SSD prices down by 10-15% in second half of 2010

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Although solid state drives are still a bit too expensive for the average user, prices have come down a little through the second half of 2010. According to DigiTimes, companies including Intel and AData Technology have lowered asking prices on their SSDs by around 10 to 15% in recent months as they hope to entice more holiday shoppers and boost market penetration.

Adoption rates will also climb as more system builders include flash storage in pre-built machines, such as Apple's MacBook Air. Based on iSuppli's figures, SSD penetration will triple this year for both desktop and enterprise server segments, increasing to 1.2% and 1.7%. That rate is an even higher 2.3% among notebooks, which benefit greatly from the lighter, cooler design.

The firm estimates that SSD sales will total some 7.2 million units by the end of 2010, and while that's an increase from 2009, it's still far behind conventional hard drives, which should reach some 662 million shipments. Earlier this year, we asked how many of you had already purchased an SSD, and plenty of you (justly) complained about prices still being too high. With holiday sales looming, are you ready to take the plunge or are you prepared to wait out the cost premium?

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https://www.techspot.com/news/41169-ssd-prices-down-10-15-second-half-2010.html

 

[Ahmed90]

hope it will drop more like USB Flash price what we use to pay for 2GB 2 years ago now we pay it for 8GB and even 16GB

 

[Guest]

SSD's price drop 10-15% by comparison how much HDD's price drop in this second half 2010 ?
I think HDD's price drop more so HDD's market will destroy SSD's market. UEFI will sweep SSD from our market because fast booting matter will become irrelevant xD

 

[TomSEA]

Prices have dropped some, but not a lot. I bought an OCZ Agility 2 128GB on sale for what I think was a pretty decent price at the time - $230 including rebate in July of this year. But I see it routinely on sale for that same price now without rebate.

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Guest said:
SSD's price drop 10-15% by comparison how much HDD's price drop in this second half 2010 ?
I think HDD's price drop more so HDD's market will destroy SSD's market. UEFI will sweep SSD from our market because fast booting matter will become irrelevant xD

Actually, DigiTimes reports the opposite: "However, since SSD pricing is currently still 10 times higher than traditional hard drive prices, sales will still be constrained. Meanwhile, hard drive makers Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba and Hitachi GST are all reducing their capacity in the fourth quarter, so prices of hard drives have recently started to climb with 500GB models even seeing 4-5% prices rises."

 

[Guest]

@guest

UEFI will certainly give us much faster booting because it replaces the antiquated BIOS, but an SSD will make your system run quicker-loading programs/games, etc...actually that's the main reason people buy it. An SSD will also load your OS faster than a platter HD as well.

Too bad these SSD drive makers don't realize that if they drop the price more, they'll sell more units-guess they forgot their Business 101 lessons. By making it more affordable, it'll mainstream SSDs and increase demand for them.

Once people get hooked on them, they will be addicted to the speed and will be weaned off the spinning hd's. Though of course they still have a long way to go to reach the same capacity/cost that conventional drives have.

 

[Guest]

I bought HDD 500GB 1st July and I see now that it cost less than 80% old price, furthermore 1000GB HDD's price drop even more. HDDs are now freaking cheap - they now have mesmerising price xD

 

[miska_man]

Why buy an SSD when you can just buy 2 or 3 7200rpm drives and put them in a RAID configuration? That's more than fast enough for me, plus way cheaper! Although not the fastest drive, Western Digital has a 500gb Caviar Blue model (7200rpm) that is currently going for $39.99 at a certain online retailer. With prices like this, I'm doubting an SSD will touch either of my computers in the near future.

 

[Nima304]

I imagine prices will drop pretty fast after the OEMs pick up. Apple is only one piece of the puzzle, I'm waiting for Sony, IBM, Toshiba, and HP. Either way, datacentre owners will be pushing SSD use in mission-critical servers to cut down massively on power consumption.

 

[DKRON]

Because miska_man ssd's are still up to and above 100times faster then standard HDD's, my computer boots up to logon page in 4 seconds and shuts down in 2 seconds

 

[Guest]

Spoken like a person who hasn't owned an SSD and discounts all the other benefits beyond just the untouchable access times.

 

[Guest]

Miska your a noob Raid 0 hd's will not be greater than an SSD.

Raid increases your access time.

Your raid array will sit at 11-12ms while the ssd is at 0.1ms.

Unless you are doing alot of file transfers all day which Raid provides a performance boost its not worth the Risk of a drive failure in Raid O. Do what the other guys suggest buy and SSD and use one or STFU you obviously have no clue what you are talking about.

P.S DKRON

Miska is a noob but you don't have to lie there is no way your machine will go from power on to Post then to windows login in 4 seconds. even the 2 second shutdown is a flat out lie.

Why are there so many noobs and people posting misinformation on this site?

 

[Lokalaskurar]

This is what we've been waiting for; SSD-prices dropping. And even 10% is a good decrease. When will SSD's be as cheap as HDD, one might wonder?

