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Most SSDs Now Under a Dollar Per Gigabyte
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."
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.
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.
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.
Most SSDs Now Under a Dollar Per Gigabyte
So does that mean a 1 TB drive is $1000 or $1024?
There's no place like
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).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
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)
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.
I am an engineer at an SSD company and I would like to vouch for this being a great explanation. Thank You.
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...
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.