What happened to big SSD price drop?

E

eddie500

Gawd
Joined
Jan 23, 2003
Messages
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It was sometime middle of last year when I was looking at SSD hard drives. I've read many posts where people said by the end of 2009 prices would drop dramatically and hard drive sizes would increase dramatically also. It was worth to wait at this point.

Well now that I look, prices seem to be the same or higher, capacity size has not increased very much also.

So whats going on here? I've been out of the research for like a year. Do I have to wait longer?
 
i dont think SSD market penetration has been what they thought, sure they are darn fast, but until Windows 7 came out, performance was questionable with the whole read write thing.

i think once they become more main stream and sold more in OEM rigs, they wont drop in price yet, for %99 of computer users a mechanical HD is still plenty fast.
 
They have dropped some but are still expensive. You can get an Intel X-25M G2 80GB for around $200 if you watch for sales or rebates, they can be found for $225 included shipping at most places. They were around $300 not too long ago. Still too expensive for mainstream use. I recently bought one and it did make a noticeably difference in boot up and application load time.
 
william_fontaine said:
It would be awesome to have one, but I think I'm going to hold out till they get to a $1 per gig.
Click to expand...

That may be a while as they are currently around $2.50/GB for the cheaper ones. I think it will be a couple of years at a minimum before you see $1/GB.
 
NAND prices were rising; only logical prices didn't fall.

The only reason for SSD prices to fall at this point is when using newer technology/production process. For example the original "55nm" Intel X25-M was more expensive than the current "34nm" offerings.

In about half a year, 2010 Q4 (christmas) you'll see Intel's new controller launch, and using 25nm MLC process for both X25-M as well as X25-E. Then you can expect new performance levels, 6Gbps SATA interface and lower price per GB. Probably all 'third-vendors' will follow after market leader Intel.
 
Add to that that the oem's currently aren't reducing price, but reducing size to try to make these drives more affordable to consumers.
 
sub.mesa said:
NAND prices were rising; only logical prices didn't fall.
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This. Unlike mechanical drives where the manufacturers generally build their own platters in their own factories (as far as I know), SSD's are dependent on global commodity memory prices (ok, Intel technically manufactures their own flash memory, but they also sell it on the open market so their NAND prices still have to follow supply and demand to keep the operation profitable).
 
william_fontaine said:
It would be awesome to have one, but I think I'm going to hold out till they get to a $1 per gig.
Click to expand...

Well, if you want about 1TB worth of space here's the equation:

80gb SSD = $220
1tb HDD = $80
==========
$300 / 1080gb = $0.27/gb

Seems pretty reasonable for exceptional performance. Unless you *need* your mp3's or pr0n really, really fast.
 
[LYL]Homer;1035646828 said:
Well, if you want about 1TB worth of space here's the equation:

80gb SSD = $220
1tb HDD = $80
==========
$300 / 1080gb = $0.27/gb

Seems pretty reasonable for exceptional performance. Unless you *need* your mp3's or pr0n really, really fast.
Click to expand...

Exacty what I have done. Windows 7 and programs on Intel 80GB SSD, All data and other files on WD 1T Black. Very fast.
 
[LYL]Homer;1035646828 said:
Well, if you want about 1TB worth of space here's the equation:

80gb SSD = $220
1tb HDD = $80
==========
$300 / 1080gb = $0.27/gb

Seems pretty reasonable for exceptional performance. Unless you *need* your mp3's or pr0n really, really fast.
Click to expand...

Agreed. This is the best bang-per-buck way to use SSDs at the moment, and probably will be for the next few years.

One exception would be laptops where you only have one drive bay, so $/GB does matter a lot more.
 
You want to combine with an HDD anyway. For your temp files and swap files.
 
Yeah, I love the SSD I got half a year ago still being more expensive than the price I paid for it.

This already happened when the E8400 was released - first week, $199 & it went out of stock almost instantly, second week price went up to $299 & stayed up for a few weeks, then took a while to go back down to release day prices. Now, same exact thing with SSDs, though I definitely did not expect their prices to stay this high for this long.
 
Dual said:
You want to combine with an HDD anyway. For your temp files and swap files.
Click to expand...

There goes half the benefit of the SSD imho.
If you move the shit that is accessed most off the fast drive :confused:

If you want to move it to another drive spend $180 on some mild-priced ram add 6gb, and make a 6gb ram disk for temp files.

