SSD Prices in Free Fall; Capacity to Surpass HDDs in 2016

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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According to Information Week, SSD prices are in a free-fall and with the advent of 3D NAND memory, SSD capacity will catch up and surpass HDD numbers in 2016. [H]'s own SSD engineer and editor Chris gave his perspective on the SSD market in this article. Check it out if you missed it the first time.

So what about SSD price points? In 2014, prices for high-end consumer SSDs dropped below enterprise-class HDD, and continued to drop in 2015. A terabyte SSD can be had for around $300. Moreover, this is before 3D NAND begins to further cut prices. By the end of 2016, it’s a safe bet that price parity will be close, if not already achieved, between consumer SSDs and the bulk SATA drives.
 
The only answer to this is to lower HDDs price more. I'm still in need of a couple 6+ tb drives but they just aren't cost effective yet.
 
How is SSD reliability now? Could be purely bad luck on my part, but I've had my SSDs failing at a pretty high rate compared to my HDDs. (That being said, I'm only on SSD still).
 
Of course prices of SATA SSDs are falling. They are old tech since the introduction of consumer NVMe SSDs.
 
The new NVME drives have been in free fall too, although they are bouncing a bit now... Cannot wait for 1TB 2.5" SSD my 24 hotswap 2.5 chassis is awaiting.
 
How is SSD reliability now? Could be purely bad luck on my part, but I've had my SSDs failing at a pretty high rate compared to my HDDs. (That being said, I'm only on SSD still).

SSD reliability is better than HDD. Not sure why you're having multiple SSDs fail without context but that shouldn't be happening.
 
Like I said, could be random bad luck. But have had about 3 OCZ Vertexes fail within the first 6 months, which is a pain in the ass (Vertex 2s).
 
Like I said, could be random bad luck. But have had about 3 OCZ Vertexes fail within the first 6 months, which is a pain in the ass (Vertex 2s).

That doesn't shock me at all. First generation Sandforce drives were horribly unreliable (especially anything OCZ related). I can't even tell you how many Agility and Vertex 2's come back to the store in under 2 Years. You would have been much better off investing a bit more money into anything Intel at that time. (Still am running a X25-M G2 80GB in my file server without a hitch).

Buy a Samsung, Intel, or Sandisk SSD and you will be much better off.
 
Once I can get a fast Samsung 850 Pro 1 terbayte SSD for around $300, I will finally retire all my magnetic drives for good.
 
By the end of 2016, it’s a safe bet that price parity will be close, if not already achieved, between consumer SSDs and the bulk SATA drives.

Not a chance in hell there's anything close to price/size parity by end of 2016, no offense to the dude.
 
That doesn't shock me at all. First generation Sandforce drives were horribly unreliable (especially anything OCZ related). I can't even tell you how many Agility and Vertex 2's come back to the store in under 2 Years. You would have been much better off investing a bit more money into anything Intel at that time. (Still am running a X25-M G2 80GB in my file server without a hitch).

Buy a Samsung, Intel, or Sandisk SSD and you will be much better off.

Add Crucial to that list.
 
Sandisk SSD and you will be much better off.

QFT. I'm running three in a RAID-0 and each has a lifetime writes rating of 12.63 TB as of today. That's with a power on time of almost 998 days; I've had them for 38 months. Clearly I'm a power user with those numbers. They are still above 97.5% lifetime writes remaining, that is my data indicates they will survive >600 TB of writes. They will likely be recycled and reincarnated as an iPhone XX long before they would fail in normal use.
 
Not a chance in hell there's anything close to price/size parity by end of 2016, no offense to the dude.

I agree with this. It will be several years (maybe a decade) before this happens. I am not even totally sure it will happen with silicon based flash.
 
No, that's not how this works.

As long as consumers see the value in the pricing they will spend more money.

