SSD Prices Down 46% Since 2011

crookedvulture writes "Hard drive prices have yet to return to normal after last year's Thailand flooding. There's good news on the solid-state front, though. The current generation of SSDs has steadily become much cheaper over the last year or so. SSD prices have dropped an average of 46% since early 2011. Intel has largely shied away from discounting its drives, but the aggressive competition between other players in the market seems to have forced its hand. There's no indication that competition is waning, suggesting the downward trend will continue. Right now, an impressive number of drives are available for less than a dollar per gigabyte."

hard drive prices/GB are also dropping

[alen]

SSD prices just fell from completely ludicrous to ridiculous as part of the normal drop in prices per GB of storage

They speak the truth

[MetalliQaZ]

It seems to be the nature of things that prices go up and rarely come down. Interesting for manufacturers, in that they were all forced to raise prices at the same time. Now you have a situation where they can all keep prices high as long as none of the big players steps out. Almost like a natural price fixing scheme.

On the SSD front, the technology has finally matured so that reliability is good enough and cost is low enough for the mainstream. I think it is important for anyone in the market to make sure that they purchase the latest generation of drives. Speed doesn't matter that much (the rest of your computer is probably couldn't utilize it) but the newer firmwares are much less likely to corrupt your data. The parts are also more fault tolerant.

Really, the biggest issue is probably the difficulty of moving existing OS installs to a new drive. Too bad, because a completely solid state PC is so nice to use.

Hard drive prices down?

[Anubis350]

Compared to Just post flood, spinning disk prices are down sure. But pre-flood prices were significantly lower than now, whereas SSDs have just been dropping like a stone recently.

Re:hard drive prices/GB are also dropping

[amicusNYCL]

Between my $500 video card, two 28" monitors, quad-core CPU, and 8GB of high-speed RAM, it was definitely my shiny new OCZ Agility 3 that made the biggest impression on my when I booted my computer for the first time to install the OS. Those things are so fast it truly is ridiculous.

SSD

[jschmitz]

the problem with SSD for high performance storage is you have to over allocate almost to a factor of 10 to get the advertised speeds ....moving from 10% occupancy to 94% occupancy can degrade performance by more than 90%. To avoid dramatic performance loss, manufacturers often “over-capacity” devices in order to ensure sufficient pre-erase “buffering” for performance. Regardless, running storage capacity at 10% will yield one performance level, 35% a lesser performance level, 75% still a lower level, and 95% capacity nearly grinds performance to a halt. DRAM is the way to go maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:really simple

[Bengie]

Until you realize that ReRAM(memresistors) will have several times the storage of SSDs for the same amount of silicon, and it will start showing up next year. Once those prices come down, they will be near the price of current mechanical HD. Silicon shrinks are out-pacing HD storage density increases.

I have a much bleaker future for mechanical HDs.

Re:SSD?

[msauve]

But even that is a misnomer. It's not a drive at all. A hard disc drive, has a hard disk being driven (spun) by a motor. SSDs should really be called SSS (Solid State Storage), or similar.

Updated Price Predictions

[CopaceticOpus]

I created some back-of-the-envelope predictions in July 2009 [slashdot.org] about the cost for 10TB of storage using either type of drive technology. Unfortunately, neither technology has kept pace with my predictions, but SSDs are making much better progress.

Actual July 2009 Prices for 10TB: Platter = $750, Flash = $28,125
Actual June 2012 Prices: Platter = $567, Flash = $8200

Previous Prediction for July 2010: Platter = $528, Flash = $9,868
Previous Prediction for July 2012: Platter = $262, Flash = $1,215
Previous Prediction for July 2014: Platter= $130, Flash = $150
Previous Prediction for July 2019: Platter= $23, Flash = $0.80

It's a shame to see that after three years, the prices are closer to where I hoped to see them in a single year. I think it's time to update my predictions based on what has happened over the previous 35 months. (Yes, I know this in unscientific and silly!)

New Prediction for July 2012: Platter = $562 [google.com], Flash = $7916 [google.com]
New Prediction for July 2013: Platter = $511 [google.com], Flash = $5188 [google.com]
New Prediction for July 2014: Platter = $464 [google.com], Flash = $3400 [google.com]
New Prediction for July 2015: Platter = $422 [google.com], Flash = $2228 [google.com]
New Prediction for July 2019: Platter = $287 [google.com], Flash = $411 [google.com]
New Prediction for July 2024: Platter = $178 [google.com], Flash = $50 [google.com]

These predictions seem much more achievable than last time. In fact, I expect that platter drives will exceed this pace as the industry recovers. I can't believe that platter drives will only see around a 50% price reduction per TB over the next seven years. However, that's been the pace of improvement from July 2009 until now.

The most interesting date will be when the technologies reach price equivalence. This would be August 2020 according to my model, at the price of $260 for 10 TB. My gut feeling is that equivalence will be reached a couple of years earlier than that, but who knows? We'll just have to watch and see!