When is the SSD price drop?

???????????

 

When they feel like it?

 

The prices on SSDs have been on a steady decline the entire year.

 

When? NOW
On the black friday deals at newegg I saw a 30GB ssd for $60
I bought a 32GB ssd a few months ago for $140.

 

i want a 500gb sdd

 

We'll see some huge price drops next year.

 

Anyone know what quarter of 2009 will we see SSD price drops?

 

Probably towards the end during holidays. But little price drops from some x brand throughout the year like I've seen this year.

There seems to be so many brands (many I haven't heard of) making SSD's and at competitive prices (usually cutting corners somewhere), but they are still faster than most HDD's. Consumers will look for two things when searching for SSD: price and capacity. Smarter consumers will do some more research and perhaps wait at least two more years until they purchase an SSD... the market should be more balanced by that time with 'X' brand performing well. It's all competition that lowers the prices, and I think we're seeing quite a few names here

 

Incorrect grammar.

When will the SSD price's drop? is correct.

 

"price's" indicates ownership by price. "prices" indicates more than one price. In this context, to be gramatically correct it would be:

"When will the SSD prices drop?" as this deals with multiples of price.

If you're going to correct someone else's grammar it's important to be correct yourself.

 

Oh just quit with the grammar already... everyone new what was meant...

 

I believe there is another correction that must be made:

"If you're going to correct someone else's grammar , it's important to be correct yourself. "

 

Who Cares!!!

 

I kind of like grammar! Without grammar, we all kind of look like idiots

 

The comma is optional in this context, not mandatory.

 

No, it's not.

/thread

 

this isn't an English thread its about ssd's.
Maybe we all should work on our grammer though

 

Y'all can expect thems SSD pricin' to drop like a hot turd right about... all year long!

Now there is some grammar for you.

 

Not for a while, I'd presume. The Intel SLCs are still $700 or some ridiculous number in that range.

 

Intel single handedly kept the prices high. Thanks for nothing, Intel!

 

Grammar?

Haha. I turned this into an english thread.

 

grammar aside, what kind of question is "when is the ssd price drop," it's like it'll happen on a specific day. It falls gradually, that's just the nature of every electronic commodity.

but if you insist, it'll drop on november 12, 2009 at 4:00 PM PST

 

haha. (10char)

 

I know exactly what you mean about waiting a while before going the SSD route. I generally wait a while to purchase any new technology 'cause I've always believed it to be a prudent thing to do, but two years? That seems like a long time. Are you suggesting that "smarter consumers" should wait two years strictly from a price perspective, or do you also suggest waiting that long to make sure they 'perfect' the technology as well? I'm interested in your point-of-view on this.

Also, what do you all believe will be the immediate impact on current hard drives once SSDs really catch on? Will they go the way of floppy, zip drives, cassettes, VHS, etc., or do you all believe they will continue to exist in some capacity for a little while? How long do any of you believe it will take for the current drives to fizzle out - months or years?

 

SSDs are only gonna replace hard drives in the performance sector if the current trends continue.

People in favor of SSDs always tout "Moore's Law" price drop advantages but hard drives drop quite fast. Moore's Law in current trends is double the transistors every 24 months, which means half the price every two years. Hard Drives in average has been dropping half every year, which is twice the rate of SSDs.

http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddiskdata.html

 

They'll continue to exist for quite a long time, but will eventually go out of style because they have a fundamental problem: moving parts. The other major computer components are almost purely electronic -- there are various fans and coolers, of course, but the CPU, GPU, RAM and so on don't move and this is in large part why they've gotten faster at an exponential rate. It doesn't mean they can't have issues: as people at my workplace recently demonstrated in a spectacular fashion, electrical current and temperature changes can be just as destructive as mechanical motion (or more) if your circuitry is not well made. However, as long as you build stuff properly, moving parts are much, much worse and there's really no avoiding their drawbacks.

Years, possibly more than a decade. Don't get me wrong: if my current machine survives for the 2.2 years that I'm hoping for it to survive, the next laptop I plan to buy will have an SSD and I will be very disappointed if this SSD is not at least 4 times as big as the Intel X-25 and (simultaneously) at least twice as cheap. The time when you can buy a $1.5-2K laptop with a reasonably sized SSD is just around the corner. However, it will take a while for them to truly replace hard drives as the latter are currently used almost everywhere.

 

The assumption here is that the only price factor in SSDs is the transistor count. There are other factors including volume which are going to play significant roles in pricing.

 

John, Samsung had a presentation recently where they were comparing prices at 1.8 inch and prices per GB were 5x for the SSDs compared to HDDs. They expect that to only go down to 3x by 2013. And 1.8 inch drives are more expensive than larger 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch desktop drives.

 

You're thinking of this presentation, right? If so, please note that the year in question was 2010 rather than 2013. The statement is quite likely true, but keep in mind that 2010 is less than 13 months away from now.

Also, people who buy SSDs aren't attracted to high storage capacities, they want speed and HDDs aren't likely to give them that. Any HDD has a fundamental limitation: the disk can only spin so quickly and they're already beginning to be a bottleneck. For example, OS loading times are dependent on them as are loading times of games. I'd be willing to pay $200 extra if it means Windows 7 loads twice as fast.

 

I think that when Intel came out, the prices dropped not becasue Intel came out, but becasue everyone realized what complete pieces of crap the current MLC drives were . So, when I refer to SSD's, I now actually refer to SLC SSD's. After my non-starter with an MLC, I am not even will to try an Intel MLC, although I am sure it would be better, this is my data I am talking about and I want the best, fastest, most reliable, and THE LEAST STUTTERING, preferably none at all ANd the industry standard SLC's are still 64GB, Samsung, OCZ rebadged, and the venerable Mtron. The Intel SLC is, well, over priced. LIKE WAY OVER. Giove me a 128GB for the price of an Mtron 3500 64GB and I'll take it!

