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

Posted by msmash on from the we-could-use-more-SSDs dept.

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.

7 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Anal - lytic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Google searches for "SSD upgrades" may outweigh searches for "CPU upgrades" but that would represent a very small segment of the computer buying public. Most storage is acquired with the purchase of a new machine and never changes.

    1. Re: Anal - lytic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There are many more technical considerations and issues regarding a CPU upgrade.

  2. HDD price milking by harvey+the+nerd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    after the floods of 2011 in Thailand, the HDD market raised prices, consolidated companies to fix prices higher, and has been milking them ever since. Some HDD prices per GB today are almost as low as they were before the rains in 2011...

  3. Pre-installed HDD win on cost every time by magarity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We asked Samsung why desktop PC penetration is so low

    All the big PC vendors see SSD as a huge markup and thus don't sell anywhere near what they could if they priced more reasonably. Instead of the upgrade to SSD being the retail price of the SSD minus the OEM cost of the HDD, the upgrade option is usually a good margin way over the retail cost of an SSD and never mind the cost of the HDD they would replace it with.

  4. HDD NOT going away any time soon by Espectr0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wake me up when a SSD doesn't cost 10 times as much as a HDD for the same capacity.

    Really, common users see a unit that costs 70$ (seagate 2TB 7200RPM) versus one that costs 550$ or more (crucial 2TB SSD, samsung's is 10x the listed HDD price) and they will gladly save their money.

    I bought a crucial 500GB 2 years ago for little over 220$, and today the same drive is about 120$. So they are going down, but as more people adopt SSD, the HDD's price will go down as well.

    --
    Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
    1. Re:HDD NOT going away any time soon by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Really, common users see a unit that costs 70$ (seagate 2TB 7200RPM) versus one that costs 550$ or more (crucial 2TB SSD, samsung's is 10x the listed HDD price) and they will gladly save their money.

      Assuming the common user actually needs 2TB of storage space and doesn't care about the speed of booting or launching applications. Common users either use streaming services or torrent & delete after watching it, they're not trying to archive the Internet. They snap a few pics and make some funny clips with their phone but they're not photo or videos buffs with ten thousand photos and hours of raw footage to store. And many of them now use the cloud as backup, say what you will but they do. HDDs don't really scale down, you get a 1TB HDD to the price of a 120GB SSD but you can't get a 120GB HDD cheaper.

      I wouldn't buy a machine with only HDD today, I got one laptop that I rarely use that is like that and it runs like a sloth in slow motion. And if you go the HDD+SSD route you're looking at the minimum price of both a HDD and a SSD. I'd say up to 250GB of storage I just wouldn't bother with a HDD anymore, above that I'd get a SDD for the stuff you use often and as big a HDD as you need. And possibly one for local backup, for a common user I wouldn't bother with RAID as software bugs, user error and crypto viruses would destroy all copies. Of course if you're in the geek squad you might have a ZFS storage pool with lots of disks, snapshots and whatnot. Good for you, but you're hardly the common user.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  5. Re:NVMe is excellent by m.dillon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Unless the project has only one source file, compiling isn't really single-thread bound. Most projects can be built make -j N. When we do bulk builds, that's what we see happening most of the time so with very few exceptions your project builds should be able to make use of many cpu cores at once.

    The few exceptions are: (1) The link phase is typically a choke point and serializes to one thread, and (2) Certain source files might be so large relative to the others that everything else finishes and the build is twiddling its thumbs waiting for that one 200,000 line source file to finish compiling before it can move on to the link phase.

    One other note - Builds are like 99.9% cpu driven. Storage bandwidth is almost irrelevant because there is almost no I/O involved in doing a build vs the cpu time required. Source files are already likely cached in memory. Temporary files don't last long enough to even have a chance to get written to disk (if not using tmpfs), and object files and executables are tiny relative to available storage bandwidth and asynchronously flushed as well (so nobody has to wait on them to be flushed to disk).

    So, for example, when we do a bulk build of all 24000+ applications in ports, we use tmpfs mounts for all temporary files and our disk I/O is almost non-existent throughout the process. The only time we see busy storage is during maximum peak load when the running compiler binaries exceed available ram and the system pages a bit (you have to allow this in order to optimize the non-peak portions of the build to ensure that all system resources are fully utilized throughout the entire 22-hour-long bulk build).

    -Matt