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SSDs Approaching Price Parity With HDDs (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: Hard disk drive per-gigabyte pricing has remained relatively stagnant over the past three years, and prices are expected to be completely flat over at least the next two, allowing SSDs to significantly close the cost gap, according to a new report. The report, from DRAMeXchange, stated that this marks the fourth straight quarter that the SSD price decline has exceeded 10%. Over the past three years, SSDs have dropped from 31 to 13 cents per gig annually. In contrast, from 2012 to 2015, per gigabyte pricing for HDDs dropped just one cent per year from 9 cents in 2012 to 6 cents this year. However, through 2017, the per-gigabyte price of HDDs is expected to remain flat: 6 cents per gigabyte. Consumer SSDs were on average were selling for 99 cents a gigabyte in 2012. From 2013 to 2015, the price dropped from 68 cents to 39 cents per gig, meaning the average 1TB SSD sells for about $390 today. Next year, SSD prices will decline to 24 cents per gig and in 2017, they're expected to drop to 17 cents per gig. That means a 1TB SSD on average would retail for $170, though online prices are often much lower than average vendor retail prices. DRAMeXchange also stated that SSDs are expected to be in 31% of new consumer laptops next year, and by 2017 they'll be in 41%.
The numbers in the summary are contradictory. Yeah, I know this is Slashdot and what do you expect, but could we have at least _some_ level of editorial checking?
I've seen multiple deals in the last 4 weeks of 1TB (well, 960GB) SSD's ranging near the $200 US mark.
I'm gonna guess that $350 is the new "expensive" 1TB SSD in 2016, Q1/Q2 and then $200 becomes standard place for the cheapies by end of Q1.
Multiple articles, quoting multiple manufacturers seem to claim we'll be seeing, VERY large SSD's in less than 24 months and within 5 years, ridiculously big SSD's (in the 80->120TB mark, iirc)
I'd just like to see an SSD in the 10TB mark, "cheapie" or not, under $300 US within 24 months. My FreeNAs machine is spinning 6x5TB Toshiba 7200RPM disks and it's just gross. The heat, the noise, the failures. Just not fun.
In other news, Seagate made an interesting announcement, which went under the radar. They announced a plethora of different HDD models (I'm so sick of all the sub-product dilution, but I digress) one of which though was an 8TB NON Helium, NON SMR, NON HAMR tech.
It's plain, old, regular HDD - no read / re-write / write trickery, no obscure elements required. It's actually a bit of a shock, how long it's taken to release a larger than 6TB disk which works 'normally' The fact this announcement occured in the last month or two and how long ago it was the first 6TB HDD was announced (which didn't require fancy tech) I would have to surprisingly admit that the storage industry is indeed as speculated, moving incredibly rapidly towards ending magnetic drives, they see the writing on the wall and appear to be paying close attention to it.
(hence stagnated HDD price reductions at the top end, also)
FWIW: I've hated (and loved) hard disks since my first machine, with a 20MB MFM disk. I still recall the benchmarks. 18ms track to track, 80 or 90ms random reads, 640kb/s sustained (under DOS 6.22)
I purchased the first consumer 7200RPM disk, I think it was a 9gb or 18gb (?) version of the WD Expert, $600 at the time
I'll miss HDD's, SSD's have had some real bad stuff go on with them in the past 5 years but considering I plan to utilise them in a NAS eventually, with some redundancy, I'm looking forward to my server cupboard running a bit cooler, quieter and cheaper on electricity
I still don't understand how 3D Nand works or why it's so much cheaper but I'm glad it exists.
I had to replace my computer's failing spinning HD recently, and a trip to Microcenter cost me this:
$100 for a 250GB SSD
and $40 for a 1TB spinning HD.
Same manufacturer, and both were best in class prices. I think parity is a ways off yet...
