Intel Expected to Drop SSD Prices in August

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I just looked at the price of the 330, and man, they must've missed the memo about falling SSD prices before. The Samsung 830 is at least $20 less in some cases.
 
[citation][nom]PreferLinux[/nom]Don't you know that it is currently winter in some parts of the world? And that those same parts always have Christmas in summer?[/citation]
If you were smart, you'd be able to deduce that the person is from the northern hemisphere then.

[citation][nom]marshal11[/nom]ugh. intel's 60GB drives are still the same price as Crucial's 128GB M4s. i don't know why anyone would even buy Intels lower capacity SSDs when you can get twice the capacity and almost the same reliability with M4s for the same price. stupid. maybe im missing something that Intel SSDs have that others don't, idk. if i am please do tell me what i'm missing because i love Intel and their SSD pricings are bothering me.[/citation]
From the general consensus I get online, Intel has better quality of controllers. Maybe time has altered this but I remember it was true a few months back.

 
I will not take a look until I can buy a 600GB SSD for $0.01. Until then, it's over priced.
And oh, I will only buy a laptop until it comes with 16core 4GHz cores i7 1W CPUs with 24hr battery life, with foldable 27in Retina Display, 128GB ram, 10Gbit WirelessEthernet, 5TB SSD storage for $500, otherwise, it'll be too slow for my use. I hate to get ripped off by corporations.

Until then, I refuse to buy use/buy computers or get on the internet.
 
ZzzzzZZzzz...hrrhmm...hrgm?...?...*reads article*...oh you Intel, oh you...wake me up when I could buy my Intel 510 120GB (which is THE best mid-range SSD on the market right now) for less than 88$, brand new, in a retail package...hrm.....snort...zzzzZZZZZZ...*goes back to sleep*...
 
SSd makers would be smart to pricematch hdd prices for drives of equivalent size... sales of SSDs would skyrocket & HDD makers would be forced to innovate in the direction of higher capacity drives
 
SSd makers would be smart to sell it at 1/2 the price of a equivalent HDD prices. The sales of SDDs would skyrocket even further. Better yet, they would institute a buy-one-get-one free promotional campaign. That would surely force the industry to make higher capacity drives.

Oh, they should offer a buy-one-get-one-free program for laptop too. My family is very poor and cannot afford a phone/computer/books. That also should force the industy to make faster laptops.
 
[citation][nom]dragonsqrrl[/nom]I'd say 4 15k drives could definitely outperform a SSD in terms of sequential reads/writes. And fast sequential reads/writes are all you really need for a good scratch disk. Then again, it would probably cost a lot more than a single high-end SSD, but you would also get far more storage capacity as a tradeoff. Even at these reduced prices, SSD's aren't always the best answer like many believe, especially for those who need high-capacity in addition to performance.[/citation]

4 300gb cheetahs and a quality sas raid card will run you $1300-$1400 right now. two OCZ vertex 4 drives will set you back the same ammount and offer more than double the performance (two 128 gb vertex 4s will even double the cheetahs). I know its desktop vs enterprise hardware, however you cant argue with double the performance. you could even raid 4 agility 4 drives and do raid 0/1 for the same price. still double the performance and you have 100% redundancy.
 
[citation][nom]rapidcolor[/nom]I have moved my entire company, www.rapidcolor.com, to SSD's - and in all honesty the productivity increase has been amazing. There is more than a price / MB to consider. But when my people are loading photoshop in 2 seconds instead of 50 seconds, 30 times a day - that price per minute in labor has no comparison. The more the better with these drives.[/citation]
For the average consumer, price per GB is the most important matrix.

[citation][nom]Tomfreak[/nom]if HDD maker do not want SSD to kill them, they should start moving to 15K rpm drive as standard from 7200rpm. *and sell at reduced price.[/citation]
Increasing spin rate only improves performance by so much. 15K rpm vs 7200rpm isn't going to provide a dramatic increase in performance unless they can decrease access time and increase transfer rates dramatically.
 
