Yes but like large HDD's used to be, they're rather 'fresh' and not actually mainstream yet. Large HDD's are cheap because users made them cheap by buying them year after year, materials are in much larger quantities. I wouldn't even say SSD's and HDD's should be competing at all because they're opposites, one is for speed the other is for storage.
They're not even that expensive to be honest, from a storage point of view they're horrendous but when you have the option to increase the slowest device (and only moving part) in your computer for less than a new GPU or CPU its just another cost that you go with (this is going on my local prices). I'm surprised you guys don't complain about RAM modules, now those are expensive!
Everything has to be considered in context; I didn't complain about or refuse to buy the early hard drives because there was no cheaper alternative. Today, with SSDs, there
is a cheaper alternative, and the cheaper alternative (HDDs) doesn't slow me down in a way that matters. Thanks to all the buffers, cache, system and video memory in today's computers, there's nothing I
can't do because I have HDDs instead of SSDs. If I had too slow of a GPU, I couldn't play certain games; too slow a CPU and I wouldn't be able to watch HD movies. But HDDs don't restrict me from doing anything; they just make loading times a little longer.
Buying a $3-4/GB SSD to speed up load times, is like buying a Ferrari to get to the grocery store faster. It was only a five minute trip in the first place; now it's 3 minutes. So you spend $250k to make trips that were already quick, even quicker. It doesn't help with the long trips (big file transfers); you can make those trips faster for less (with RAID). And if you wait a couple years, you can get something a few times faster your Ferrari for a fraction of the price. However: just driving that high-end pasta rocket is a blast. This I recognize and if you want to pay the price for that ride, more power to you.
I'm glad there are people who buy $3+/GB SSDs. I've used them myself in a few dozen builds for customers, and am grateful for the purchases of those people—their support of the SSD manufacturers will ultimately bring the cost of SSDs down to the point where people like me will buy them and benefit from their investment. Everyone wins; the early adopters pay big bucks for the rush, the technology gets developed, refined, and becomes economical, and then mainstream users who are more patient get to use it.
I just wouldn't try arguing for SSDs being a wise investment right now—not even for those who need extreme performance. Just for those who need extremely fast load times.
