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SSDs Approaching Price Parity With HDDs (computerworld.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the spinning-platters-will-soon-be-like-dialup-internet dept.

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%.

40 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. It's time to let the HDD's go. by AbRASiON · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by AbRASiON · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I can't tell if you're joking or not, but this is a huge Apples / Oranges comparison if ever I've seen one.
      In 18 months your link would be as foolish as someone advocating a tape drive, instead of a hard disk for a desktop computer.

      Also: nothing stopping you using magnetic disks, I have 6 of them in my house operating right now - but 0 of them in my laptop, PS4, PS4, desktop, HTPC.

    2. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by should_be_linear · · Score: 2

      Main problem for HDD is that SSD only needs to get below $50 for 256GB drive and nobody (except data centers, database servers and several professional applications) will ever ask about HDD again.

      --
      839*929
    3. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by blind+biker · · Score: 2

      The problem with SSDs, for me personally, is their catastrophic failure mode. It has to do with the controllers rather than the storage technology, but all the same, when an SSD fails your data is gone - all of it, and you can't retrieve it in any way unless you are a three-letter agency.

      --
      "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
    4. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by tibit · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Back in the days of CP/M my dad splurged on a RAM disk. A 1 MByte RAM disk, no less, with a Ni-Cd battery backup on a daughtercard. The disk was visible to the OS as 4 256kB disks. It was sheer joy to work using that thing - think instant WordStar saves and menu switches (overlays had to load from disk!). When we moved to a PC/XT clone, I re-interfaced that disk and had "instant" boot-ups, much faster than even the half-height 20MB NEC hard drive would give. I'm awaiting for the future to catch up with the past where we'll be able to get rid of mechanical drives. It's about time. I got spoiled in my youth, you see.

      Side note: This thing was a work of art, with properly engineered battery charger where each cell was individually charged using a flying capacitor kind of a set-up - the cells lasted for almost a decade.

      --
      A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
    5. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by Dunbal · · Score: 3, Insightful

      $200 for only 1 TB of storage is far from impressive.

      I think you're missing a major point here. SSD owners do not simply gain the benefit of "storage". The access speed is the important part. Read/Write speeds increase in proportion to drive size on platter drives. Cache helps a bit with this. Increasing the number of heads helps a bit. But that's the major problem. I switched to SSD years ago and I would never, ever own a platter drive again simply because I couldn't take the slow access speed. Storage capacity is fixed by simply buying more SSD drives. Yes it means I have to keep track of what I put where but that's not a big deal.

      So if you go around quoting a 5TB drive at $200 as if it was a "good thing" I still wouldn't touch it. I can just imagine how long it would take me to manipulate TB's of data on that drive, let alone copy sizeable chunks to/from that drive. Like someone else said, it would be comparing apples to oranges, or a boat to an airplane. Yeah, you can fit a lot of cargo on a ship, if you don't mind the 2-3 weeks it takes to get to your destination. Or you could pay more and make many, many plane trips in 1/10th of the time.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    6. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by Dunbal · · Score: 2

      Fair comparisons: You can buy this for only $21.50 per mph or this for $1180 per mph. Now which one would you rather have?

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    7. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by Dunbal · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.
    8. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by jellomizer · · Score: 2

      From my experience with Desktop based drives. HDD seem to be more fragile, So they will have errors and crash after any little detail. Sure you may be able to recover your data and replace the drive, but once it starts going downhill it goes downhill fast and most of the time, it is isn't worth it to try to get the data out of it.
      SSD having no moving parts tend to run a bit better over a longer period of time. But when they go they are gone.

      Either way, if your data is that important you should have a backup.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    9. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by Karlt1 · · Score: 2

      So if you go around quoting a 5TB drive at $200 as if it was a "nothing" I still wouldn't touch it. I can just imagine how long it would take me to manipulate TB's of data on that drive, let alone copy sizeable chunks to/from that drive.

