Samsung: SSD Match HDD Prices in a Few Years

[Marcus Yam]

Admit it, you want a solid state drive. The only thing stopping you is the price, which is understandable -- but Samsung says that won’t be a concern within a few years.

Samsung: SSD Match HDD Prices in a Few Years : Read more

 

[jacobdrj]

Kind of redundant. Why bother stating this?

 

[skine]

So judging by the lowest priced 250-256 GB SSD ($489) and highest priced 250 GB HDD ($85) on NewEgg, and about 50% decrease in price per year, it looks like about three more years of hearing about how awesome SSDs are before I can actually buy one.

On the other hand, I could have bought a 64 GB SSD for the same price as my 1.5 TB HDD. Again, assuming double the capacity for the same price for each year that passes, this would lead to about 4-5 years of waiting.

 

[Tindytim]

[citation][nom]jacobdrj[/nom]Kind of redundant. Why bother stating this?[/citation]
They're saying that, the minimum price of a HDD is higher than that of a SSD because of the basic parts that must go into them. As the price on the memory itself goes down, the SSD will be cheaper, even if the memory itself still costs more.

 

[snotling]

[citation][nom]Tindytim[/nom]They're saying that, the minimum price of a HDD is higher than that of a SSD because of the basic parts that must go into them. As the price on the memory itself goes down, the SSD will be cheaper, even if the memory itself still costs more.[/citation]
and for once it comes from an actual manufacturer who produces both types of storage
(Toshiba is the only other one doing both that I know of but who takes them seriously?)
so they do know at which pace the transition is currently going to solid state. to me this is more valuable than thousands of analyst predictions or speculations from other company who only produce either of the two.
Samsung is, after all, the new Sony.

 

[Guest]

I think SSD's will drop in price as soon as they switch over to 6MB, 8MB, and then perhaps 12MB, 16MB, 24MB, and 32MB per flash chip.

Just like RAM, an SSD is cheaper when supplied with 16 or 32MB chip blocks,compared to 4-8Mb per chip.

A better controller will not cost substantially more,and providing a SSD with 128MB of RAM will not add that much to the cost neither.

 

[hellwig]

I don't quite understand whats holding back flash memory. It's made leaps and bounds in the last couple years, but its been around so much longer. Compact Flash (with its built-in ATA controller) came out 15 years ago, but we're just now seeing practical applications for flash as a hard drive?

 

[mmm123abc]

SSDs will replace HDs for computer vendors as soon as the price drops below hard drives for a drive that has enough capacity for the OS. If a drive falls below $40 for 80-100GB or so they will be standard.

This will cause havoc in the HD business since the volume will dry up. Yes all the add on drives will probably be HD since $400+/TB is steep, but they will lose more than half their shipping volume.

I can see eventually an SSD integrated into motherboards for really low cost computers. A $35 or less chip(well probably chip set) on the MB would save the cost of a drive case, and a controller could probably be integrated into a southbridge...