SSD Prices Continue 3-Year Plunge 347
Lucas123 writes "After dropping 20% in the second quarter of 2012 alone, SSD prices fell another 10% in the second half of the year. The better deals for SSDs are now around 80- to 90-cents-per-gigabyte of capacity, though some sale prices have been even lower, according IHS and other research firms. For some models, the prices have dropped 300% over the past three years. At the same time, hard disk drive prices have remained "inflated" — about 47% higher than they were prior to the 2011 Thai floods, according to DRAMeXchange."
Hard drive prices remind me. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
of the extra fee or increase in prices that companies such as FedEx imposed when gas prices were around $4. They claimed it was in response to the increase in fuel prices.
Now that prices have fallen by 50-70 cents, I don't see those fees being revoked.
Same thing with hard drive prices. Initially, with limited supply, a price increase was justified. Now that production is back to normal, I don't see the prices coming down.
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I'm guessing you just haven't looked? before floods I bought 3TB for $130, right after flood 3TB was $200, now 3TB $120.
Is this really a surprise? (Score:2)
prices have dropped 300%.... (Score:5, Informative)
Great, so this means that in 2012, to get some SSD disk you will be paid twice the price you would have paid to get them in 2009 ?
Sounds interesting, just the kind of storage I need for my perpetual motion simulations !
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Yeah. I wish that abuse of English would die a painful, horrible death. It might mean something to someone, but it doesn't mean anything to someone who thrives on math or logic.
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No he meant 300%, the writer admitted it was an error in the comments and said he should have wrote dropped by 2/3rds or 66%. The drop from $3/GB to $1/GB is where he got the "300%" from.
Efficient storage solutions (Score:3)
So, yes SSD space is more expensive than even inflated disk drives, but the performance difference is significant in the 4-5x range. Most people that this applies to probably already know this, but what you do is buy an SSD that fits all your mission critical games / apps (those game take up A LOT of space very quickly and are a major decision when deciding how big of an ssd you need) and everything else: data, movies, music goes on a spinning disk, preferably encrypted. You can install your apps / games on the disk drive, but you're kind of missing the main performance boost for those things. So buy a bit more than you need to future proof it and couple it with a spinning disk to actually store data. Doing it this way makes buying an ssd make a lot more sense.
Cpt. obvious strikes again, but reading some of the discussion, maybe not for everyone.
Wow! (Score:3)
though some sale prices have been even lower
You don't say!
the prices have dropped 300%
They can't even give them away!
the article is worth what you pay for it (Score:5, Informative)
"The better deals for SSDs are now around 80- to 90-cents-per-gigabyte of capacity"? Where's this guy been?
The better deals for SSDs are now close to 50 cents a gigabyte. Two months ago I picked up four 128GB Samsung 830s for $70 each. This past month I've seen a PNY 120GB for $70, an Intel 160GB for $90, and the 128GB Samsung for $70 again. Better deals on larger SSDs (over 200GB) are now 70 cents and less - Newegg just had the a 500GB Samsung 840 for $330 (66 cents/GB).
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Let me know when I can get a 32GB SSD for $20 or less.
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Re:Can't wait (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. Margins are much higher. Essentially what happened:
a) A situation of oversupply in the HDD market leading to thin and sometimes negative margins.
b) Huge drop in supply due to natural disaster
c) drop in supply causes sharp increase in price which leads remaining suppliers to experience high margins
d) as supply comes back on board margins remain high because there isn't oversupply
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And hence not artificially inflated.
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Yeah, more like "not articifically deflated any longer".
I remember the the brick that was the 52mb external HD for my Amiga 500 haha... harddrives today could cost 10 times more and I'd still consider them crazy cheap, and moaning about their price seems kinda greedy... It's not like anyone with a real need for anything, or real money problems for that matter, ever does that. Or maybe I just missed it.
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I agree with you. I was simply laying out the series of events to ggp.
There are ways artificial can be meant though other than government manipulation which are true.
a) Artificial pricing meaning above industry average margins. In other words a pricing scheme that will lead to more people entering a market. In which case it is true that under that definition right now HDD prices are artificially high. This what people mean when they say "Apple's computers are priced artificially high", or "magazine pri
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
You'll be waiting a long time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You'll be waiting a long time (Score:4, Interesting)
SSDs are an excellent example of Moore's Law in action - because doubling the transistors at a basic level doubles the storage.