[citation][nom]sykozis[/nom]For the average consumer, price per GB is the most important matrix.Increasing spin rate only improves performance by so much. 15K rpm vs 7200rpm isn't going to provide a dramatic increase in performance unless they can decrease access time and increase transfer rates dramatically.[/citation]

The average consumer is not very relevant to this discussion because they tend to not bother with SSDs anyway. 15K versus 7.2K can be quite the difference because it directly increases transfer rate and access times improve too. That's what happens when the disk spins faster. Sure, it doesn't reach SSD performance (especially not in random access performance), but 15K RPM HDDs generally perform substantially better than 7.2K RPM HDDs.
 
600 GB sounds pretty good at 859. Intel was the last holdout in the ssd arena. I think now that the giant is coming down the mountain, the pricing landscape is in for a massive shakeup.
 
[citation][nom]bin1127[/nom]600 GB sounds pretty good at 859. Intel was the last holdout in the ssd arena. I think now that the giant is coming down the mountain, the pricing landscape is in for a massive shakeup.[/citation]

600GB for $859 means a whole ~$1.43167 per GB... That's a fairly poor price if you ask me. Considering the reliability of Intel's SSDs and the fact that SandForce drives don't mind RAID as much as others (granted they have to rely on compression to get full performance), except for something that can't fit multiple drives, I'd much rather get two 300GB drives or four 150GB drives and save over 40-60% of what I would have spent on the 600GB drive.

Heck, with that kind of money, one could get five 150GB drives, make a RAID 5 array for optimal reliability and still a great performance boost over one drive, and still save some money compared to a single 600GB drive despite having the same capacity, granted five drives is getting a little excessive. The same could be done with three 600GB drives and you'd probably still not be more expensive than a single 600GB drive despite having much more performance and reliability. I'd consider three drives as reasonable considering the benefits to the alternative. Of course, just getting two 300 GB drives for RAID 0 would also be good, granted it'd be more risky.
 


It's not smart to sell far below BOM and lose money on every SSD sale. Buy-one-get-one-free also doesn't work well with laptops considering that again, they'd not be making much profit at all, if any, unless you're buying high end laptops and even then, they loss a lot of profits. That'd basically be doubling the BOM without increasing the profit margins. Sure, it'd be nice and I'd like it too, but it doesn't seem like a good business model, just a fantasy of yours (no offense intended by that sentiment). The same goes for doing that with SSDs. They could offer discounts for return buyers and multi-item buyers, but going beyond that doesn't seem reasonable.
 
Since I'm an SSD newb and haven't really been paying attention to SSD news lately......how do these drives perform compared to other SSD drives in their price range?

With prices being so much lower now than when I built my PC I'm considering finally buying one. I imagine I'd be thrilled even with a 'crappy' SSD drive compared to my 7200k platters, but I want a good SSD for my first :)
 
[citation][nom]aaron88_7[/nom]Since I'm an SSD newb and haven't really been paying attention to SSD news lately......how do these drives perform compared to other SSD drives in their price range?

With prices being so much lower now than when I built my PC I'm considering finally buying one. I imagine I'd be thrilled even with a 'crappy' SSD drive compared to my 7200k platters, but I want a good SSD for my first[/citation]

i would suggest getting a crucial M4 128/64GB. they are the most reliable besides Intel drives (which aren't that much more reliable, yet they still sell for twice the price, WTF Intel) and they sell for a great price over other drives. they are usually 10-25$ more than the equivalent sized SSDs, but offer longer lifetime and stability. it is rare for someone to have problems with this SSD, but it happens all the time with lets say a Vertex 3 drive.
 
[citation][nom]aaron88_7[/nom]Since I'm an SSD newb and haven't really been paying attention to SSD news lately......how do these drives perform compared to other SSD drives in their price range?With prices being so much lower now than when I built my PC I'm considering finally buying one. I imagine I'd be thrilled even with a 'crappy' SSD drive compared to my 7200k platters, but I want a good SSD for my first[/citation]

Nitpicking, but it's 7.2K or just 7200, not 7200k. 7200K would be 7.2M RPM and that is a thousand times faster than they are actually spinning, so it's wrong to an extreme just because of that misplaced k.

