SSD Price Speculation

thenewrick

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 7, 2009
Messages
160
Hello all, this is my first thread. I was shopping for a SSD and thought maybe I should wait until black friday or another time for a deal. I'm interested in something in the 300-500 range and I only need about 64-80 gigs. I've read SLC is better, but what are your thoughts on how much real world better? What high quality products do you think will become affordable and when?
 
SLC looks like great stuff. Being twice as much as the already expensive MLC models is hard to get past. Do you think the X25-E Extreme 64 gb, or the OCZSSD2-1VTXEX60G will be under 500 bucks within a month? What kind of deals might pop up for this stuff on black Friday? It's looking for my price range the X25-M Mainstream 80 gb is my best bet. At about 290 bucks it's not that pricey. Are these X25-M Mainstream's the SSDs with 32 nm process not the 50 nm process of the older ones? What's the mystery products that were supposed to, or are going to, come out in 2009? Are these up and coming models from Intel going to be the new hot mainstream affordable new sexiness? I'm already growing to like the helpfulness of this community!
 
I seriously doubt they'll be any price cutting anytime soon.

It seems that some manfgs are even slowing down the rebates and deals.

Do your research on which model you want and keep your eyeballs peeled for a good deal.

The "Hot Deals" area here is a good place to start but places like FatWallet usually find them first.
 
It's very tempting to jump on the SSD bandwagon right now, but only the MLC tech SSDs begin to approach what could be considered "affordable".

I have a reasonably snappy 256GB Samsung HDD which I'm tempted to replace, but at the moment the costs of even the MLC drives is prohibitive, and SLC is where it's at if you really want to appreciate the benefits of solid state.

It can wait another year.
 
Definately a statement from an inexperienced SSD user. :D

Yup.

As far as price speculation, it is tough to guess, but I don't think that we're really at the point where we can expect the technology to start slowly creeping down in price, like most technologies do. There are a couple of reasons for my opinion. 1) The drives rely on the price of NAND Flash, which is a volatile market. 2) SSDs on their own are starting to generate buzz. 3) With the release of Win7, I expect more consumer interest in SSD, and also for OEMs to start getting involved.

The strategy that I took was to purchase a reasonably priced drive now (OCZ Agility 60gb), and when I feel like there are significantly better SSD on the market, I will move the Agility from my desktop to my laptop. And purchase a new SSD for my desktop.
 
You have to consider price/performance. Yes SSDs are expensive, but the only real problem is their size. If you can deal with only having ~120 GB of space, then their price is worth it for the performance.

This is a rare opportunity for a 100 times reduction in latency. In engineering it cost A LOT of money to reduce latency just by a few factors.
 
I'm also in the situation of looking for SSD drives. I'm curious if any of the latest drives have any of the stutter problem that the J-Micro controller drives were having. How noticeable, if at all, is the difference between the lower end OCZ Solid drive and their Vertex Series?
 
The OCZ Solid drives are jmicron which are worthless. Vertex uses the Indilinx controller which is the only competitor to Intel right now.

OCZ in their infinite wisdom is going to release a "Solid 2" drive which uses a Indilinx controller with slower flash chips...Bad name but probably good value.
 
Don't buy the OCZ Vertex EX, buy the OCZ Agility EX.

They both use the same controller, one just uses NAND from Samsung, the other from Intel. Both perform exactly the same.

Right now the OCZ drives support Windows 7 TRIM, which is a "garbage collection" service meant to keep your hard drive at top speed. Intel does not. Intel has also not officially stated that they will provide Windows 7 TRIM on their X25-E, so it's something you should look at.
 
I'd hope they would go down. I would totally love one but just can't justify the price/gb. It's just too much. Though from the sound of em they are worth the price. But I'd rather have a 2nd 5850 over an SSD.
 
I could've sworn I saw in some article that Intel planned to support TRIM in windows 7 with their SSDs. That is an interesting factor though. I don't totally understand TRIM, but it sounds like:
Series Agility Series
Model OCZSSD2-1AGT120G , is the only MLC SSD that utilizes TRIM in Win7? I think I heard the 120gb SSD's actually outperform the smaller ones? These OCZ Agility SSDs seem to be the most recent and have every feature? The only thing Intel has over the OCZ agility is the faster random write speed, which is probably not as important in real world performance as the features from OCZ agility. Does this seem right?
 
I'd like to add that the OCZ agility EX models are tempting. I could maybe see buying the 650 model if it dropped to 450. SLC really turns me on. I can't see it being affordable for anyone though.
 
I don't understand why people think they need slc. SSD cost so much today if you wear out a MLC (which you won't) just buy another much cheaper MLC because that'll be 5-10 years down the road!
 
I keep finding conflicting reports of windows 7, TRIM, and intel/OCZ SSDs. I can't seem to get a clear answer as far as how much impact TRIM has, and whether or not its supported, and whats supported. I'm just lil confused!
 
I could've sworn I saw in some article that Intel planned to support TRIM in windows 7 with their SSDs. That is an interesting factor though. I don't totally understand TRIM, but it sounds like:
Series Agility Series
Model OCZSSD2-1AGT120G , is the only MLC SSD that utilizes TRIM in Win7? I think I heard the 120gb SSD's actually outperform the smaller ones? These OCZ Agility SSDs seem to be the most recent and have every feature? The only thing Intel has over the OCZ agility is the faster random write speed, which is probably not as important in real world performance as the features from OCZ agility. Does this seem right?

Intel Generation 2 is expected to support TRIM. The Generation 1 is not expected to receive an upgrade to support TRIM.

The OCZ lineup basically looks like this (faster-slower) Vertex EX, Vertex Turbo, Vertex. (The Agility line has the same three "tiers," and differs from the Vertex line in that it uses whatever NAND flash is cost-effective at the moment.)

OCZ just released firmware 1.4, which comes in two flavors. Garbage Collection (GC) (Operating System agnostic), and TRIM (requires a TRIM-aware OS (Win7)). The upgrade has been released for Vertex, and will follow shortly for Agility.
 
Intel is only promising X25-M G2 80GB and X25-M G2 160GB with TRIM updates.

X25-E 32, 64GB
X25-MG1 80, 160GB
X18-MG1 80GB

Intel has no official plan to release TRIM support for the SKUs above. Just something to consider when you are purchasing an SLC drive.
 
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