Thing is, everything else doesn't have to follow Moore's Law - spinning rust has been growing faster than Moore's Law for a little while now. And in some formfactors, spinning rust has made an exit because it's not possible to cram all that mechanical stuff in there (see the 1.8" formfactor - exclusively SSD these days because the largest spinning rust is 160GB - while you can get 256GB SSDs for cheaper!).
But where space isn't a problem (2.5" and 3.5" drives), the SSD will always be more expensive unless someone comes up with a way of storing data more densely with the same access times.
However, SSDs are big and cheap enough to be the only hard drive in many computers these days. And given the pervasiveness of networking, having a few TB of spinning rust attached and accessible via one's "personal in-home cloud" will serve to handle most people's bulk storage needs.
Of course, there will be industries where the files are so large and sequentially accessed that an SSD benefits are basically nil - like movie editing, where they can stream through TB of data, sequentially accessed.
After all, SSDs excel at random I/O, but spinning rust excels at sequential continuous access - if all you're doing is accessing data in megabyte or larger chunks, the slowness of moving the head around is hidden by the sheer speed of pulling the data off the media.
Re:You'll be waiting a long time (Score:4, Informative)
Using the phrase "spinning rust" the first time was clever.
Using it the next four times was just pretentious and annoying. Just use the term "HDD" like everyone else if you want to refer to them more than once.
Re:You'll be waiting a long time (Score:5, Informative)
You sound like a dork writing "spinning rust" repeatedly.
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"SSDs are an excellent example of Moore's Law in action - because doubling the transistors at a basic level doubles the storage."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEgh8TUlpQc [youtube.com]
Please read and attempt to understand Moore's paper.
Re:You'll be waiting a long time (Score:5, Informative)
Thing is, everything else doesn't have to follow Moore's Law - spinning rust has been growing faster than Moore's Law for a little while now.
Have they been? WD announced 2TB drives in early January 2009. WD announced 4TB drives in late November 2012. That's a period of 34.5 months to double capacity, and launch pricing was roughly $400 in both cases.
Moore's Law as it is currently accepted says we should see doublings every 18-24 months (18 months is for doubled performance, 24 months is for doubled transistor count), so it's clear that HDDs are improving at a rate much slower than Moore's Law, not faster as you claim.
SSDs, on the other hand... The Intel x25-m came out in late 2008 at an MSRP of $1,190 for the 160GB model. Today I've seen the Intel 330 180GB as low as $90. Per-gig, that's $7.4375/GB -> $0.50/GB, or 14.875x improvement in price.
That's 3.9 doublings over the course of 4 years. So SSDs are improving much faster than Moore's law, while HDDs are improving much slower than Moore's law.
Without significant changes in the improvement rates, SSDs will become cheaper per-gig than HDDs in less than four years.
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Have they been? WD announced 2TB drives in early January 2009. WD announced 4TB drives in late November 2012. That's a period of 34.5 months to double capacity, and launch pricing was roughly $400 in both cases.
I'm pretty sure that the exponential growth of hard drive capacity has *slowed* significantly in recent years. In the 90s and early-2000s, they seemed to be increasing much faster. I remember considering buying a 120MB HDD for my Amiga circa 1993, which was moderately big at the time IIRC, then five years later my first Wintel PC had a 3.4GB HDD, and that was nothing special by the standards of the time. Four years after *that* I got an 80GB HDD, which was quite decent, but still pretty mainstream in terms
Re:You'll be waiting a long time (Score:5, Funny)
Turtles.
FET = Flying Electric Turtles.
That's why SSDs are so expensive still, they have to breed nano-scale turtles that are almost impossible to corral because they either fly over the tiny fence or conduct along it.
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Agree! Currently I'm using a Corsair F120 for my SO and main games and apps. The rest of my stuff goes to normal, run of the mill HDD. This SSD was probably the most effective upgrade I've ever done, both in terms of value for money (payed around 120 € more than a year ago) as well as pure performance. I think that having a main SSD drive (a 120 GB one will be enough for having the SO + some stuff), along with one or more additional standard HDD should be next "unofficial" mandatory config any new comp
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I'm sure your significant other would approve. (OS instead of SO, haha)
Meanwhile, I do wish SSD's were a little cheaper, but I'm happy at the direction they are going, same as you and the OP. I've been holding off this entire time, but not for much longer at there rate the prices are dropping.