      What do most consumers need a 5TB worth of storage for besides storing media like ripped videos, music, etc? In that case SSD is overkill. I have no problem streaming 3 videos (with transcoding) over WIFI from a regular hard drive over USB 3. Sure SSD for primary work but a bunch of slow spinning hard drive makes more sense for backup and media.

    10. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by Coren22 · · Score: 2

      When was the last time you recovered the data from an actual failed hard drive?

      When spinning rust fails, it is pretty catastrophic to your data as the head crashes into the platter and gouges out the data and the head.

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
    11. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by Cederic · · Score: 2

      That is what Amazon Glacier is for.

      The upload times for 5TB of data are a bit excessive. The download times for recovery are better, but not really usable.

      Local copy then take the disks to a friend's house. Or pay for a secure site of some form.

    12. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      You seem to feel very strongly about this, but frankly your ideal that spinning magnets are outdated technology are misplaced. I am an SSD owner. Every computer in the house has an SSD in it. Every computer also has a classic HDD too. You talk about slow access speeds, unless you're running a cache, application, OS or database on it the access speed is really not much of a problem. A movie won't load up magically faster. Yeah you may be able to do a lightning fast MD5 has of it but that's not what most people do with them.

      You want to manipulate a TB worth of data. May I ask where to? My HDD can already outperform my network connection so unless I'm going SSD to SSD locally inside the machine I'm not entirely sure what exactly I am manipulating. Unless you're talking about a TB large database in which case see above. The vast majority of computer applications that an consumer would use that requires this large amount of storage does not require instant access to it at blazing speeds.

      So in reference to the title, no. It's not at all time to let HDDs go. It's time to embrace the fact that we now have 2 different storage mediums which can serve 2 different purposes and are sold at 2 different price points. We wouldn't question whether you wanted a computer with L3 cache OR RAM. It's only a question of how much of each to suit your needs. Why would you forgo one over the other in the HDD debate?

    13. Re:It's time to let the HDD's go. by AbRASiON · · Score: 2

      Honestly, I'm not sure how that post should be classed as flamebait? The guy is quite clearly being a complete troll in the thread, deliberately comparing apples and oranges? ...

  2. No they're not. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...

  3. BS by afidel · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:BS by Overzeetop · · Score: 2

      Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I rarely (never?) purchase HD space at retail. External 4/5/6 TB hard drives are hovering around $25/terabyte when on sale (which is fairly frequently). 8s, as you noted, are getting close to that. There's a limit to how low the price for a new drive can go - they typically bottom out at $40-50 no matter how small the capacity is. The 2-4TB drives are falling quickly toward that range, which means the 8s will start taking the low-$100 spot next year (Though perhaps late next year).

      SSDs may ultimately overtake spinning rust for consumer level storage needs, simply because we're running out of shit to store. With more and more content being delivered as a service rather than a stored medium, and with video getting further and further locked up by content owners, SSDs may catch up with more than 99% of the storage needs of users for that magic $100 mark in the near future.

      --
      Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
    2. Re:BS by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      Here is what you do not realize.

      As economies of scale cheapen SSD's the same economies of scale raise the price of HDD's as less people purchase them.

      There will come a time when a new R&D investment will not make much business sense anymore. True today they are still cheaper but if we had a graph showing the trends you will see a point.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
  4. editing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    > 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?

    1. Re:editing by randm.ca · · Score: 2

      Hard to tell. My interpretation is that prices have dropped somewhere between 31 and 13 cents per year over the last three years. So one of the three years saw a 31 cent drop, another of the three years saw a 13 cent drop, and another of the three years saw a drop somewhere in between.

  5. "approaching" by fche · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... 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.

    1. Re:"approaching" by Beezlebub33 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Poorly written story too, just quoting numbers left, right, and centre.

      And would it fucking kill them to put a graph there? this line is the price per gig for HDD and this line is for SSD. See, they are getting closer. That's the article.