 

[Guest]

Even if they get as cheap as HDD's, they will never fully replace them, at least not while they're employing these current technologies. MLC gives you what, 5 000 or 10 000 write cycles ? That's not as much as it seems, you can't thrash a SSD the way you do a HDD and expect to use it for any meaningful amount of time. SLC gives you maybe double that, but it's still not enough, and SLC costs an arm and a leg.

SSD's are amazing as boot drives, but I wouldn't use one for data storage just yet, even if they were dirt cheap. In my view, it's just not worth the trouble of migrating huge chunks of data to a new drive every couple of years, when the drive fails to write. And fail it will, especially if you write to it all the time.

 

[taea00]

While I'm sure SSD's are a huge performance boost, it's not the right time to buy one yet. They're still just too expensive. They don't give a big enough bang for the buck, except using a smaller one for your OS and putting everything else on a standard hard drive. I don't feel that's really worth it. Sure your OS will be snappy, but when you're loading games, which I'm sure that's what most of us use our PC's for, you're still stick with standard HDD speeds, so why bother?

 

[TeamworkGuy2]

I am waiting it out. I am hoping to build in the next year and a half and my computer will not have a SSD unless I can get a high performance 64 or 80 GB SSD for less than a hundred buck, which is very doubtful, so I guess my future computer will be getting a WD Caviar Black.
Who can afford to spend $200 for a ~120 GB SSD.
Cheaper to RAID four HDs for ~$250 and end up with a total size of over 2 TBs !!!

 

[Leeky]

Miska is a noob but you don't have to lie there is no way your machine will go from power on to Post then to windows login in 4 seconds. even the 2 second shutdown is a flat out lie.

Why are there so many noobs and people posting misinformation on this site?

I'm not saying he's right, but my PC will shut down my Linux desktop to power off inside 3-4secs. It would be faster if it wasn't having to wait for 3 mechanical drives to shut down first - Least I am assuming it is waiting, because I always hear the drives do something before the power off signal, and PC has already finished shutting down by that point, and powering off.

Loading is fast, but it spends at least 4-5 secs with the BIOS logo screen, and doesn't actually pass the full POST for about 3-4 secs longer than that, then the delay at the boot loader, but even still, I can have a fully operational desktop inside 30secs, which in my opinion is a massive advantage over using a traditional mechanical drive.

To me there is a huge difference in load times using a SSD - Its the difference between night and day.

EDIT: I would also like to say, that from the point the SSD kicks in, to the login screen is only about 5-6 secs, it just takes another 10 or so seconds from there until the desktop has logged in (W7 Pro x64 - my Linux is half this time), and the start up programs loaded and the desktop is ready to use.

 

[Archean]

I think if the hybrid drives can give a reasonably good performance boost and the prices of such remain where the mechanical drives are today, they may 'slow down' SSD adoption rate for a while, by I'd like this hypothesis to be tested with price vs performance ratio in mind.

 

[Guest]

I'm going to wait at least another year

 

[Guest]

I will buy a Led, LCD or Pasma Full HDTV on chrismas!

 

[Guest]

I think it takes another year for the HDTV have a reasonably fair price, 2 or 3 years for a SSD

 

[Guest]

By the time, I am going to be content with a standard HDD of 1TB!

 

[DKRON]

Just because your computer isn't as awsome as mine dosn't mean im lieing lol, it seriously shuts down near instantly and with quick boot enabled it will do it in 4 seconds flat (Remembering im using a "force shutdown command")

 

[Guest]

OP was right, in that uefi will knock one of the props of SSD eg fast startup. I don't think people are looking far enough ahead .. disks are nice for the storage but even they (mfrs) know they are on the back slope of production. As 2nd OP said, once SSDD start getting put into upper mainstream systems and std business systems then volume goes up, prices come down etc. They still are a bit work in progress, look at all the shonky firmwares coming out, But the big lads are getting into them, Hitachi, WD and SeaGate so they will be business ready and consumer friendly. Cheap, Fast MLC with onboard RAID0 and snapdragon as controller gives 256gb of longlasting, superfast, just cheap enuff .. round about Q2/Q3 next year.
For my present tastes tho 2,3,4 Cav Black in raid0 is a better solution, along with a C4Q proc.I rarely shutdown and always Hibernate .. its quicker..No SSD required.
Might even think about W7 next year ...

 

[Guest]

Yes, and hard drives are a lot faster than OCZ Vertex 2 SSD's when handling non-compressible data in XP!

A vertex 2 can only copy and paste data at less than 4 Megabytes/sec on an ATOM computer with XP

My Western Digital 5400RPM Laptop hard drive is faster than that...

and my 7200RPM Western Digital desktop drive is A LOT Faster!

Too bad you can't accuratly test the drive speeds in Windows 7 due to its funky caching scheme

In Windows 7, all the drives recorded the same speed during the copy/paste test!

and whats up with those bogus Read/Write speeds that OCZ advertises

SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS HAVE NO PLACE IN SSD TESTING!