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ahahah nice! :D damn me and my awesome bilingual capabilities! xD
Anyways, yeah, you will definitely be amazed at the difference an SSD will make :)
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I got a 512gig ssd for just over $300 at newegg recently, and that was one of the OCZ high performance drives. So prices are a lot closer to the ~10x range right now than ~$15
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My laptop only has a SSD drive.
I have two operating systems, some Windows video games, and some films and TV series.
It's fine.
When your disk is full, it just means it's time to move your old stuff to some slow large-capacity disk as an archive.
Re:You'll be waiting a long time (Score:4, Insightful)
You're obviously a copyright thefting pirate if you need more than 256 GB storage on an SSD.
Or a parent with a camera that records video.
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Or have a very large collection of games installed.
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Re:Can't wait (Score:5, Funny)
I've never had an SSD, and had a very bad experience with a first gen one
So what was the bad experience you had with a first gen SSD besides not having one?
Re:Can't wait (Score:4, Informative)
I've had bad experiences with busses before, but I've never owned a bus.
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I had to read that several time to realize you weren't talking about computer buses, but large vehicles
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From your comment's siblings, you are apparently not the only one. I didn't even think of that potential pun when I was posting that; as a laptop user and supporter of public transportation, I ride buses a lot more than I install them. :p
Re:Can't wait (Score:4, Informative)
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Yup. I thought that was a pretty well known and/or obvious thing to do.
Though my SSD is only 64GB, so I had to put my Steam install on my hard drive. I currently have something like 400GB of games installed on there. It sounds like it's about time I looked at a dedicated games SSD though :)
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NTFS Junction Points. Learn to love them when you have an SSD.
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Actually I moved my documents directory to my HDD using those. I suppose I could do it with individual game directories on Steam if I want better loading times. Thanks.
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Cool - but you needed 64GB to do this in Debian?
(Not trolling - I'm an old BSD fart so just curious...)
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One thing I'd recommend is going with a RAID 1 setup for the HDDs. Drive failure is still a constant issue, and there is a big difference between seeing a dialog that pops up and going "crap, time to replace a drive", compared to hoping you have a recent backup... somewhere. Even if documents are saved on Dropbox or backed up via Mozy, it still is a PITA to reload/activate the OS, reload/activate apps, etc.
For SSDs, I have not seen any concrete proof that they are any more reliable than HDDs, so I'd have
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As someone who finally picked up an SSD on Black Friday, I have to ask: does Windows 7 work any better than XP about having apps installed on other drives rather than in Program Files/User folders?
I remember trying a similar setup once for XP, back in the mists of the past, and it was not a happy fun time.
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I keep reposting the same advice, but look into NTFS junction points. It's much safer than trying to pick a random folder to install to. They work like Symlinks on Unix-like systems.
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That's an idea. Are they supported natively, do you know, or do I still need some third-party utility to make them like I did back in the not-so-good old days?
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They are supported natively. Use mklink from the command prompt. It's built in on at least Windows 7+.
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Which problems are you referring to?
I use symlinks if I want to store data on other drives, that works like a charm. I think those are added after XP, though.
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Hard drives are getting gradually cheaper per-gig too. Even if SSDs became really cheap, hard drives still would have a storage-per-cm3 advantage that would give them some advantage in bulk storage - one rack enclosure full of hard drives could store as many bits as a whole rach full of SSDs, with associated reduction in power, controllers, cabling and management costs.
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I would not mind seeing SSDs and HDDs merge, with a smart "SAN in a can" drive controller. This drive controller would do autotiering. If a region of blocks is used often, it gets moved to the SSD. If more areas get used more frequently, that set of blocks goes to the spinning platters. This way, over time (assuming consistent usage), there is a good balance between SSD speed and the capacity of traditional HDD.
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You mean like one of these? [seagate.com]
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It is already happening and has been for a long time. All modern OS use RAM buffers/cache. Put more RAM in your computer.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3324693&cid=42327113 [slashdot.org]
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I need to build another computer in the near future and I've been thinking long and hard about SSD versus HDD. Still undecided, but with trends like this, I'll be opting for SSD
That "future" better not be too near.
