt if the drive controller fries and is down for a few days while we get a replacement? then no, that isn't a smart idea.

      Both style of drives have their place, and with Win 7 having superfetch as long as you have plenty of RAM the only real gains you'll see is boot. Again this is GREAT for mobile, where you are dealing with slower CPUs and spinning that drive sucks power, but desktops? Meh, its okay, for the average person with average PC usage its really not gonna make a big difference in their lives.

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    4. Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      Now you would think that was the case unixsc, but it ain't. i have some gamer customers that buy new SSDs pretty much constantly because they want to biggest and baddest (hell one has his grandma on a skulltrail, that was the weakest hand me down he had, swear to God) but its NOT the cells dying that bites you right in the ass, its the controller.

      In fact that has been one has kept me from recommending SSDs for anything but mobile, and even those only for those that are willing to stick to a backup schedule, because I can tell you the SSD OEMs are still having some SERIOUS issues with the controller chips.

      Now maybe its like how Seagate drives above 700Gb suck because they used cheapo ARM controllers and crappy code from their Maxtor buyout, maybe they have a vendor in the chain cutting corners on QA and QC, who knows, but I can tell you for some damned reason and it don't seem to matter who made the drive that the controller will fail long before the drive has lost enough cells to be worthless. And this is a BIG problem as with the cells when they die they just become read only but when that controller fails you flip the switch and there is just nothing, it doesn't even show up in BIOS or give you any warning at all, seriously nasty.

      That's why while I'll put one in my netbook after the holidays, since I'll have an OS image and I won't have any data on the thing I can't easily replace, I'd be reluctant to put one in my desktop. I use this for work as well as play and flipping the switch one morning and have it go tits up? NOT good.

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  3. Some good values. Read reviews to avoid the duds. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Newegg has sales all the time. I've picked up some great drives for a steal. Non-crap 120-128GB devices for less than 80 dollars is a shock.
    The price of flash is imploding and the quality of the drives/controllers/firmware is improving quite a bit. The latest crop of devices are far better in terms of speed and reliability so don't bother getting an older model to save money. Only pick up a latest gen device. You can find them cheap too, don't worry.

    The latest crop of sandforce based drives are fast and cheap and seem pretty reliable. (The new firmware really makes them shine)
    Intels are still more expensive, but are generally the most reliable of the bunch.

    I picked up an OCZ vertex 4 128gb for less than 80 bux and it gave my laptop a whole new life.

  4. big data drive is in my NAS by Chirs · · Score: 2

    I have a dual-drive RAID1 NAS with 2TB drives that is my main household storage. I've got a couple of 2TB external drives to back up the NAS, and one of them lives off-site.

    The other devices all mostly access big files from the NAS.

    Works fairly well.

  5. Calculation by darkpixel2k · · Score: 5, Funny

    Most SSDs Now Under a Dollar Per Gigabyte

    So does that mean a 1 TB drive is $1000 or $1024?

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    1. Re:Calculation by martin-boundary · · Score: 2

      Sucker! $640 should be enough to buy *any* SSD drive.

  6. Re:SSD still not fast enough by corychristison · · Score: 2

    There seem to be 3 classes for SSD.
    - Consumer (what the article is referring to) - good speeds for a good price.
    - Business - reliable drive w/ good speed for about double the price
    - Server/Power Users (PCI-E drives) - insane performance/IO for an insane price.

  7. Flash wears out. Smaller flash wears out faster by Firethorn · · Score: 2

    okay, unlike processors, it's already known that flash only has so many write cycles before it's worn out. Thus far, the reports I've read say that smaller process flash, especially MLC flash, wears out quicker. HOWEVER, shrinking the process so you fit 4X the cells into a given area doesn't give you cells with 1/4 the lifespan; maybe 2/3rds, maybe 1/2. That part isn't clear. Thus, a theoretical 1TB flash chip might only have 10TB worth of 'writes' to it, that 10TB is still better than a 1GB chip that has 100GB worth of writes. Wear leveling takes care of the rest.