Retail pricing for HDD's is already below $.03/GB, 8TB drives can be had for $230.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
> Over the past three years, SSDs have dropped from 31 to 13 cents per gig annually
What in the fuck does this mean? Does anyone even read these or is a bot posting them?
... not in the sense that they are close, only that they're getting less far. Current retail price for TBish HDDs is on the order of $0.06/GB; TFA for SSD is $0.39/GB, about six times as much.
How long do SDDs last now? That's basically all that keeps them from replacing HDDs by now.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Never is impossible. Given enough time, anything can happen.
I think if in the near future HDD manufacturers don't cut margins to compete with SSDs on price, smaller HDDs (1 tb or so) are simply going to vanish and become landfill.
Right now, there's a lot of external USB-powered small HDDs out there. That market will be simply gone, replaced by equal capacity or larger SSDs. Single cable solutions are just that much nicer.
Cheapo PC makers are going to look at SSDs and HDDs, and realize there's some low hanging performance fruit to be had. Why add a faster CPU (where gains are low low low) or more RAM (which sits unused) when you can add an SSD?
Next gen consoles? I'd opt for SSD to save both space and power, and to massively reduce the annoying loading times.
Laptop SSD adoption is under way as we speak.
HDDs will still be a good choice for large-scale redundant slow-ish (network) storage, but increasingly they'll be too slow, too energy hungry and too large for the average streaming, cloud service using consumer who doesn't value personal backups at all.
1TB SSD $400.00
1TB HDD $89.00
Call me when a 1TB SSD is $98.00 a REAL one from a reputable brand not the remarked B stock crap from ADATA or Happy-Fun SSD
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So in 2017, if all goes well, SSDs will be 3x the cost per GB as HDDs (17 cents vs. 6 cents per GB). That's an interesting definition of "price parity"...
What kind of moron writes these articles?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I don't know where these guys get their disks but my last one cost me 4 cents per gigabyte (converted from euros) and prices down to 3 cents per gigabyte can easily be found. My disk was a 6tb one for 240 euros. Equivalent SSD storage capacity would cost me about 2000 to 4000 euros depending on how many SSD drives I am prepared to fit in my computer case. We're nowhere near price parity.
0x or or snor perron?!
Not even close
A coworker of mine bought a 1TB Samsung SSD last year for $360 on Cyber Monday. The price of a 1TB Samsung SSD this year on Cyber Monday, $347. I was hoping to pick one up this year for closer to $250.
SSDs may ultimately overtake spinning rust for consumer level storage needs
Seeing where technology is heading, that's pretty much a given and only a matter of time (and you can scratch "consumer level" from that phrase, I think). But NOT
simply because we're running out of shit to store.
Are U kidding, we'll just find new stuff to fill the space available. As it's always been. In particular hi-def video (got some 4K videos yet? ;-), but for example 100GB+ downloaded games may also become 'normal' some day. Never mind datacenters or other professional uses.
That said: yes, it is becoming easier & easier to find room for all that other stuff we've got on our hard drives and USB sticks.
Over the past three years, SSDs have dropped from 31 to 13 cents per gig annually.
How exactly does it drop from 31 to 13 cents every year? Does the price go back up every Jan 1st?
Over the past three years, SSDs have dropped from 31 to 13 cents per gig annually.
So three years in a row the price went from 13 cents per gigabyte on December 31st to 31 cents per gigabyte the following day and then proceeded to decline to 13 cents per gigabyte the following December 31st? That seems odd.
Even with the price coming down, have SSDs managed the same write cycle count as HDDs? I am asking, since I was last recommended to keep with HDDs for jobs which required a lot of disk writes. Has this changed?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
For the same size SSD and advertised bus speed, there is already a huge price performance variance. SSDs vary greatly in both IO operations per second and total IO operations (lifetime).
There are SSDs that have worse IOPS than a HDD, but in most cases HDDs cann't touch SSD IOPS specs.
On the other side: A great SSD might have a better lifetime (IO operation total) than a cheap HDD; however it is still to be proven that an SSD could match a quality HDD in lifetime.