I'm not holding my breath for a 3TB SSD in the $100 range...
Re:mSATA SSDs (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad Moses spent so much time trying to save squirrels and zebras that he couldn't be bothered to save some of that tech.
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No, you can't name the seller. Slashdot is a tyranny.
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I read that as "tranny" and it was much funnier.
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LOL. Works both ways, I suppose.
Re:UK HDs seem to be down to 2011 prices (Score:5, Funny)
LOL. Works both ways, I suppose.
That's what (s)he said!
Re:WTF?!?!?! (Score:4, Interesting)
OCZ Vertex drives have had a consistently 5% return rate (that's 1 in 20) since May 2012 now. I would stay the hell away from the Vertexes in particular, as they're closer to 7%, the company as a whole is closer to 5%. Granted, that's return rate, not confirmed failure, but a return rate that's been consistently ten times higher than the rest of their competition should give you pause when buying cheap hardware. Compare to 0.5% for manufacturers like Intel and Samsung.
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Or to put it another way, name a PC manufacturer who uses OCZ drives. Go ahead and try. Yep, didn't think so. Above and beyond performance, reliability is the primary concern for a drive, and OCZs aren't there. Samsungs and Toshibas are.
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That might partly be because they don't already have an OEM agreement. For Samsung and Toshiba, it's just adding product lines to an existing HDD relationship.
Re:WTF?!?!?! (Score:5, Informative)
Here are the hard numbers for anyone who's curious:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html [behardware.com]
- Intel 0.45% (against 1.73%)
- Samsung 0.48% (N/A)
- Corsair 1.05% (against 2.93%)
- Crucial 1.11% (against 0.82%)
- OCZ 5.02% (against 7.03%)
Return rates specifically for OCZ models:
- 40.00% for the OCZ Petrol 64 GB
- 39.42% for the OCZ Petrol 128 GB
- 30.85% for the OCZ Octane 128 GB SATA II
- 29.46% for the OCZ Octane 64 GB SATA II
- 9.73% for the OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB 3.5"
- 9.59% for the OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB
- 6.73% for the OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB
- 5.43% for the OCZ Agility 3 240 GB
- 5.12% for the OCZ Vertex Plus 128 GB
Also if you have a Crucial M4 make sure you have the correct firmware [anandtech.com] as Crucial keeps releasing/shipping units with buggy firmware updates that can brick your drive.
Re:WTF?!?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure you understand how percentages work.
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5% is 5% regardless of the number of unit generated.
It's a strong indicator of poor QC.
He may not know statistics, but based on your post, you sure as hell don't know statistics.
Re:WTF?!?!?! (Score:4, Informative)
We've been over this at some point... OCZ has a greater volume of sales generating higher return rates, it's a rule of QC. Crucial (#1 lowest returns) has relatively minor sales in comparison so not as many are shipping out that can fail.
What? Higher sales generates higher returns in absolute quantity, not in terms of return rates. Return rates are a percentage, and are independent of the quantity shipped (although a larger shipped quantity means the rates will more accurately reflect actual failure percentages).
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holy crap you are BAD at math.
Don't stop, you have moved from facepalm WTH stupid into entertaining stupid.
Here's another WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary says that the prices on some models has dropped 300%. That's impossible, since the price cannot drop below zero, unless of course THEY are paying YOU to take the drive (as in soviet russia).
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Yes, this is one phrase that people use that might mean something to a particular group of people, but sounds absolutely stupid to anyone else. I do not subscribe to that form of English.
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Yes, this is one phrase that people use that might mean something to a particular group of people, but sounds absolutely stupid to anyone else. I do not subscribe to that form of English.
Forget subscribing. If you understand what it means, do share.
I was under the impression that the fact that I'm not a native English speaker was irrelevant to how I understand basic algebra. Guess I was wrong...
So, if a drive was priced at $100, and its price dropped by 300%, how much would it go for now (assuming -$200 isn't the right answer)?
Shachar
Re:Here's another WTF (Score:5, Funny)
Assuming it's proper English to someone, I'd assume the logic goes like this.
The price was $12, now it's $3. The price dropped by 300%. That is, 300% of the final price has been subtracted from the first price. It's complete nonsense, and completely backwards really.
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Language changes over time, often for the sake of shorthand. "To be" is often left off and simply implied in a lot of regional dialects now, especially combined with "needs."
