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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."
"Artificially" inflated?
No, you can't name the seller. Slashdot is a tyranny.
OCZ Vertex drives have had a consistently 5% return rate (that's 1 in 20) since May 2012 now. I would stay the hell away from the Vertexes in particular, as they're closer to 7%, the company as a whole is closer to 5%. Granted, that's return rate, not confirmed failure, but a return rate that's been consistently ten times higher than the rest of their competition should give you pause when buying cheap hardware. Compare to 0.5% for manufacturers like Intel and Samsung.
moox. for a new generation.
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
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.
2TB drives used to be 69 and below, they are currently sitting between 90 and 100.
70* 1.47 = $102
47% higher seems about right.
There's a large, smoking hole in the ground where the price fell through the Earth's crust.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
I've never had an SSD, and had a very bad experience with a first gen one
So what was the bad experience you had with a first gen SSD besides not having one?
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 !
Here are the hard numbers for anyone who's curious:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html
- Intel 0.45% (against 1.73%)
- Samsung 0.48% (N/A)
- Corsair 1.05% (against 2.93%)
- Crucial 1.11% (against 0.82%)
- OCZ 5.02% (against 7.03%)
Return rates specifically for OCZ models:
- 40.00% for the OCZ Petrol 64 GB
- 39.42% for the OCZ Petrol 128 GB
- 30.85% for the OCZ Octane 128 GB SATA II
- 29.46% for the OCZ Octane 64 GB SATA II
- 9.73% for the OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB 3.5"
- 9.59% for the OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB
- 6.73% for the OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB
- 5.43% for the OCZ Agility 3 240 GB
- 5.12% for the OCZ Vertex Plus 128 GB
Also if you have a Crucial M4 make sure you have the correct firmware as Crucial keeps releasing/shipping units with buggy firmware updates that can brick your drive.
moox. for a new generation.
Given that my first disk drive held 72 kilobytes, I find your comment a bit funny.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Put your OS on it, and application binaries. You can have a second drive for everything else.
If you are looking to build a system (I will assume a desktop), then don't worry about waiting for cost parity. There is really no reason to put most of your files on an SSD, unless you are building a server that requires lots of random I/O requests. Instead, go both ways: purchase a modestly-sized SSD for the OS and Apps (64 GB), and a conventional spinning disc for bulk storage (photos, video, etc., 500 - 4000 GB). Sized appropriately, you can configure a system that gives you the speed where you want it and capacity where you want it for a decent price.
I read that as "tranny" and it was much funnier.
Yes. Margins are much higher. Essentially what happened:
a) A situation of oversupply in the HDD market leading to thin and sometimes negative margins.
b) Huge drop in supply due to natural disaster
c) drop in supply causes sharp increase in price which leads remaining suppliers to experience high margins
d) as supply comes back on board margins remain high because there isn't oversupply
I'm not sure you understand how percentages work.
moox. for a new generation.
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've had bad experiences with busses before, but I've never owned a bus.
"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).
I would not mind seeing SSDs and HDDs merge, with a smart "SAN in a can" drive controller. This drive controller would do autotiering. If a region of blocks is used often, it gets moved to the SSD. If more areas get used more frequently, that set of blocks goes to the spinning platters. This way, over time (assuming consistent usage), there is a good balance between SSD speed and the capacity of traditional HDD.
LOL. Works both ways, I suppose.
We've been over this at some point... OCZ has a greater volume of sales generating higher return rates, it's a rule of QC. Crucial (#1 lowest returns) has relatively minor sales in comparison so not as many are shipping out that can fail.
What? Higher sales generates higher returns in absolute quantity, not in terms of return rates. Return rates are a percentage, and are independent of the quantity shipped (although a larger shipped quantity means the rates will more accurately reflect actual failure percentages).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Other people buy Big Macs and Fords too...
That just means that they have no clue, or no taste, or just buy things based on some sort of conspicuous consumer herd mentality.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
LOL. Works both ways, I suppose.