There is not one of us here who would not spend $350 - $400 for a 2TB SSD in 2016

It will be a handful of years more before you see a 4TB SDD for $119

Mark my words, you will never see a 3TB SSD for $99 or a 4TB for $119 in 2016 let alone 2017
 
NO chance in hell I would replace a hdd storage drive with an ssd drive. I've had hdd's fail and ssd's fail. When an ssd fails, your data is gone, hdd's you can recover.....

But anyways, 1tb would be sufficient enough for me for all my games, programs, and os. I'll still have a large spinner for everything else!!!
 
When I can get a 2TB SSD for $70, I will be swapping out the drives in my NAS... not that I need the speed, but I'd love to reduce the noise of having 20 spinners, lol.
 
I would certainly be happy with a PCIe M.2 1TB drive.
 
When I can get a 2TB SSD for $70, I will be swapping out the drives in my NAS... not that I need the speed, but I'd love to reduce the noise of having 20 spinners, lol.

Speed, noise, power... many advantages.
 
The problem with HDD prices is they take a fair amount of raw materials. There is sort of a $50 minimum on hard drives of old technology this is similar to the pattern we saw with massive profits in tablets, face it dispite what people will tell you tablets are dirt cheap to produce compared with laptops or desktops. With SSDs they can keep going down, they can get rid of the metal shell, strip it down to a bare card. And with the ever declining demand and volume for HDDs the HDD makers have to charge higher prices to squeeze profit out of these drives. On top of all that HDD makers are going to be less and less interested in investing more in research.... Its just a downward spiral. Most predictions are purposely a little too soon just to drive in hits but 2017-2018 sounds possible for HDDs to go past the point of no return on their downward spiral.
 
NO chance in hell I would replace a hdd storage drive with an ssd drive. I've had hdd's fail and ssd's fail. When an ssd fails, your data is gone, hdd's you can recover.....


That's what parity is for. Just because you can "physically" recover data off a HDD, it doesn't mean that any meaningful percentage of the public actually does it. But a good percentage of people DO use some type of parity to protect against that. And it that situation an SSD of same capacity and availability will always be better then a platter drive.
 
The problem with HDD prices is they take a fair amount of raw materials. There is sort of a $50 minimum on hard drives of old technology this is similar to the pattern we saw with massive profits in tablets, face it dispite what people will tell you tablets are dirt cheap to produce compared with laptops or desktops. With SSDs they can keep going down, they can get rid of the metal shell, strip it down to a bare card. And with the ever declining demand and volume for HDDs the HDD makers have to charge higher prices to squeeze profit out of these drives. On top of all that HDD makers are going to be less and less interested in investing more in research.... Its just a downward spiral. Most predictions are purposely a little too soon just to drive in hits but 2017-2018 sounds possible for HDDs to go past the point of no return on their downward spiral.

I have seen computer chips sold to customers that do not even have plastic packaging on them recently. They just cut the chip out of the wafer and flip it over and solder to the PCB. Fragile, but shaves even more pennies off the cost....and thin & small as hell too.
 
Nothing. We will be using spinners for mass storage for at least 1 more decade.

I'll 2nd that.
I don't see replacing the enterprise 4TB SATA drives in the servers at the office with enterprise level SSD's any time soon. Even the low end enterprise 800GB SSD's are still too expensive to justify, unless 15K rpm SAS drives just are not fast enough. By next year I'll likely be putting 8TB drives in the servers anyways.

As for my Database and Exchange servers, hopefully there will be some reasonably priced enterprise level 2TB SSD coming out in the next couple years, as I could use the performance boost.
 
There is not one of us here who would not spend $350 - $400 for a 2TB SSD in 2016

lol I wouldn't. I just don't have enough data that needs fast access to justify a price like that, when I could put that money into a CPU or GPU or display or UPS, etc. instead.
 
I would have a lot of trouble justifying a >500gb SSD atm. I would absolutely take 3 or 4 of those 6TB hdd's for 1/2 their current price.
 
I hope mainstream SSD will eventually outgrow the size of video games, lol. Would love to move my Steam folder to SSD, but games are getting larger too (60GB for GTA V!). Therefore I still keep all of my games on a 2TB WD Black drive.
 
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