SSD Prices Fall Dramatically In 2012 But Increase In Q4 77
crookedvulture writes "Solid-state drives became much more affordable in 2012. The median price for 240-256GB models fell by about 44% over the course of the year and now sits around 83 cents per gigabyte. Lower-capacity drives also got cheaper, albeit by smaller margins that kept median prices from dipping below the $1/GB threshold. Surprisingly, most drives actually got more expensive over the fourth quarter, despite Black Friday and other holiday sales. This upswing was driven largely by OCZ's decision to back off its strategy of aggressively discounting drives to gain market share, allowing its rivals to raise prices, as well. Although some new models arrived with next-generation 19- and 20-nm NAND that should be cheaper to produce, those drives didn't debut at lower prices. We may have to wait a while before SSD makers pass the savings along to consumers."
Re:yea they fell by 44% (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just uninformed. Not all drives use TLC and most drives released in 2012 do not. Some drives did, like the Samsung 840, but the 840 Pro for example did not, nor did the OCZ Vector, etc.
Anyway, the case has always been that if you're not sure about the reliability of your disks: don't just use one! Software RAID solves the issue of TRIM support and you shouldn't be using parity on SSD drives anyway (due to garbage collection issues) so throw it in a RAID1 or RAID10 and build an even more reliable disk.
And if you're on a laptop that can only hold one internal disk and you still feel unsafe with just one disk: why aren't you using some sort of network based or "cloud" backed storage to ensure you have copies of your most valuable data? Why aren't you making backups?
Seriously, these problems didn't just up and appear with the invention of SSDs. It's not like we had a 30 year golden age in which no hard drive ever failed or there weren't bad runs of drives (*cough*DeskStar*cough*) that caught users by surprise. The solution has been and always will be: use RAID for redundancy, make backups for recovery.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't seem to know what price fixing is. Prices dropping steeply as more competitors enter a market are indicative of a price war, effectively the opposite of price fixing.
But don't let this minor detail interfere with your rant about the government.
Re:yea they fell by 44% (Score:4, Insightful)
Until this article, I didn't realize that there was a difference in SSD technology (SLC, MLC, TLC).
"I am an uninformed buyer and will now dispense my lack of wisdom to you."
I recently built a new system with two Samsung 40 250GB TLC SSD drives (paid about $170 each). I have one dedicated to the OS, one for programs, and I'm storing my data on standard SATA III hard-drives. As I understand it, this is the current recommended setup for SSD drives. My static usage on each SSD drive is about 80GB with 120GB free and 32GB unallocated. The only data being written to the drives are OS generated files and Temporary Internet Files, which I now plan to move off to one of my data drives.
I'm not worried about my setup.
"I am actually worried about my setup, as I intend to move frequently written datasets to the mechanical drives."
Based on the TLC numbers, it should last about 7 to 10 years in this configuration, much longer than the expected lifetime of most consumer grade mechanical drives.
"I am pulling some numbers right out of my ass. Also, my configuration which consists of mechanical drives should last much longer than mechanical drives."
How did this bullshit get modded up?