      --
      The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
  6. What's the MTBF? by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:What's the MTBF? by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 2

      My old Intel X25-m SSD is 6 years old, and the Intel SSD utility says that it has 99% of its life remaining. I have not had a single SSD fail on me yet. My 4 year old Samsung 830 pro also says it has 99% of its lifetime remaining. Those two drives combined have written well over 20 TB of data. Even my Samsung 840 pro which is only 2 years old has written 7.3 TB of data. I have had many platter hard drives fail on me, some within a week or two of purchase. I trust SSDs more for continual use, but my backup drives that sit without power for long periods of time are platter drives.

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    2. Re:What's the MTBF? by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.
    3. Re:What's the MTBF? by HiThere · · Score: 2

      That hasn't been my experience. I'm considering them for backup storage, and I've had SSD's die without warning, apparently from being removed from power for too long. Not acceptable for a backup.

      OTOH, what I'm talking about were thumb drives. But why should I think other removable SSDs would be different?

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    4. Re:What's the MTBF? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      SSD endurance is fine. All good brands last a long time and even the supposedly cheap and short lifespan Samsung TLC drives last well beyond what most people will ever get out of them.

      SSDs don't see to be any worse than HDDs, and for laptops that get moved around a lot are probably even more durable.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    5. Re: What's the MTBF? by DigiShaman · · Score: 2

      Am I just lucky?

      Hard to say. Many SSDs can become bricked from an abrupt loss of power (Vertex series know for this) due to a partial write-back. Normally it's not an issue for HDDs so long as you've got a modern filesystem that does journaling (most if not all do nowadays). But for SSD, they're a separate table in the firmware that tracks what LBA becomes dynamically remapped to specifically cells for wear-leveling. As you can imagine, loss of power during a critical update to the table can cause all sorts of corruption issues. Enterprise and prosumer SSDs have added electronic capacitance to help eliminate half-writes leaving the after math a normal file system problem as would normally occur with an HDD under the same circumstances. With laptops, it's not an issue as you're buffered with a battery anyways. But with desktops, make sure you're at least behind a UPS; otherwise you're playing a game of Russian Roulette during periods of brownouts and power loss.

      I've also had SSDs go tits up from excessive use. I'm a power user with building VMs on my MacBook Pro. I've learned to go with 512GB drives so I've got extra slack in wear levels cells; otherwise I'll burn through 256GB drives. Or so, that's been my experience with the past three SSDs I've owned.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
  7. Re:Firssd? by Bengie · · Score: 2

    Never is impossible. Given enough time, anything can happen.

  8. No not really.... by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  9. Way cheaper by zmooc · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?!
  10. Re:A factor of 3 by 2017 is not "parity" at all by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Morons that work for a magazine that sells advert space as its business model. Or in today's world, a clickbait site.

  11. Wait, that's not right! by sabbede · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Wait, that's not right! by MobyDisk · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  12. Apples and Oranges by Trevelyan · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?).

  13. No excuse for boot drives by DrStrangluv · · Score: 2

    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.

  14. "Cents per gigabyte" by ebh · · Score: 2

    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.

  15. Before SSDs can replace HDs by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Big Switchover will occur when, and only when, we can get SSDs to fail read-only.

    1. Re:Before SSDs can replace HDs by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      I really don't understand Intel's attitude to this. When the write counter gets to a certain level the drive goes read-only, and after a power cycle is bricked. You can't even read it any more. It's stupid because it's not based on running out of spare sectors or anything like that, just a counter that tracks how many bytes were written to it.

      I can appreciate that Intel no longer has faith in the drive after a certain number of TB written, and wants to put the drive into read-only mode. Fine, but why brick it after a power cycle? That just prevents me from removing the drive to recover the data. My guess is that the drive needs to write small amounts of data to work, even in read-only mode (metadata basically) but the chances of that being the straw that breaks the camels back...

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  16. Re: Firssd? by Coren22 · · Score: 2

    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?