PRICES REDUCED 1 BILLION PERCENT* (Score:2)
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The price dropped by 2/3, exactly, or approximately 66.667%. You are now paying 1/3 of the previous price, or approximately 33.333%.
What was your point, again ?
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100% of 100 dollars is 100 dollars.
300% of 100 dollars in 300 dollars.
So, how did the price of 100 dollar drive drop 300 dollars?
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66.666...%
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Having said that, we're probably stuck till January, this time of year isn't known for it's bargains post-black friday. Also, stores get pretty unpleasant around this time of year, unless long lines and cra
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What the fuck planet are they shopping on? Fell 10% my ass!
I had assumed this was posted from an alternative universe where "fall by 300%" makes sense.
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Oddly, I read this and thought the exact opposite. Most of the deals I've seen on Slickdeals since Black Friday have been in the 50- to 80-cents-per-gigabyte range. The latest deal, posted just yesterday, had an Intel 180GB SSD for $100 after rebate. That's 55-cents-per-gigabyte. That's only one deal site, so I'm sure there's other deals that I've missed.
The store doesn't matter so much as the price. Where you shop has become less important than how you shop. If you're only focusing on a few retailers, and
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thing on sale more expensive after sale, news at 11
The trend is downward, and lately the trend has steepened. You really don't understand the market, the idea of trends, or and article review trends.
I'm going to be buying a 3TB drive for 90 dollars this afternoon, but I certainly wouldn't use the single data point as a trend, or to refute a trend.
Wise up.
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2TB drives used to be 69 and below, they are currently sitting between 90 and 100.
70* 1.47 = $102
47% higher seems about right.
Re:300% drop? (Score:5, Funny)
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Simple, they pay you twice as much as you used to pay them and you get the goods on top of that !
Say you use to pay 100$ for something, now you get it for -200$, that's a 300% price drop.
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72KB wouldn't be big enough to store the extracted text captions from a single movie. It's too small for a single photo or a single record album compressed in MP3 or AAC.
You probably can't find a current OS or even a single application that can fit in such a small space.
It's no longer 1980. Imagine that?
Your nostalgia was outdated even by 1990.
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In 2012 my linux desktop systems never went above 30 gig, excluding data (/home). And a live system is chock full of apps in 2-4 gb.
So these drives make plenty of sense. I wouldn't even use them for data which gets rewritten a lot.
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Are you serious? You can't be, floppies stored more than that. Anyway, my first hard drive was 20MB and I am serious...
Re:Kinda tiny (Score:5, Insightful)
Put your OS on it, and application binaries. You can have a second drive for everything else.
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I can see where the original poster is coming from. I recently had to upgrade my SSD to 240 GB from 120 because I was having to delete applications to install new ones. Sometimes I could easily find something I wasn't going to use anymore, like an old game, but it was becoming tricky. Applications like Visual Studio, Office, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc. seem to keep getting bigger (maybe not all of them, but most of them).
Luckily I was able to buy the newest Intel 240GB SSD for the exact same price that
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Those programs might be huge, but a lot of the large resource files can be symlinked (Unix) or junctioned (NTFS) off to another drive. Final Cut Studio would have taken dozens of GB on my computer if I hadn't done that.
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I install my OS and my apps on a fast 120GB SSD. That fits pretty much everything I want; the OS boots fast and the apps load quickly. My Drobox folder (5GB) also goes on this drive which is where most of my important documents are. All the stuff that isn't speed dependant goes on a traditional hard drive. Movies, music, stuff like that.
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Other people buy Big Macs and Fords too...
That just means that they have no clue, or no taste, or just buy things based on some sort of conspicuous consumer herd mentality.
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120 GB is plenty of space. I ran Windows 7 plus some apps like Firefox and LibreOffice on a 30 GB SSD in 2010 so I know it can be done. My current laptop has 128 GB and is only half full.
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> I payed $300 to upgrade my Mac Mini's drive to an 256 GB SSD. Therefore prices haven't changed in three years. ...and they never will.
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To 'upgrade'. You were already paying X$ for the previous PITA of drive included in the price so the reduction is 1-167/(300+X) (167 being the lowest price found on newegg in 30 secs.)
We could estimate X being in the range 50-100, thus, a reduction of ~ 53 - 58 %