    --
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  8. Re:SSD still not fast enough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    There's also at least 3 classes of "Consumer" drives.
    1. Cheap. (usually using older gen controllers, low endurance flash, ...) the low-end stuff from dozens of manufacturers.
    2. Fast. (bleeding edge controllers and firmware, sometimes with severe bugs...). OCZ is *the* name in this segment.
    3. Reliable. Slower than 2, commonly using binned flash rated for more writes and extensively tested controller firmware on previous-gen controllers. Speedwise somewhere between 1 and 2. (intel and samsung mostly come to mind here).

  9. Reality check by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

    Consumer disk storage is 6 cents a gig. Still a factor of 16 less than flash. As long as that ratio holds there will be no overnight takeover of the storage market by flash. Instead it's a creeping progression largely driven by the mobile market, outside of which the vast majority of mass storage being sold is still rotating disks. Sure a few geeks like me have begun to swap out their noisy, slow hard disks for ssd, but that's a few geeks. The PC market, the cloud, and enterprise storage, which together completely dwarf the mobile segment in terms of capacity, will continue to prefer cheap over fast and quiet for some time to come.

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    1. Re:Reality check by jo_ham · · Score: 2

      Apple already has started to do this - the Air and the rMBP both have stock SSD drives. I would be shocked if the updated iMac that should probably arrive sometime before Christmas didn't ship with a stock SSD+HDD combo on the higher spec model too.

    2. Re:Reality check by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      That "flatlining" is simply reflecting the fact that a 5 year old PC is still useful but a year old ARM device is considered rediculously out of date. The PC market is saturated and the PC is a mature technology.

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  10. It's not just consumer drives by bertok · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've been waiting for "enterprise" SSD prices to drop for ages, because even though I'm now on my fourth consumer SSD, I've only seen SSD drives in the enterprise space for three out of the last twenty customers or so! Anything esoteric you plug into a server magically becomes 10 to 50 times as expensive. Currently, that's SSD drives and GPUs. The latter has only some niche uses, but everybody could benefit from 1000x lower I/O latencies.

    I recently noticed that there's a new OCZ brand for enterprise SSD storage. They sell drives in every form factor, and with very impressive specs. Their drives are already between the $3-$7 per GB mark and dropping. Until recently, most vendors were selling the same kind of thing for over $15 per GB, which is insane.

    Competition is good! 8)

    1. Re:It's not just consumer drives by SScorpio · · Score: 3, Informative

      Enterprise SSDs are actually different from consumer SSDs though. Most Enterprise SSDs generally have higher IOP counts so you can get higher random access reads off them. The $15/GB drivers you saw were also likely SLC, SLC has a single bit per cell while MLC has two bits per cell. The cheaper OCZ is very likely an MLC drive.

  11. Yay for SSD boot drive. by eriks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just did a re-install about a month ago: 128GB adata SX900 -- which newegg now has for $15 less than I paid (always happens) -- on a 3+ year old system.

    Best. Upgrade. Ever.

    12 second boot instead of 45 seconds (not that I reboot much) but the big win: lag is nonexistent. Disk intensive stuff like browsing/picking through my heavy photo catalog just flies. Most of my stuff is, of course, still on spinning drives, but key apps & data, like email and photo libraries I'm working with are on the SSD. Actions that used to take several seconds (per photo) now are nearly instantaneous. Full-text searching through email is a lot faster. Sleep/Hibernate is practically instantaneous. $100 is nothing for not having to wait a few seconds (every few seconds!) when doing photo work. I make backups of critical data onto multiple spinning disks, regardless of what kind of disk I'm using, so reliability isn't a concern. I wish I took the plunge sooner.

    1. Re:Yay for SSD boot drive. by jo_ham · · Score: 2

      I think you have the right idea, and I'm sure you're not the only one; a smaller SSD boot drive with OS and apps and some data, with spinning drives for less speed-sensitive large files, with the crucial step of regular backups.

      Although, SSD or not, regular backups are always a crucial thing, and not just "up to the Cloud(tm)" - a cheap, large local drive (or a pair of them that mirror their data, but not in a RAID) with a simple automated backup solution is one of the best investments any computer user can make.

  12. Re: Reliability by MrL0G1C · · Score: 2

    No, Crucial's are currently by far the most reliable, Intel's are a distant second, see:
    Components returns rates (6)

    Although if you'd have said that last year then you'd have been correct (things change quickly).

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