Slashdot Mirror
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%.
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.
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.
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 as long as your average HDD does and with the race to the bottom? Its only gonna get worse.
The reason why many drives were so high in 2012 is most were SLC while today its pretty damned hard to find anything other than enterprise that isn't MLC, in fact I don't think a single manufacturer makes an SSD that is SLC for the consumer market anymore. Whats worse is as they keep adding bits to MLC to both increase capacity and lower cost the MTBF for each cell just plummets and on its best day with perfect conditions you're looking at 10k writes with MLC versus 100,000 writes with SLC, and that was with the original 2 bits per cell, according to Wikipedia its now up to 4 bits per cell.
Now does this mean I think we should avoid SSDs? Nope in fact they are the boot drives on most new builds and swapping HDDs for SSDs on laptops is the least expensive way I know of to boost performance, but I make sure they have a HDD with a backup image, whether its built in or USB, because IMHO its unwise to trust your important data to an SSD.
Finally the rotting elephant in the room with SSDs is the way they fail and that is without warning. I'm sure I'll be slammed with anecdotes about HDDs that failed without warning (Protip: Avoid Seagate) but honestly its been quite a few years since I've seen a HDD just fail without giving the user plenty of warning, with an SSD? I've thrown many an SSD into the trash because they failed without warning.
TLDR? In a race to the bottom like SSDs is in now quality goes to shit as does MTBF, for years HDDs have been proven reliable tech and as its capacity climbs by adding more bits per cell SSDs will give up life and reliability for size.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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?).
and how many times can you read and write the SSD? Indexing?
You're out of date. SSD MTBF's are now better than platter drives. Not the same. BETTER. You think your 7200rpm drive is perfect and will never fail?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
They meant to say:
Over the past three years, SSD prices have dropped between 31 cents per gig annually and 13 cents per gig annually.
They mean that the amount of the drop varies. The maximum drop seen was 31 cents, and the minimum drop seen was 13 cents. I had to read the summary 3 times to figure out what they meant.