Solid State Drives Break the 50 Cents Per GiB Barrier, OCZ ARC 100 Launched 183
MojoKid (1002251) writes Though solid state drives have a long way to go before they break price parity with hard drives (and may never make it, at least with the current technology), the gap continues to close. More recently, SSD manufacturers have been approaching 50 cents per GiB of storage. OCZ Storage Solutions, with the help of their parent company Toshiba's 19nm MLC NAND, just launched their ARC 100 family of drives that are priced at exactly .5 per GiB at launch and it's possible street prices will drift lower down the road. The ARC 100 features the very same OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 controller as the higher-end OCZ Vertex 460, but these new drives feature more affordable Toshiba A19nm (Advanced 19 nanometer) NAND flash memory. The ARC 100 also ships without any sort of accessory bundle, to keep costs down. Performance-wise, OCZ's new ARC 100 240GB solid state drive didn't lead the pack in any particular category, but the drive did offer consistently competitive performance throughout testing. Large sequential transfers, small file transfers at high queue depths, and low access times were the ARC 100's strong suits, as well as its low cost. These new drives are rated at 20GB/day write endurance and carry a 3-year warranty.
Re:Not a barrier (Score:3, Insightful)
Performance (Score:5, Insightful)
If SSD's had come first we'd be talking about how HDD's finally broke the 3ms latency barrier or the or the 1 Gb/s barrier. SSDs' aren't about capacity, that's just not what they're for. While it's certainly nice that you can have a usable amount of space for a decent price, 120GB is enough SSD space to see 95% of the benefits for 60% of users. If laptop manufacturers would make 2 bay laptops standard that 60% would jump to 95%.
Yay! I can lose my data cheaply now! (Score:5, Insightful)
So much SPAM... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how this whole article is anything but a commercial advertisement. $0.50/Gig was broken a long time ago, at least for your average consumer. I have a 500GB SSD in a laptop that was well under $0.50/GB from a national brick and mortar retailer.
So this is just more evidence how far Slash-dot has fallen? Come on folks, I don't mind the banner ads on the website, you all have to eat, but can we dispense with these kinds of stories?
Re:Performance (Score:4, Insightful)
Bingo. Laptop users. Laptops are on the way up, desktops are dying. And since the higher-end laptops (ultrabooks) are even ditching optical drives to save size and weight, what do you think are the odds that they will make space for a 2nd drive. In fact, I would not be surprised of the 2.5" drive bays went away entirely in the next three years, to be replaced by slots (probably PCIe or something similar). Unless you are going for a larger device -- gaming or workstation laptop, you are not going to have the luxury of two drive bays.
Re:Cheaper drives (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no particular technical difficulty, just another step in gradually falling prices. We have seen drives hit $0.39/GB as well with standard Amazon.com pricing. The Crucial M550 (a bit faster) is at $407 for 1TB model today, for example: http://amzn.to/1kBpIs1 [amzn.to]
Re:Not a barrier (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm.. I remember the Atari 1020ST was sold as the first computer ever to be under $1 per Kilobyte. It is true that $0.50 / gigabyte is nothing magical from a tech standpoint, but this is not about tech, it is about psychology. Human beings are not entirely logical, and emotions play a large part in decisions.
Re:Yay! I can lose my data cheaply now! (Score:4, Insightful)
I hear your song, but I heard it before by the HDD cover band before the SSD members were even born. All hardware is prone to not coming back up after the power was cut (or turned off in the case of a laptop I have), SSD is not special in this. It appears you have heard it, but if not, tune in to the greatest hits channel and you will hear the number 1 song for the past 30 years: "Always have working up to date backups". I'm glad your backups work.
Re:flash/disk/tape ratios still stand (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a little short sighted. Video files are not th eonly kinds of file that have grown demonstrably larger over time, due to "hey, everyone has the spaces these days, let's fill it! It's CHEAP!" being a development consideration.
Be it audio files (FLAAC vs MP3), Images (jpg vs png vs bmp vs RAW), Documents (RTF vs DOC vs DOCX) 3D object files (OBJ vs MAX vs BLEND) and of course, application files (I've seen 10mb and larger DLLs and other libraries become commonplace these days, where previously they were a few kilobytes to meg or two, with 5mb being 'large')
What you mean to say, is that 1TB is more than enough for anyone, "right now."
4 years from now, not so much.
Re:Huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are so many analogies I could make for that.
Ford Motor Company eliminates Ford brand and replaces it with Edsel.
Microsoft changes Windows 7 to Windows Vista Second Edition.
Cisco to deprecate Cisco trademark in favor of Linksys. *
* Yes, I realize that Cisco no longer owns Linksys.
Re:Performance (Score:2, Insightful)
desktops are dying
LOL. People have been saying that for over a decade and it ain't happening. It seems like the myth lives on by being rekindled in new generations of geeks who weren't around to see the prognosticating last go 'round.
Re:Yay! I can lose my data cheaply now! (Score:5, Insightful)
>All hardware is prone to not coming back up after the power was cut (or turned off in the case of a laptop I have), SSD is not special in this.
But OCZ SSDs were. The failure of OCZ drives doubled the industry average failure rate, that is how bad they were. Returns were in the double digit percents.
And still I hear your statement that this could happen to any company. Which is true. But OCZ ignored the problem and pretended it did not exist, instead of showing a bit of generosity towards the (rightly) disappointed customers. This I will not forget, and like me many others.
Re:Cheaper drives (Score:5, Insightful)
I love my Apple products, but let's be honest: their storage prices are outrageous. If we calculate the value they place on each GB based on the difference in prices between models that have different amounts of storage but are otherwise identical, the lowest they ever go with SSDs is $1.56/GB (which we see in their laptops and high-end iPads). For lower-end or mid-range iOS devices, the prices are as high as $6.25/GB (for the $100 16GB->32GB step up) or $3.13/GB (for the 32GB->64GB step up that costs $100).
So, suggesting they are $2/GB seems fair to me, even if it doesn't universally apply across all of their products.
Re:So much SPAM... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cheaper drives (Score:4, Insightful)
$2.02/GB flash drive [apple.com]
Boom! Proved you wrong. ;)
Re:Yay! I can lose my data cheaply now! (Score:4, Insightful)
And Intel had drives that reverted to 8GB after a reboot, IBM had the Deathstars, Quantum had their Fireballs, Seagate, well, about every model between 500 and 1TB.
*everyone* in the industry comes out with bad products.