When will large SSDs be cheap?

For example, I currently have a 750gb Hard Drive in my MacBook Pro.

I am only going to upgrade to a SSD of equal, or bigger size, and don't want to spend a fortune.

When will 750GB - 1TB SSDs be priced around $150-$200?

Total guesstimation, just for fun thread.

 

A couple of years? 256 GB SSDs are already the 200 dollar range, less than 1 dollar per GB mark. Just 6 years ago, a 64 GB SLC Samsung SSD was 1000 dollars...so the future looks bright.

 

2.5in 1tb HDDs are still $100...


IMO it will be 5+- years

 

5+ years, unless you're willing to use "old" tech SSDs.

 

I'm going to say at least 10 years as there is nothing to compete against technology to drive down prices. The only reason the platters dropped so much is cause of the SSD.

 

Why are the 128GB and 256GB SSDs going down so much but not the 512GB? I've been using a 240GB and would prefer to upgrade to 512GB, not 256GB.

 

Problem is that the prices go down so slowly. I see part of that reason is if there's ever a decent deal the drives sell out in minutes, which tells OEM's that the price is too low. If they didn't sell that well at those lower price points then it might show them that the costs are too high still.

 

When this happens.


But seriously, as SSD capacity grows, the "largest" ones will always be more expensive, and I think will remain prohibitively expensive (for the majority of users) for some time to come.

 

Uh... no. It's more the competition between the HDD industry giants, which is even more cutthroat than the competition between flash manufacturers. SSD adoption is even now still too marginal to really truly threaten HDD demand in computers. What's worrying HDD manufacturers more is the increasing adoption of tablets, where HDDs are not as practical.

Considering I bought my 80GB SSD for $189 used and my 64GB SSD for $100 used, I'd say that in a few years, we'll be seeing more affordable 128GB+ SSDs. Already, a large number of semi-knowledgeable computer users know about solid state drives and are looking for them in their next laptops.

 

I went laptop shopping yesterday and the store had 100+ laptops on display. Only a couple of netbooks and a mac had SSD's.

 

Yes but THAT is basically putting HDD manufacturers in competition with flash manufacturers...who also happen to supply flash to SSD manufacturers. And the upward scaling of flash manufacturing to meet that demand is helping to lower SSD prices.

We're seeing "affordable" 120 GB SSDs now, you can get them around $1 a gig. Same with the 250 GB ones. The 500+ GB ones are still a little prohibitive, but I bit the bullet and bought one (found it on sale at least) and it's the best purchase I've ever made. What might actually be holding those up in price is the higher demand for lower capacities: people use them in combination with HDDs and/or cloud storage, reducing or even eliminating the need for large SSDs.

 

I think SSDs have been cheap for awhile... I once ordered a desktop with the biggest hard drive available, 425-ishMB (yes, that is an "M" as in Mega), and it was the only hard drive available at the time that had a cost lower than 1MB per $1... thats right, I paid $400 for it, and it was a deal. That makes the $200 I paid for my first 160GB 2nd gen Intel x25m last year look pretty good.

Here's the other reason I consider SSDs "cheap"... imho, for most users and their computers (desktop or laptop) an SSD is probably the single most effective way to get a nice bump in performance (actual and perceived) without going to an entirely new system. When I got that x25m mentioned above last year, I was working in a group of developers most of whom ran gen I quad-core laptops and I was running a 2.5 yr old 2.0 GHz dual core laptop. Once I put in that SSD, my laptop appeared to be as fast as theirs in many tasks, and faster in a number of tasks. Another way to put it, I could have upgraded to a quad-core laptop for $1500 just to "tie" the other developers in performance, or add a $200 SSD and beat them in most of the tasks we did on a daily basis.

 

$200 for 256GB is still expensive, and you can only get that price on a fire sale not regularly. Spindle drives even with the price hike, are less than half that cost. So I guess from a system and performance perspective they're relatively cheap but compared to the alternative of a spindle drive and per GB storage, it's quite expensive.