Whenever these price comparisons come up, I get the feeling that there is a huge bias in favour of the statement that article wants to make. i.e. If its about the falling price of SSDs, then compare a low spec SSD with a high spec HDD. If you want to argue for HDD, do the reverse.
As things stands both have their place, and you should be careful about what you buy in both cases. e.g. WD-Green for laptop, but WD-Red for a NAS (yes there is a difference). For SSDs only my budget would force me to buy an EVO instaed of an EVO Pro. (I only mention WD and Samsung to be able to give concrete examples).
In my (humble) opinion neither SSD nor HDD will be able to replace the other, before some other storage technology comes along and blows them both away. Although that tech might be a descendant of one or the other (memristor? crystal/optical?).
"Consumer SSDs were on average were selling"
I saw a well-reviewed 120GB SSD on Amazon this week for less than $45. You can get less-well-reviewed models for as little as $29, though the SSD reputation makes you want to think hard about that. Still, even at $45, there's no excuse anymore for not using an SSD for at least the boot drive.
The mind still boggles at that phrase. The first disk drive I ever bought was in 1986, when prices first broke the $10 per *megabyte* barrier.
Should have been: SSD parity still long way: HDD expected to be still 3X cheaper in 2017!
(The post speaks of 17 cent/GB for SSD and 6 cents/GB for HDD)
The Big Switchover will occur when, and only when, we can get SSDs to fail read-only.
(ala Seinfeld) "I don't think so.. Not bloody likely!"
I can buy a 3T drive on Amazon for $85. That is less than 3 cents per Gig.
Fuck "TiB". It should just be "TB" and base-10 whiners can STFU.
Fuck TiB, fuck TB, Fuck the base-10 whiners, and fuck base-2.
Units should be in laraBytes (la-B, which is 60^7 in metric-60), using base-60. We could use modern glyphs, but I'd go for cuniform just to really fuck with people's heads.
Intel/Micron's [recently announced] 3D XPoint technology dwarfs SSD technology. Okay, it might as well be vaporwear right now but in five years I can't imagine anyone will consider either HDs or SSDs unless they're buying for their legacy machines.
Am I way off base here?
Lot of file-system design was built over the block architecture of a disk; a spinning disk performs better for sequential data access [where the read-head stays in the same track]. So break up a file into blocks of say 4k bytes. Since SSD, I assume has same seek-time everywhere, it is like RAM. Does any file-system architecture exploit this new ability and drop any overhead associated with the HDD's block managements [like tracking i-nodes, de-fragmentation] etc.
I believe just like a malloc library, it can manage the SSD since access cost is same to all locations.
Which pretty much means never...
I just bought a 250 GB SSD for $75 because my 64 GB SSD filled up. I paid something like $100 for the old one about 2 years ago. That is a great improvement and I hope that I will be able to buy a 1TB SSD within a few years for less than $100. But I can buy a 4 TB HDD for less than $100 right now if you catch the right sale. By the time a 1 TB SSD becomes less than $100, you will probably be able to buy 8 TB of HDD space for the same price. On the bright side, decent sized SSDs are now affordable for consumers, but they have a long ways to go before they achieve 'parity' with HDD storage. I look forward to the day when some kind of solid state memory can completely replace the HDD (3D XPoint??), but the death of the hard drive has so far been greatly exaggerated.
So, the fact that SSDs last longer than mechanical hard drives means they will never catch on? You shouldn't take numbers you don't understand to mean weaknesses.
SSDs are more reliable than spinning rust
On another note entirely, why did you post a signature manually as an AC?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I once had a disagreement with someone with regards to the security of SSDs versus rotating magnetic media: I was saying that you can use something like Eraser or sdelete to overwrite every block of an SSD, and the person I was disagreeing with claimed that 'wouldn't do anything' and it was impossible to completely erase an SSD; would someone please clear that up for me? I can't see how writing random data to every block of an SSD woudl fail to securely erase it.
