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?
First job he has to do though is hunt those employees at WD and Seagate responsible for price fixing and using the thailand floods as a excuse to keep prices up - after that THEN we send him into the future.
I like this trend :)
Finally I may be able to get a SSD of a noteable size, that's not going to kill me in the pocket..
www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100008120%2050001455%20600038491&IsNodeId=1&name=Crucial&Order=PRICE&Pagesize=20
Oh well, got it on a big discount so, in the end at least I didn't pay full price.
i have about 12 drives, three of which are internal. OS, games, backups. running with less seems madness to me in a desktop.
If the prices keep dropping, I might be able to replace my caviar black 640GB drive with a sata6 SSD.
Of course I don't need to do this, but it would be nice to have ultra fast loading times in all my games, without having to plan ahead and move things with the Steam-mover program.
Sometimes convenience is worth the few extra bucks.
That is roughly .66 USD per GB. :)
Crucial M4 512GB SATA III MLC that with the promo code (EMCYTZT1803) brings it down to $344.99 USD (and free shipping). That's $0.67 per GB.
The only downside is A: I'm broke and B: It's US (and possibly Canada) only.
Also, seems some people (yet again, not many speak-up, I never leave reviews because I'm lazy) are having problems.
Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Ca...
$170 - $20 promo code = $150
$150 / 3000 GB = $0.05 / GB
Put bluntly, I can't see SSDs ever hitting that price. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're faster but are they worth spending 13+ times more for? I struggle to say "yes" to that when they're only about 5 times faster.
At $150, nothing else will give you a more noticeable performance upgrade.