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SSD Prices Continue 3-Year Plunge
Lucas123 writes "After dropping 20% in the second quarter of 2012 alone, SSD prices fell another 10% in the second half of the year. The better deals for SSDs are now around 80- to 90-cents-per-gigabyte of capacity, though some sale prices have been even lower, according IHS and other research firms. For some models, the prices have dropped 300% over the past three years. At the same time, hard disk drive prices have remained "inflated" — about 47% higher than they were prior to the 2011 Thai floods, according to DRAMeXchange."
I can't wait until we finally get at that intersection point of SSD and HDD pricing. Why? Because when that happens the harddrive manufacturers hopefully will either die and reduce down to niche markets, or they will finally wake up and realize they can't keep their prices artificially inflated. I've never had an SSD, and had a very bad experience with a first gen one. However, I need to build another computer in the near future and I've been thinking long and hard about SSD versus HDD. Still undecided, but with trends like this, I'll be opting for SSD
NCIX just had 3TB barracuda's on for $109 while my memory is not photographic, I'm pretty dam positive that is cheaper than a year ago. but it's most certainly not 50% higher for dam sure.
I've just bought a 2TB USB 3.0 external drive for £64.99 with free delivery, I think that's as low as it has ever been. Can I name the seller? The biggest online seller of computer goods in the U.K. (I think).
What the fuck planet are they shopping on? Fell 10% my ass! Ever since black friday, I can't even find a reasonably priced drive anywhere. I got two Vertex 4 128GB drives for $80 ea and that's the third time they've been on sale for that price. Now they're $139! That's a $59 increase! The cheapest I saw in the last 2 weeks was a $90 crucial M4 120GB old model and those aren't even that great. Before the holidays, I could throw a mouse blindly and hit a website with a $65 60GB SSD from a respectable manufacturer and now even those are all above $70. Coincidentally, spinning drives have fallen like they're going off a cliff so the article is actually twice as wrong. 320GB intellipower and 1TB Seagate 524AS models have been $50-60! That's slightly below what I paid for mine 2 years ago when I built my computer and during the flooding, they hit $180. I hate when some idiot posts precisely the opposite of reality on slashdot and calls it a story.
I think that Hard disks will live longer more than expected, specially in desktop and laptop computers. According to Internet hard disk live about 5 years, but personal computers hard disk can work more than 7 years I guess.
This report is for the whole 12 months, but recently, prices are now within 10-20% of the pre-flood levels.
Cheapest UK price for a 2TB disk in mid 2010 was £49.99. Can pick one up now for £59.99 (Aria UK has deals)
3TB drives I've seen for about 90 quid. These were far more expensive before flooding.
SSD prices seem to have stabilised though. 256GB is about £150, 128GB is about £79. Been that way for a while.
The summary says that the prices on some models has dropped 300%. That's impossible, since the price cannot drop below zero, unless of course THEY are paying YOU to take the drive (as in soviet russia).
of the extra fee or increase in prices that companies such as FedEx imposed when gas prices were around $4. They claimed it was in response to the increase in fuel prices.
Now that prices have fallen by 50-70 cents, I don't see those fees being revoked.
Same thing with hard drive prices. Initially, with limited supply, a price increase was justified. Now that production is back to normal, I don't see the prices coming down.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
What the hell does a 300% price drop even look like?
A 300% price drop? That's amazing!
Can't wait to get my drive and check for twice its cost in the mail!
At $.90 per GB, SSDs are still about 15 times more expensive than the same amount of hard disk space. Forget about trying to put your 2 TB of data on SSDs. I like the trend of reduced prices for SSDs. They are finally affordable enough to put my most active data on (e.g. boot files, applications), but if you think they will be a viable complete substitute for hard drives anytime soon, think again.
from the article: 'Despite hard drive prices remaining high coupled with the continual decline of SSD prices, the per-GB price of the largest capacity SSDs (300-600GB) are currently 9 times more expensive than 500GB notebook hard-disk-drives from the Idealo study.'
Look, I know there's some exceptions, but for the most part when a product is made by more than one company, the price is slowly lowered as they try to outsell each other.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
They're paying people to take SSDs now? That's what they meant by prices dropping 300% right?
I'm still trying to figger out a use for a drive so small. Even a 250g main drive is kinda pushing it for space.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
For some models, the prices have dropped 300% over the past three years
Great, so this means that in 2012, to get some SSD disk you will be paid twice the price you would have paid to get them in 2009 ?
Sounds interesting, just the kind of storage I need for my perpetual motion simulations !
Could use a new hard drive or 2. Not paying post Thailand inflated price tho so they're not getting a cent out of me.
Some HDD sizes are now cheaper than before the Flood. The 3TB 3.5" models should definitely be cheaper, simply because the technology has matured with the move from four platters to three 1TB platters. Increased areal density has also pushed down the cost of 1TB 2.5" (laptop) drives.
I'll wait for 500GB SSDs to go down to the prices of today's 120GB SSDs before making the plunge. I have a 750GB 2.5" HDD installed on my SFF desktop, with about 300GB of data that can be moved to an external drive.