 

Yeah, I knew I was not unique in that regard . I guess my bigger point was that really just one "order of magnitude" leap is necessary to get to a really good place.

For example, the Mtron 3500, keep the price the same, but double capacity. Or, half the price. Either is good. Both will probably not happen this quarter, or even Q1 2009

So, really, progress has been made. Too bad most of it was on usless MLC's.

 

$300 SSD by mid year next year....at least thats my prediction

 

SLC? WHat size?

 

128gb Ssd.

 

that's totally believable because 128gb mlc that are coming out tout 2-3x the performance as the current ones, i can't imagine the current ones costing more than 200 bucks by the end of next year.

128gb slc, on the other hand, is a pipe dream seeing as 128gb slc's aren't even released yet.

 

Ok so I got the date wrong. I didn't even read the presentation through and was guessing off top of my head.

But look at the starting date, which is 2007. And the price gap at that timeframe is put as 5x. They are looking at 3x for 2010. It might be closer on very small 1.8 inch hard drives, but go bigger, 2.5 inch laptop(most of laptops) and 3.5 inch desktop and the price difference will still be very big.

The current MLC-tech is on 2 bits per cell(SLC is 1 bit per cell). Price reduction forecast for SSDs put having 3-bit, 4-bit or even greater MLC tech. Considering the hassle of 2 bits are causing for SSD market, 3, 4 bit MLC is even gonna get worse to lower prices.

Performance advantage in real world for SSDs that are relevant for most users seems to be not big either. Tech Report's review of the SLC-based Intel X25-E doesn't show faster boot times, or load times. It's faster at copying files or extracting data, but you don't do that every day. There'll be a point where people say we don't need faster SSDs and the point is reaching very quickly...

 

problem is, you don't get faster boot times if the bottleneck got shifted to somewhere else.

you gain much more in boot time by taking off everything from your pc (or disabling it in the bios of your notebook) in vista. should help much more (helped me much more ). but ssd's still help (they did in my case, much on the notebook, a bit on the pc).

 

I don't see a reason for that. All other things being equal, the 1.8 stuff is going to be more expensive than the 2.5 stuff regardless which type you choose and the 3.5 stuff will be cheaper than both, but I don't see why the ratios of HDD:GB to SSD:GB wouldn't be more or less similar regardless of the size.

Really? This review says otherwise:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4035456

It shows faster load times (by quite a bit, actually), but not boot times. At the moment, the SSDs are still optimized for different things -- if you look at their chart, the boot time champion is the Samsung Flash SSD. You have to wait a little for all of them to copy the advances off of each others' work and come up with something that is better in all respects.

Come on. Do you also expect people to say we don't need faster processors? Or faster graphics cards? Or faster memory? People might say we don't need faster SSDs if it means paying so much more money or if it means settling for a small size, but if you make the other components of the cost-benefit analysis neutral or only slightly negative, people will always want faster stuff.

 

The game load advantages of X25-E over the fastest hard drive is a mere 6 secs. Since the fastest drive takes over 25 secs to load, its not noticeable.

I think I can estimate why that's happening. Chip-level, Intel's and Samsung's aren't that much different. It's the controller that allows Intel chips to get ahead of performance in IOPS/archiving/copying. Chip-level, the Samsung and Intel chip might have similar latency. Intel themselves said its the much lower latency that's making difference in boot times, with some having to do with read transfer rates.

We might say that Intel isn't using the fastest chips for the SSDs.

Some say its the fast sequential reads that makes it load/boot fast. X25-E isn't doing it. Latency is another factor but since SSDs latency is already low, it won't lower drastically.

CPU-Different, CPUs are general purpose processing units and speed up everything you do
GPU-You lag in game, your 3D app slows, its your graphics card
Memory-More memory is good but generally there's a point where it levels off with most people and faster memory has to be usually paired with faster CPUs anyway.

SSDs-Your computer is now responding faster and booting faster, yay! There's a thing called limitations of human perception and there'll be a point where the benefits will diminish, since we'll go into millisecond ranges. But out of IOPS in servers(and still not always) its not making anything else process faster.

 

And my point was that it is not just Moore's law that's in play here for pricing. Volume of manufacturing is also a significant factor. Look at your pricing for 1 off vs 100 vs 1000 vs 10000 vs 100000 vs 1000000. Then there's competition which we haven't factored in either.

We can't look exclusively at Moore's law, we also have to look at these other factors to be significant in pricing.

Not having had the opportunity to take apart a 1.8 or 2.5" SSD I'm not sure that there's a big difference between them when it comes to manufacture other than the size of the board that pops into the case. If there aren't any significant differences then the price for either should be comparable.

This isn't the case when we go from 1.8 / 2.5 / 3.5 in mechanical spindles.

 

Good, I probably would have no doubt on the X25-M as a notebook drive as no other drive offers power savings and performance all in one.

 

You're missing the point. That 6 seconds corresponds to a 20% reduction in loading time. With modern games and programs, this is not critical (though here I'd argue that 6 seconds is noticeable), but its real benefit is that in the future, game designers will be able to give us 20% more content per second of loading time.

That sounds about right. Now all we need to do is combine Intel's controller with Samsung's fast chips...

If you plan on using the same exact software as you're using now, then yes. However, this is not what has happened in the history of computers. Instead, the software becomes bulkier to take advantage of the hardware. Operating systems do more and more things, video and pictures become high-def, modern games take up 10 times more space than they did 5 years ago and so on. Once a bottleneck disappears, you see better stuff for the same temporal costs.

 

I was hoping they drop by a reasonable this year. Maybe by the holiday "09" season the price will have dropped enough for some to be in "Retail stores"?

 

Thank you both for the input.