Shipment in volume, sure. I was more referring to end user purchases which may be different, not just the commercial bulk applications. Catching a 500gb ssd on sale isn't bad for ssd pricing, only because they're so expensive in the first place. $100 for 500gb is still 4x the price of common hdd's at around $45-50 for 1tb. That's not a small price difference, 400% is a lot.
2020 is still over 3yrs away, quite awhile in tech terms so I don't think hdd's are going anywhere anytime soon. That is unless they pull what they did with lcd monitors and just yank the old tech off the shelf. That would force people to either do without the space or pony up and that would be a bad deal for many folks. Even 500gb is a bit slim for a gaming pc depending on the games and how many. Some people only play one or two games at a time I suppose, others who have a larger collection may not want to have to delete and reload their games on a somewhat frequent basis.
Cloud storage is sort of an option for those who A, trust cloud storage to be secure and B, have fast enough internet without limitations. A lot of people still have slow internet or limited internet usage or both which makes cloud storage more of a bandaid than a real solution. Also if someone's internet goes down they're blocked from their files.
For the time being and likely the next several years hdd's will continue to fill a role that the ssd's just aren't at the moment. Affordable storage. Ssd's are definitely falling in price. Using the popular samsung evo's as an example, in 2013 the 840 evo was pretty decently priced (among ssd's) at around $180-190 for 250gb. The 850 evo was released around a year later in 2014 at around $100 for the same size, so a nice price drop. Now however the 840 evo's are back up to $140 and the 850 evo is still hovering around $93-95. A bit volatile in pricing just like ram is.
There's the 750 evo which is a bit cheaper, around $70 for 250gb but they also went with cheaper planar nand. Unfortunately they're not the same test to my knowledge so hard to directly compare. Anandtech bench'd the 750 evo and average data rate was 87mb/s using their extreme test. Under their heavy test, the avg data rate was 226mb/s on an empty drive and dropped to 126mb/s on a full drive. By contrast when the wd10ezex 1tb 7200rpm drive was tested using hdtune pro 5.5 it had an avg read of 148mb/s across the entire drive with a max of 179mb/s and min of 90mb/s. The 750's average works out to 176mb/s and during that heavy test they never ran it long enough to hit steady state.
Of course seek/access times are much better on an ssd, but it sort of shows how performance begins to hurt as they cheapen ssd's. That's the sort of performance for now that's considered a 'deal' when getting 1/4 the storage space for 40% more cost. Hopefully they have more tricks up their sleeve for keeping performance up and driving costs down or else by the time they cut corners some more we may just find ourselves with slightly higher cost ssd's (vs current hdd's) with similar space and similar performance. Other than a few things like lower power consumption and form factor reduction, right back where we started.
I'm not discounting ssd's performance benefits but especially when looking for 'cheap storage' vs high end performance, the 750 evo vs the 850 pro it puts people in a bit of a pickle. The cheap(er) drives begin suffering in performance as they fill up and that's what storage drives are for, to be filled with data. In order to really reap the benefits of these inexpensive drives people will have to partially fill them which means they'll need to buy larger than needed to avoid the performance drop off. That means potentially needing a larger more costly drive.
A lot of these are just speculation and it's difficult to speculate what lies ahead in 2-3yrs, whether it's drives, tech, memory pricing, games etc. Hopefully ssd's will continue to improve or come up with some new method to offer more affordable storage. I can't speak much to prebuilt pc's, never been a big fan personally. They often throw in low tier junk just good enough to 'tick' a specs list for the purpose of a quick sale. For now it seems a difficult balancing act between cutting corners and causing issues.
I appreciate samsung's attempt with the 750 evo and maybe it's just a test run, but they offer their budget ssd's in low capacity only options. There's no 750 evo above 250gb for now. In order to get into 1tb territory it's costing between $240 and $300. To get into higher endurance/reliability drives like the 850 pro it exceeds $400. Blazing speeds might not be needed on storage drives (vs os/apps) but things like durability are a concern. They would be much more viable if they could even get them around twice the price of hdd's, 1tb for $80-100.
rhysiam brings up a good point about mass markets for dell, hp etc and chances are they won't be concerned about larger capacity. That's usually left up to the end user. Then again the prebuilt market has never really been interested in offering things like performance, they'd rather sell more budget oriented machines which means 250gb more than likely.
@bit_user, as I pointed out those drives are going to be older. They don't really have much in the way of new 250gb hdd's, most are 1tb or larger. It was an attempt to compare ssd vs hdd on size, if going by current models then we look at 1tb hdd's still having a cost equal or lower than many 128gb ssd's and it only embarrasses them further. Nothing was said about ebay. It may be that Paul and I were talking different scenarios, one being oem bulk purchasing and the other point being single item end user purchases. Bulk purchases are almost always going to be cheaper and I've not seen any wholesale drive pricing from newegg or other vendors. Usually you need a retail license to even gain access to those sort of lists, newegg and other prices we see are end user retail. That means newegg purchased the drive for xyz, added their markup to cover their shipping costs and profit margin and passing it along to the end consumer. Someplace like HP would get a solid price cut buying 10's of thousands of drives in bulk oem packaging directly from the manufacturer and then factoring their profit into a prebuilt system. They're not buying them 1 or 5 at a time from newegg.
There's no actual information that says you have to take pricing from newegg, no idea where that came from. They're not listed as 'deals' which are typically posted as 'was this price, now this price', save $10 or other wording. Going by 'legit' retailers the typical wd10ezex 1tb runs anywhere from $50 to $60 whether buying from newegg, b&h, pcm or dell. That's like saying ok, sure compare car prices, but you can only buy it from Big Bill's. In texas. Dallas to be specific, anywhere else doesn't count, it's probably a stolen car if Al's in Houston has it cheaper. Unless the older/outdated 250gb hdd's were stolen maybe years ago and someone sat on them so they could sell them for $30 6yrs later, maybe they played the long game.
There's no good way to compare hdd's vs ssd's based on capacity. Common current hdd's capacity is well above the typical ssd and at a far lower price. Even when going with an older smaller hdd where it should be hitting rock bottom at say the $40 bottom end mentioned in the article, the least cost effective hdd when $10 more can buy 4x the capacity. Comparing it to the equally sized 240-250gb ssd's which are becoming more commonplace. Ignoring capacity and looking at typical drive options from both, hdd's are cruising around 20gb/dollar and ssd's are 3.5gb/dollar. That's around a 570% cost difference and that's compared to the more budget oriented 750 evo.
I haven't checked the toshiba's out, can't speak to their reliability much or know of any inherent problems however they have a 3tb drive for $90. That further widens the gap to over 33gb/dollar. Ssd's have a long way to go to make up ground in the price/capacity arena.
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