That's what (s)he said!
One thing I'd recommend is going with a RAID 1 setup for the HDDs. Drive failure is still a constant issue, and there is a big difference between seeing a dialog that pops up and going "crap, time to replace a drive", compared to hoping you have a recent backup... somewhere. Even if documents are saved on Dropbox or backed up via Mozy, it still is a PITA to reload/activate the OS, reload/activate apps, etc.
For SSDs, I have not seen any concrete proof that they are any more reliable than HDDs, so I'd have a second controller and have those mirrored or RAID-ed as well, so their I/O performance isn't linked to the I/O of the slower HDDs.
Too bad Moses spent so much time trying to save squirrels and zebras that he couldn't be bothered to save some of that tech.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
And hence not artificially inflated.
I keep reposting the same advice, but look into NTFS junction points. It's much safer than trying to pick a random folder to install to. They work like Symlinks on Unix-like systems.
Sounds like a perfectly functioning market to me, nothing artificial about it. If a government were putting pressure on a manufacturer to increase their price, or speculation caused people to buy up huge stocks in anticipation of a price increase, that would be artificial.
You mean like one of these?
Yeah, more like "not articifically deflated any longer".
I remember the the brick that was the 52mb external HD for my Amiga 500 haha... harddrives today could cost 10 times more and I'd still consider them crazy cheap, and moaning about their price seems kinda greedy... It's not like anyone with a real need for anything, or real money problems for that matter, ever does that. Or maybe I just missed it.
They are supported natively. Use mklink from the command prompt. It's built in on at least Windows 7+.
quantity goes up this gains a higher margin with higher quantities. This is why you don't term your 10m a year product line with a 5% return rate. But on a 500k a year product line, 5% may not be as acceptable. So, if OCZ sold 1m drives and crucial 100k... and OCZ's failure rate is 5% and crucial's is 2%, your chances are still higher to get a working drive with OCZ.
To quote someone's Slashdot sig:
Protip: Never go full retard.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
The problem is like in X86 there isn't any real competition and I'd say its worse than in X86 because at least AMD, which I've been building exclusively for the past 5+ years, the performance is "good enough" for the vast majority of users including the gamers but in the HDD arena the competition is making such piss poor products that I'd be afraid to buy them.
You see pre-flood we had 4 players in the game, Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and WD, but now there is only WD and Seagate and ever since the Maxtor buyout Seagate quality has really gone down the shitter so there isn't really any choice but WD. Pre-flood I was buying Samsung EcoGreens at $35 a TB but since the buyouts I've found anything that Seagate makes over 500Gb to be Russian roulette with your data while the WDs have a MUCH lower failure rate, at least from what I've seen in the shop.
So I'd say what they are doing certainly isn't illegal, although why they allowed Seagate and WD to buy out the competition to make it a duopoly I'll never know, but since Seagate seems unable to fix the serious failure rate of their over 500Gb drives you have WD charging 40%+ over what Seagate is charging and they'll get it as nobody wants to risk losing their data. Just go look at any of the BF and Xmas sales and you'll see what I mean, the Seagates are selling for $60-$70 for 1Tb, $70-$80 for a TB and a half, while WD is selling for $100 a Tb, $150 for a 2TB and they can't seem to keep them in stock whereas the Seagates have been on sale for weeks and they appear to have plenty of stock left.
Its not the market itself keeping the prices high, its the fact you really only have one supplier worth buying. Like I said you can take an AMD quad or Hexa and even the gamers will be happy with the performance but NOBODY is happy when they buy that cheapo Seagate 1.5TB and it craps itself in 3 months and takes their data with it. WD knows this so they keep their prices high, knowing that all it takes is getting burned by Seagate for a time or two for the customers to see its better to spend the money than lose their stuff. This is just a perfect example of "you get what you pay for" where someone who makes a better product charges more than the guy making cheap shit and this is why the prices remain high on the WD side of the aisle, they know their competition just can't seem to make a good product ATM.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.