 

Less than half the cost...and less than half the performance too. You have to keep that in mind. It's not an apples to apples comparison. That's like saying a Cruze is cheaper than a Corvette, so until the Corvette is the price of a Cruze, obviously the Cruze is a better performer. Doesn't quite work that way.

SSDs, because of their speed advantage, will ALWAYS be priced at a premium versus HDDs. That's just the market. That premium is the smallest it's ever been right now though.

 

1TB SSD will cost 150$ in about 4.5 years.

 

Although I don't have actual data, I'd be willing to bet that SSD usage in laptops is still relatively negligible in the grand scheme of things (remember, NBR's average user technical expertise is much higher than that of most consumers). So, I'm sure SSDs have contributed to stealing the market for super-fast HDDs, but for most people who have over 100+ GB of data they need to carry around, HDDs are still a more popular solution. The HDD price wars (which were more intense before the Thailand floods) were the main factor that drove prices down.

I agree that SSDs are far more affordable than they were a few years back. But $200 for a 256GB drive is still astronomically expensive compared to, say, a 250GB HDD (even post-flood). Unless you're a computer enthusiast (like most of us), you're probably not going to dump $200 into upgrading a computer that probably only cost $400-600.

For me, $200 was the very upper limit for how much I'd spend on a computer upgrade, and I'm far more willing to spend money on tech than most consumers. So "affordable," yes. But actually affordable, not yet

 

meanwhile in 4/5 years too
10-60tb hard drives coming to tablets notebooks desktops by 2016
Cloud Computing? 10-60TB Hard Drives Coming to Tablets, Notebooks, Desktops by 2016 by VR-Zone.com

 

Interesting. Thanks for the link +1.

However I don't like how they say speeds won't increase much. However, by then they should be able to put 64GB SSD's on there cheaply as a fast read/write cache. Read cache like on the Momentus XT is ok, but a larger buffer would allow for read/write caching to speed up everything. I mean how often will you need to write 64GB of continuous data?

 

I'll bet 4-5 years... it will take a couple for the 512GB to replace the 256's at the 150-200$ price point and another 2 or 3 for a 1TB.

I saw a 240GB for 160$ today

 

For read and write caching they use DDR memory, right? Right now its I think at most 64MB per drive. A single drive with 64GB of flash memory would I think be the perfect single hard drive for a laptop! Even 32GB would be really good. Also what about a drive that was both SSD and mechanical, but completely separate? I could deal with a fast SATA 3 64GB SSD and a one platter 500GB 5400rpm hard drive in a single physical package. They would share the SATA port, but it shouldn't slow things too much. When transferring anything between the drives, it will be bottlenecked at the speed of the mechanical drive and not the shared SATA port.

One great thing about the advancement of hard drive sizes since Windows XP was released is that the files and programs we put on them have grown at a slower rate than the hard drives. It's just that we put so much more on them. Six years ago I had the most amount of hard drives I have ever had and had only around 2TB worth. Today all of that fits with room to spare on my largest hard drive. I look at the files I had from that time and they are pretty much the same as the ones of today.

The only thing I don't like about hard drives anymore is that there are no different kinds. Back in the day we had like a dozen manufacturers to choose from. That has slowly dwindled to what, 2 companies competing now for consumer hard drives? Our choices are becoming more and more limited all the time. With SSD's it really isn't much better at all though.

 

I saw an Intel 330 SATA3 SSD, 180GB for $140. That's pretty good

Mr. Mysterious

 

Not for some time,,it appears ssd bigger memory chips prices are on the rise not decline

Cheers
3Fees

 

Now.

Buy.com - Crucial M4 512GB 2.5" SATA III Solid State Drive (SSD) for $399.99

 

Get it down to $300 and I'll buy a 512GB.

 

Likewise, or maybe $250

However, one I get my 180GB + 160GB setup, I should be fine for awhile.