I'm also looking at installing mSATA SSDs, which cost about the same as full-size SSDs. With the graphics now built into the CPU and mSATA, I'd have almost the entire system on the motherboard, making it easier to just unplug the PSU when changing desktop cases.
Let's think about who the primary user affected by this is: the computer builder / tinkerer. There's ssds that come as a feature on higher end laptops / desktops and I'm sure those are affected by the price drop too, but the OEM will probably pocket those profits.
So, yes SSD space is more expensive than even inflated disk drives, but the performance difference is significant in the 4-5x range. Most people that this applies to probably already know this, but what you do is buy an SSD that fits all your mission critical games / apps (those game take up A LOT of space very quickly and are a major decision when deciding how big of an ssd you need) and everything else: data, movies, music goes on a spinning disk, preferably encrypted. You can install your apps / games on the disk drive, but you're kind of missing the main performance boost for those things. So buy a bit more than you need to future proof it and couple it with a spinning disk to actually store data. Doing it this way makes buying an ssd make a lot more sense.
Cpt. obvious strikes again, but reading some of the discussion, maybe not for everyone.
though some sale prices have been even lower
You don't say!
the prices have dropped 300%
They can't even give them away!
I payed $300 to upgrade my Mac Mini's drive to an 256 GB SSD. Therefore prices haven't changed in three years.
How do prices drop 300%?
"The better deals for SSDs are now around 80- to 90-cents-per-gigabyte of capacity"? Where's this guy been?
The better deals for SSDs are now close to 50 cents a gigabyte. Two months ago I picked up four 128GB Samsung 830s for $70 each. This past month I've seen a PNY 120GB for $70, an Intel 160GB for $90, and the 128GB Samsung for $70 again. Better deals on larger SSDs (over 200GB) are now 70 cents and less - Newegg just had the a 500GB Samsung 840 for $330 (66 cents/GB).
If a price is lowered by 100%, its cost is zero. How can prices "plunge" 300%?
.....(*compared to last year's price drop of 1/billionth of a penny).
"For some models, the prices have dropped 300% over the past three years"
That means that I should get paid 200% the price of the SSD when I "purchase" it.
And 384K disks; which was double the average PC. A 100G of flash stores hundreds of hours of musics and tens of hours of video
% reduction = (A-B)/A*100
a= original price, b = new price
300% = 300/100
So you are subtracting (300/100) x 100 = 300
And 100 - 300 = -200
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've never had an SSD, and had a very bad experience with a first gen one.
Are you old enough to have tried the first affordable hard disks widely available to the consumers ? A lot of them was terrible at this time. Full scan of the media was a common procedure to mark bad sectors. Media deterioration, heads crash and motors failure at start up was probably as common as the SSD problems we see today.
The hard disk are much reliable today, but still have a limited life time and have a probability to fail. I am certain that the SSD can a least archive the same kind of reliability in the future.
Apparently it's true!
I got an email this morning from the assistant to the president!
All I need is some of your personal information and some cash to prove your interest in this fine offering.
No brain, no pain.
Supposedly the lack of moving parts is better, but from what I've read, the reliability of SSD drives isn't necessarily any better than that of traditional HDDs. That, combined with a 5X or greater premium in terms of price, and I'll stick with the traditional hard drive, thank you.
At the link you gave, Seagate says, "Up to 3 x faster than a traditional HDD". There is a superscript 1 for a footnote, but no footnote.
"Up to 3 x faster" can mean 10% faster. There are marketing people who have no knowledge of technology and no interest in technology who believe that marketing always includes some kind of lying or sneakiness.
And, what happens when one fails? Are there weird failure modes in which your files get scrambled? Seagate's web pages are not reassuring.
The article is written to sell SSDs. We are the eyeballs needed by the SSD manufacturers. Telling us SSD prices are closer to 50 cents a gig will keep us away from anything more expensive than that. So they cook up some inflated price (like the MSRP) and will you look at that, I can find it a dime a gig cheaper! I'm buying one right now!!1!
I come here for the love
Every time you write it, you sound 1.5 times dorkier.
I have a 2011 macbook air, with the malware bundled with it (macos something or other) removed and replaced with win 8, and its by far the fastest computer ive ever used.
I blame the SSD.
Apps open instantly, visual studio doesnt take forever to open a project, explorer is responsive, and even the start menu search thing (supplied by a start menu emulation app) can do searches instantly (as could built in win7 start menu search), which makes opening apps, docs etc easy and useful.
SSDs are defo the future for desktops, with NAS hard drives for large stuff that doesnt need loads of random access (mpgs etc).
Agree! Currently I'm using a Corsair F120 for my SO and main games and apps. The rest of my stuff goes to normal, run of the mill HDD. This SSD was probably the most effective upgrade I've ever done, both in terms of value for money (payed around 120 € more than a year ago) as well as pure performance. I think that having a main SSD drive (a 120 GB one will be enough for having the SO + some stuff), along with one or more additional standard HDD should be next "unofficial" mandatory config any new computer nowadays.
I don't bother with HDD except external storage. The Revodrive works great and uses the PCI x16 port.
I'll continue buying the cheap hard disks because SSDs are not my bottleneck. My biggest bottleneck is my brain. It takes me a long time to read. Takes me even longer to write. Now if I could upgrade my brain I'd gladly spend the money!