But on that same subject: an SSD is more time-consuming and difficult to 'erase' securely, especially considering that with a traditional HDD you can put it through a degausser and completely erase it in a matter of seconds; with an SSD, you'd either have to overwrite it, or literally dismantle it and carefully smash every single flash memory unit on it in order to be 100% sure it's unrecoverable.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The only caveat about SSDs is that when they die, unlike HDDs, where the data can be pulled off in a clean room from the platters, when the electrons head out of the gates, that data is GONE.
To a lesser extent, it is easy to destroy data. A blkdiscard /dev/sda will zero out a drive fast and effectively, with no chance of ever getting the data back.
So, even though that nice new 7200 RPM SSD kicks butt in the desktop, make sure it is backed up.
7200 rpm ssd? Want to know how I know you don't know what you're talking about?
And in infinite time everything is inevitable, heat death of the universe not withstanding.
Because he thinks the data in SSDs magically disappears? Or because he thinks SSDs spin? Both errors indicate a complete lack of knowledge of the subject.
SSDs when they fail can be recovered in a clean room, HOWEVER, if the controller chip loses everything, if the SSD uses encryption, it is toast. Just as with a hard disk head crash, all the data is gone (from under the head at least).
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
In the last six months I have had three 2TB hard drives fail that were just a bit over two years old. Three different machines. Two seagate and one western digital -- computer hardware vendor was Lenovo. One was replaced under commercial warranty, the other two were aftermarket add-ins, so my nickel. The odd thing about all three is that there were no anticipatory errors -- bad block replacements, retries, etc. Their response simply became erratic and in one case there was a BSOD through iastor (which all machines used). One could reboot and the drive would simply not spin up. Or be accessing it and the last IO would just not come back -- so the application would hang. On two machines the drives held the music library for the radio station, steady read activity with very few writes.
Makes me think fondly of the RK05s my first real computer had... they just worked and worked and worked. And when there was a hard crash one just scrubbed the flying head and put in a fresh platter. Were still running fine when they got retired to a landfill. Sigh...
did nobody teach you about Solid Spinning Drives? it's the Bee's Knees!!!
The only caveat about SSDs is that when they die, unlike HDDs, where the data can be pulled off in a clean room from the platters, when the electrons head out of the gates, that data is GONE.
And what percentage of dead HDDs get sent to a data recovery service? I'd guess the answer would be less than 1%. For the other 99%, SSDs are just fine. And if you have something on your drive that's that important (whether it be an SSD or an HDD) MAKE BACKUPS!!!!!!
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
What a crock of sh*t! A mechanical 250 GB HD is currently $25.00 on Pricewatch (10 cents per GB). The cheapest 256GB SSD is $90.00 ( 35 cents per GB). I have NO freaking clue as to where the author is getting .03 cents per GB from. Yet again, another example of the disconnect between the people in charge / with money, and reality.
The difference is even greater if we explore 1TB sizes. $35-45 for a 1TB Mechanical HD, and $220 for a 1TB SSD. Pull this f*cking sh*t article please!
Whenever these price comparisons come up, I get the feeling that there is a huge bias in favour of the statement that article wants to make. i.e. If its about the falling price of SSDs, then compare a low spec SSD with a high spec HDD. If you want to argue for HDD, do the reverse.
There will always be bias in these sort of comparisons where profits of large industry players is to be had. What matters is the sentiment and frequency of the messaging. SSDs start to erode HDD marketshare? You will see lots of anti-SSD articles. SSD players pushing back? A few articles claiming price parity or read/write speed differences.
Track the progress of these as data points on a timeline and you'll a trend.
Also of importance, are people/organizations that have taken a notable stance on a subject (an SSD/HDD critic finally claiming that they're giving up on their position, or a large organization (e.g. Apple, Google) making a shift to mainstream one technology over the other for a specific need.
