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