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."
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.
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.
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
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.