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I've seen "enterprise" disks that were just consumer disks with a fancy housing. There were some electronics for things like hot-swap and interface adapting. But no difference in terms of the storage media.
Did they or did they not come with additional warranties? Because while the consumer may just throw out the drive, business customers can and will claim the warranty... thus making the additional cost of the "enterprise" product worth it to their intended customers.
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I bought two Sandisk Ultra II 480 GB SSD for $109 a piece on Black friday. That's 22.7 cents/GB. (That deal is no longer available, though - price is now back to $140+.)
On Thanksgiving night, I bought two Seagate 4TB HDDs for $88 a piece at Fry's. That's 2.2 cents/GB. (That deal is also no longer available - price is now higher, $105 at Amazon as I write this).
All 4 drives are running in two RAID 0 arrays in a new machine.
Even at the rock bottom prices I paid, the SSD is still an order of magnitude more expensive per GB than the HDD.
If the SSD keeps dropping 10% a year, and HDDs keep dropping only 1% a year, my math says that it will be 26.8 years before the price per GB of SSDs and HDDs equalizes. Hopefully, it will happen sooner than that. But the capacity of SSDs also needs to go up. There aren't any consumer-level SSDs beyond 2TB right now AFAIK, and those I have seen cost at least $650 or 32 cents/GB, much more than what I paid.
SSDs are good for short term, non-volatile, fast(er) data access. They will be a stopgap until RAM based on memristors become commercially available.
HDDs still have a long life ahead because SSDs are nowhere near competitive capacity or price-wise. For example, I recently bought two 5TB HDDs for $120 each. The largest SSD in existence is only 2TB and costs almost $700. I could buy nearly 30TB worth of HDD space for the same price.
If you want an SSD, go for a cheap 250GB at most for your OS and heavily used apps. Anything larger would be a foolish waste of money.
So, the fact that SSDs last longer than mechanical hard drives means they will never catch on
I have a Quantum 80MB HDD from 1989 that still works. Show me a 26 year old SSD that still works.
Someone else commented on this article about a 1mb SSD they used to play around with, I think he indicated it still worked.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
the price will catch to that, ie drop below HDD eventualy
Or their performance. Or quality control.
Don't get me wrong, I replace HD's with SSD's for clients as soon as it is warranted and possible because of the performance increase and better control of thermal management. Planning for out of box failures and short term failures is just part of implementing SSD's. Oh, and making sure all data and disaster recovery systems are thoroughly tested and functional. Because you really need it with SSD's.
That advice doesn't work for laptops. Most only have room for one disk drive, either an SSD or a rotating drive. If you go with an SSD it has to be one that is big enough for all your needs. If you really need to carry around a terabyte of data than a terabyte SSD it is, whatever the cost.
Big heavy laptops (ones weighing over 6 pounds) may have space for a second drive. But I consider those to be portable desktops rather than true laptops.
Intel is shipping their first resistive memory technology next year. This has been in the works by many companies for more than a decade. It seems to finally be coming out. These new memories are able to be stacked vertically allowing nearly infinite storage and are persistent (not needing power to retain their contents), can be cycled infinitely with no fading and the real impressive thing are almost as fast as RAM memory. The first ones will be in the terabyte range and will grow within 10 years to much more basically eliminating first SSD, then disk drives, then tape drives and other media and even internal memories of computers. A lot of energy has been spent to produce the layering of memory to optimize performance. The ability to access nearly infinite storage at RAM speeds promises massive change in computer architecture and performance and cost of computers.
The gap might be closing but even the forecast for 2017 shows SSDs being three times more expensive per GB as HDDs. With 10 TB HDDs available today SSDs need to not only come down in price way more but also grow in capacity a lot. SSDs are great and worth their money, but it is very premature to celebrate the death of HDDs.
Under what conditions? They sure are not more reliable if you store them under good environmental conditions in an unpowered state.