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With HDDs On The Ropes, Samsung Predicts SSD Price Collisions As NVMe Takes Over (tomshardware.com)

At its Global SSD Summit, Samsung shared its vision of the current state of SSD market and also outlined the future trends. The company noted that SSDs are steadily displacing HDDs in more applications, but NVMe is shaping up to be the dark horse that may put the venerable HDD to rest. From an article on Tom's Hardware: Samsung loves Google, and not just because it probably buys plenty of its SSDs. Samsung outlined its rather intense focus on Google Analytics for marketing purposes last year, and this year it pointed out that recent Google searches for "SSD upgrades" outweighed searches for "CPU upgrades." The historical trend indicates that this wasn't always the case (of course), but with 40 million searches for SSD upgrades this year, it is clear that SSDs are on the move. Performance stagnation in the CPU market is probably to blame here, as well, and we routinely advise readers to spend their hard-earned dollars on GPU and SSD upgrades before the CPU. The cellphone industry has long served as the prime example of an explosive growth market; it grew 19.1% in the last five years alone. SSDs, by contrast, grew 54%, and the steady downward pricing slope is a key factor. The all-important price-per-GB fell from $1.17 in 2012 to a mere $0.36 in 2016 (69% reduction). This is an average value, you can find SSDs for even less on the retail market. The SSD market grew 6x (to 130,000,000) from 2012 to 2016. Samsung's NAND shipments benefit from both the smartphone and SSD industries, and the company presented a chart that highlighted the changing NAND shipment mix. A higher percentage of flash heads into the SSD and Mobile segments every year as the percentage of UFD (USB Flash Drive), cards, and "others" decline.

5 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. NVMe? by grimJester · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since the summary says nothing about NVMe, here's a Wikipedia link

  2. Unless RAID is used... by Zurkeyon3733 · · Score: 2, Informative

    As a Technician in the field for over 20 years now, I can say this from experience... Even with as far as they have come, I STILL wouldn't trust an SSD with an O/S on it, to store so much as my cooking recipes... Too much caching going on. Data loss without RAID on an SSD is simply a matter of time. An HDD, even failed, has a FAR higher likelihood of data recovery, in EVERY scenario I have encountered in my career. Fast Yes. Reliable, No. I can get a raided set of HDD to go 10+ years... I can get a raided set of SDDs to go about 3. As far as bang for the buck and hours of overall operation, I'll stick with my Red Badge SATA HDDs in RAID, thank you.

  3. Re:Anal - lytic by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    While the overclocking and impecunious-PC-performance-chasing of my misspent youth makes me sad that this is the case; the "CPU upgrade = buy new computer" mentality isn't really all that irrational.

    With laptops; it is effectively mandatory. Even in laptops with socketed CPUs, unless you went out of your way to buy the absolute worst version of a laptop with fairly high end options, you'll find that the fastest socket and TDP compatible CPU upgrade just isn't all that much faster. Plus, if it's a reasonably new laptop, buying the CPU that is a worthwhile upgrade will be pretty expensive; and if it is an old one it'll be cheap; but leave you with a laptop that is showing its age in both specs and wear and tear.

    With desktops; you are also likely to have limited socket-compatible upgrade options, so getting a meaningful CPU boost often means swapping the motherboard as well(unless you started with the lousiest option for a given socket, in which case there might be meaningful improvements to be had); and if you hit the DDR2 to DDR3 or the DDR3 to DDR4 transition you'll need new RAM as well. PSU can probably be reused, unless it is particularly grim; and expansion cards, HDDs, optical drives, and case can be reused; but bumping the CPU speed in any serious way tends to mean ripping out most of the expensive parts(unless your GPU is fancy enough to count as the really expensive part of the system).

    An SSD, by contrast, is an easy swap except on laptops that really hate you; and even on ancient systems limited to 1.5Gb/s SATA, the improvement in latency and IOPs over a mechanical drive is pretty dramatic; plus compatibility is almost universal unless your system is so old that you still have PATA; or you want to boot from an NVMe device.

  4. Re:NVMe is awesome by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Informative

    No he made a typo. If he just bought an NVMe drive expect it to be at least 2000MB/s if not higher. The whole purpose of going to NVMe was because SATA became a major bottleneck.

  5. Re: SSD = silent data corruption by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    10% is the definition of decimate