Friday, June 22nd 2012
SSD Prices in Free-Fall: The Next DRAM?
Hard drive prices refuse to budge after last year's floods that struck manufacturing facilities in Thailand, even as manufacturers turn record profit. The solid-state drive market, on the other hand, is finally rolling with competition, high volume production, and advancements in NAND flash technologies. With memory majors such as Hynix adding new NAND flash manufacturing facilities to their infrastructure, SSD is expected to finally get its big break in the mainstream market.
SSD prices, according to price aggregators, are on a free-fall. Models which once held relative pricing as high as $2 per gigabyte, and going deep within the $1 mark. For example, Crucial's widely-praised M4 256 GB SSD has a price per GB of 'just' $0.82, and a market price around $200, something unheard of, for a 256 GB SSD with transfer rates of over 500 MB/s. With SSD major OCZ Technology releasing new generations of drives under the Vertex 4 and Agility 4 series that use Indilinx processors, older Vertex 3 and Agility 3 models are being phased out, some of these are seeing sub $1/GB prices. Intel is also responding to market trends, with prices of its SSD 520 series dropping sharply. Find a boat-load of stats at the source.
Source:
The TechReport
SSD prices, according to price aggregators, are on a free-fall. Models which once held relative pricing as high as $2 per gigabyte, and going deep within the $1 mark. For example, Crucial's widely-praised M4 256 GB SSD has a price per GB of 'just' $0.82, and a market price around $200, something unheard of, for a 256 GB SSD with transfer rates of over 500 MB/s. With SSD major OCZ Technology releasing new generations of drives under the Vertex 4 and Agility 4 series that use Indilinx processors, older Vertex 3 and Agility 3 models are being phased out, some of these are seeing sub $1/GB prices. Intel is also responding to market trends, with prices of its SSD 520 series dropping sharply. Find a boat-load of stats at the source.
120 Comments on SSD Prices in Free-Fall: The Next DRAM?
(Remember the 2010 DDR2 bubble?)
Hope it continues!
I guess the minimum price will eventually stagnate due to production costs, personnel, shipping, etc but capacity will keep increasing thus price per GB will drop.
I can't wait for them [HDD manufacturers] to start seeing their "record profits" evaporating as more and more people turn to SSD.
glad i didnt join the club early :D
www.pixmania.pl/pl/pl/9760815/art/crucial/wewnetrzny-ssd-m4-256-gb.html
And I'm still not convinced of their reliability, many forums i visit seem full of people having problems with them.
256GB for $100? Not gonna happen. You might as well wish for a $500 GTX 690.
And their reliability is just fine. Apart from some shoddy products (mainly from OCZ) there's not really a problem with reliability. And you can't really compare low speeds and the occasional BSOD with full HDD failure.
And I have no doubt that years from now, there will be GPU faster than GTX690 for less than $500. It's just a matter of time.