[citation][nom]marshal11[/nom]i would suggest getting a crucial M4 128/64GB. they are the most reliable besides Intel drives (which aren't that much more reliable, yet they still sell for twice the price, WTF Intel) and they sell for a great price over other drives. they are usually 10-25$ more than the equivalent sized SSDs, but offer longer lifetime and stability. it is rare for someone to have problems with this SSD, but it happens all the time with lets say a Vertex 3 drive.[/citation]

Crucial M4s aren't very high performance drives. A Samsung 830 is significantly faster and even faster still would be the Vertex 4 (several times faster in write performances), despite not sacrificing reliability. Some of the Intel drives are also quite faster than the M4s. Price per capacity does not define the drive because it ignores performance. Also, Intel's drives aren't all expensive. The Intel 330 drives have excellent capacity for the price despite being almost as fast as the more expensive 510s.
 
[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]It's not smart to sell far below BOM and lose money on every SSD sale. Buy-one-get-one-free also doesn't work well with laptops considering that again, they'd not be making much profit at all, if any, unless you're buying high end laptops and even then, they loss a lot of profits. That'd basically be doubling the BOM without increasing the profit margins. Sure, it'd be nice and I'd like it too, but it doesn't seem like a good business model, just a fantasy of yours (no offense intended by that sentiment). The same goes for doing that with SSDs. They could offer discounts for return buyers and multi-item buyers, but going beyond that doesn't seem reasonable.[/citation]

It's pretty amazing to me that you actually took my msg seriously. Do you ever go out much? Starring at your computer screen all day in a lab is not good to your health. Grab a beer, have some weed and read my post again, then you'll see things more clearly.
 
[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]Crucial M4s aren't very high performance drives. A Samsung 830 is significantly faster and even faster still would be the Vertex 4 (several times faster in write performances), despite not sacrificing reliability. Some of the Intel drives are also quite faster than the M4s. Price per capacity does not define the drive because it ignores performance. Also, Intel's drives aren't all expensive. The Intel 330 drives have excellent capacity for the price despite being almost as fast as the more expensive 510s.[/citation]

"despite not sacrificing reliability" what a joke. go read some reviews of the raging customers who bought the V4. the drive is known to often fail under a year of use, which is ridiculous. the firmware updates are the only thing that make the drive fast, and they are also destructive. there is just generally to many problems with the drive and it has a very high fail rate. you can't trust it at all. you can't notice the real time difference between the V4 and M4, it only shows in benchmarks. so, you choose. do you want a second less waiting time while opening software, or do you want your drive to be very user friendly, and last over a year?

although yes, intel SSDs are superior in every way. but they DO NOT "have excellent capacity for the price" they are nearly twice the price as any other SSD at the same capacity, and once again, real time, you won't notice the difference speed wise besides in benchmarks. what matters is that the Intel drives will last slightly longer. IMO, not worth it at all.
 
[citation][nom]marshal11[/nom]"despite not sacrificing reliability" what a joke. go read some reviews of the raging customers who bought the V4. the drive is known to often fail under a year of use, which is ridiculous. the firmware updates are the only thing that make the drive fast, and they are also destructive. there is just generally to many problems with the drive and it has a very high fail rate. you can't trust it at all. you can't notice the real time difference between the V4 and M4, it only shows in benchmarks. so, you choose. do you want a second less waiting time while opening software, or do you want your drive to be very user friendly, and last over a year? although yes, intel SSDs are superior in every way. but they DO NOT "have excellent capacity for the price" they are nearly twice the price as any other SSD at the same capacity, and once again, real time, you won't notice the difference speed wise besides in benchmarks. what matters is that the Intel drives will last slightly longer. IMO, not worth it at all.[/citation]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167122
180GB Intel 330 drive for $160

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167121
120GB Intel 330 drive for $110

The 330s are literally right behind the 520s (my mistake with saying 510s in previous posts) in performance too, so they aren't performance slouches. I you know any similarly good $80 180GB SSDs or any similarly good $65 120GB SSDs that are available at newegg or a similarly reputable site, then please tell me.

Also, the vast majority of the newegg reviews about the Vertex 4 drives and my own experience with my Vertex 4 128GB contradict your claims about it. The Vertex 3 is far less reliable and older Vertex drives probably are too, but the Vertex 4 is a huge step-up in reliability, although the destructive firmware updates can be annoying.

You're also making a quite over-bearing statement by saying that the drive is only fast with the firmware updates. Give them NTFS compression and a good queue depth and watch them fly past almost all other SATA3 SSDs. Don't even try to catch their minuscule access times/latency with other drives. They can be extremely snappy because of this, even when compared to many other SSDs in real-world usage.
 
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