I've had WinXP Pro setup with 0mb page file (swap) and 3.25gb ram for years and performance wise was just as good as when I had a page file.

Now with 6gb ram on win7 I haven't done testing to compare page vs. no page.. but I know for damn sure I can tell my SSD increases performance utilizing my "temp" internet files being on the SSD compared to being on my mechanical drive.
 
Seems you can't disable PF in Win7.
You can, but win auto re-enables it.
You can however set it lower.

I set min to 16 max to 400mb. We`ll see how that compares to full-size win managed PF usage.

Also, posted in mobo section about utilizing the other 3 channels for a ram disk to play with, not sure if mobo will utilize full speed potential though. Going to find out and then test that.

I work on the PC daily doing web development and constantly have multiple apps open. Photoshop, Outlook, Dreamweaver, Chrome, FireFox, Digsy, etc.. I`m not a gamer so my tests are business-world.
 
Mine is de-activated in Win 7. I dont know why yours would re-enable itself.
 
Cyant said:
Mine is de-activated in Win 7. I dont know why yours would re-enable itself.
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Odd, I googled it too and found people were having same issue :(

I'd really like to try a ram disk since they are faster than a SSD and see if that improves performance at all. Or maybe just pick up a $110 SSD for PF and Temp Files only.
 
Got it disabled.

Upon reboot it did take a about .5seconds longer to load up my chat client, and when I clicked Chrome took a few seconds longer to load the home splash, not sure if that has anything to do with PF disabled or jus hte apps getting used to ram only. :p
 
New windows know how to trick your mechanical HDD to be just about as fast as an SSD anyways. I didn't notice any if at all difference comming from a Velociraptor 300 gig to a 80 Gig gen 2 Intel.

The difference is Windows 7 or Vista will use things like Superfetch, and indexing to speed up system response vs. The SSD with the real speed with seek times less then .01 ms.

Personally, I think the SSD was a big waste of money. All hype if you ask me.
 
Yes a performance increase of factor 100; tsssk what are people wowing about? You better spend your money on the new Intel 6-core Extreme CPU that costs $1000. Much more expensive than an SSD; but hey you performance would increase a factor thousand here!! You would be so stupid not to do it!

In case you missed my sarcastic tone; there was never in the history of computing since the invention of the computer chip, that we saw such high performance differences between two products. It was always about 20% faster, 43% faster, etc. Not about 8000% faster or 10000% faster; those kind of performance differences were unseen.

Yes you can install windows 7 to a brand new HDD and it'll boot fast and feel fast. But as you continue to use the system it would slow down. Not because your CPU has become so slow; all those cores are idling anyway since the disk is astronomically slow compared to the CPU. No, it is because you cannot prevent the HDD from seeking anymore; which is what things like Superfetch are all about. As the system gets used; the HDD will have to seek more and more; greatly lowering the performance of the system. Eventually the CPUs idle at 0-1% because there is no work to do even though you're waiting your ass off; with each seek causing 45 million CPU cycles times 6 (cores) = 270 million CPU cycles to be wasted. Think about it; 1 HDD seek of 15ms causes 270 million CPU cycles to be skipped in IOwait; waiting for the data from the HDD. 270 million.

Think of it this way; you have an Intel Atom low-end pc. What would limit performance the most? I can add a 6-core CPU instead and get a performance increase of 30% (since the CPU was no real bottleneck after all) - while the performance difference of SSD can go much beyond that. That's also the reason an Atom+SSD feels faster than a Core i7 X980 + HDD with things like booting up and launching apps. So what really matters in your system?

So, if SSDs are a hype, then humankind of that spoiled already that no performance increase will ever be sufficient and we would whine all the time even though we got excellent performance increases, bringing disk performance much closer to RAM speeds.
 
hdgamer said:
New windows know how to trick your mechanical HDD to be just about as fast as an SSD anyways. I didn't notice any if at all difference comming from a Velociraptor 300 gig to a 80 Gig gen 2 Intel.

The difference is Windows 7 or Vista will use things like Superfetch, and indexing to speed up system response vs. The SSD with the real speed with seek times less then .01 ms.

Personally, I think the SSD was a big waste of money. All hype if you ask me.
Click to expand...

I take it you don't run anything besides Firefox?
 
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