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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%.

18 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 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
  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.
  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?

  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 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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?!
  9. 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.

  10. 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?).

  11. 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.