Your estimate on how long before SSD's are ALMOST affordable enough to ditch HDD?

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chimera991

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I recently bought a 120gb vertex2 from newegg and couldnt help but wonder how soon (maybe 2-3 years, my guess) before SSD's are the standard (not necessarily the norm) with how fast they have been going down in price recently.

I'm no computer genius, but wouldn't an SSD be easier to manufacture vs a Hard Disk Drive? Spinning platters and all?

I was wondering because i put a WD640GB in my PS3 and with Gran Turismo 5 coming out, those few years of waiting for a nice AFFORDABLE 500GB+ SSD drive with read/write speeds of over 300 would be really nice to have NOW! :eek:
 
Maybe 1.5 years for a 500gb SSD to be under $400, we'll have a better understanding later this year when Intel releases its drives and see how the market reacts.

When Dell, HP, etc. start putting SSD's in $500 bargain pc's as standard is when the HDD can be considered dead, or at least SSD's the primary form of storage. Large capacity servers will still use HDD's for several more years at least. Unless some advancement blows away the trend with SSD's similar to Moore's Law.
 
It's not manufacturing the drive that costs so much, it's the price of NAND flash memory.

It's my opinion that SSDs are 'affordable' now, but only just barely so. I think in 2 - 3 years we will see prices that are half of what they are now when speaking of cost per gigabyte of SSD storage.

SSDs are always going to be more expensive when compared to platter based storage, at the very least for the next decade or so. You're not just paying for storage capacity, you're paying for speed and that's something solid state drive technology has in abundance. That price premium isn't going anywhere any time soon.

What you will see plenty of is INCREASES in performance. SSD technology is evolving so bloody fast it's head-spinning. We've already hit (slammed full force into, actually) the limit of SATA2 and it won't be long before we bump against the SATA3 limit.
 
chimera996 said:
I'm no computer genius, but wouldn't an SSD be easier to manufacture vs a Hard Disk Drive? Spinning platters and all?
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First of all, when doing manufacturing, a more well defined question (than "easier") is expense. Which is more expensive to manufacture, SSD or HDD?

As another poster mentioned, it is the expense of the flash memory in the SSD that is responsible for the high price of SSDs. And manufacturing NAND flash memory is very expensive. 34nm and 25nm lithography chip fabs cost BILLIONS of dollars to set up, and the development and testing required for making wafers with such small features is also expensive. All of the expense of bulding the new chip fabs and developing the new processes gets passed along, eventually, to the SSD buyer. And there are fewer SSDs sold than HDDs, so fewer purchasers to cover the costs means higher costs per device.
 
lol, "manufacturing" is not the "expense", the expense is "building factories"
 
why not talk about it in cost per GB?

I'm on slickdeals a lot and the lowest I have seen them go for is $1.5 per GB. "Premium" models still go for $2 per GB on sale or higher.
 
Personally, I've been holding out for the good 80 GB models to hit the $100 mark. Hopefully within 6 months? Of course, for the mass manufacturers and the average user, it'll take a lot more than that.
 
I won't buy anything less than 256GB. I think many users are also waiting for cheap decent capacity SSDs. Until this happens, SSDs will probably not be considered mature enough.

The 20nm process allows more chips on the same wafer, and some manufacturers also switched to larger wafer sizes, so I hope prices will come down by early next year. But don't expect mass production prices until most of the 30/40nm labs have been upgraded.
 
for a notebook 120gb + is good for the average person....

plus streaming is becoming more and more popular and storage is getting less important.

I dont know many people, other than geeks that have even 1TB....
 
brettjrob said:
Personally, I've been holding out for the good 80 GB models to hit the $100 mark. Hopefully within 6 months? Of course, for the mass manufacturers and the average user, it'll take a lot more than that.
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That might happen when the Intel G3 drives come out; there was a drastic price cut when the G2s debuted.
 
It seems that the focus is more on improving performance than it is on lowering the $/GB. I remember last year you could get a 60GB SSD for $150 or a 30GB for $100 on sale, but of course those were based on the shitty JMicron controllers. Currently, the performance is much better, but the price hasnt exactly decreased significantly.
 
Currently, the performance is much better, but the price hasnt exactly decreased significantly.
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The 80GB intel X25-m went from over $300 US to under $200 in the last year. I would consider that significant. However price reduction is a result of the NAND price not changing much inside the 34nm node. And it will not decrease much without a die shrink. The $300+ to $200 price change of the Intel X25-M price reduction was a result mostly of going from 55nm to 34nm. Remember the smaller you go the more chips you can put on a single wafer thus reducing the cost. However it is not easy to go to smaller nodes (technical reasons). And it also usually requires a several Billion dollar investment in the factory.
 
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Since I had brought up the point about new chip fabs costing billions of dollars to build and outfit, I should probably mention another important factor. Many devices use flash memory these days, not just SSDs. It is used in smart phones, digital cameras, MP3 players, ebook readers, and of course USB flash drives. So, luckily, the cost of the chip fab does not have to be covered just by flash sold for use in SSDs. But the SSDs generally need the best, most robust flash chips, and the other devices get the lower quality flash chips. That means that the $/GB for the flash in SSDs will always be higher than that used in most other flash memory devices.
 
Almost affordable? I think they are that now. I spent 150 for my 60GB agility last year and it was such a huge boost in speed it was worth it. Now the new gen is almost twice as fast for almost the same price. Come on, when the 30g raptors were new they cost over 120$ each and people still bought them.
 
Biznatch said:
Almost affordable? I think they are that now. I spent 150 for my 60GB agility last year and it was such a huge boost in speed it was worth it. Now the new gen is almost twice as fast for almost the same price. Come on, when the 30g raptors were new they cost over 120$ each and people still bought them.
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What was the $/GB for a 7200 RPM drive back then? Unfortunately you have to compare to today's HDD cost which is like $.6/GB?

I expect controller performance to converge this next generation and chip cost to drop. I'd like to get something in the 256GB (maybe 128GB) size for $300 :)
 
Unfortunately you have to compare to today's HDD cost which is like $.6/GB?
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There should be a 0 after the decimal point. However I do not believe that a ssd based on flash (using the current materials) will ever be that cheap.
 
Estimates currently state it will take 7 years for anyone to perform another die shrink after this upcoming one from Intel. Of course this estimate can be cut into significantly depending on how badly they are discounting prototype technology that would help in this process but it's safe to say SSDs won't catch up with the cost reduction of HDDs within the next 5 years thus you won't be seeing NAND flash as an acceptable means of mass storage for a very long time.
 
mutantmagnet said:
Estimates currently state it will take 7 years for anyone to perform another die shrink after this upcoming one from Intel. Of course this estimate can be cut into significantly depending on how badly they are discounting prototype technology that would help in this process but it's safe to say SSDs won't catch up with the cost reduction of HDDs within the next 5 years thus you won't be seeing NAND flash as an acceptable means of mass storage for a very long time.
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This. We're not so terribly far from the physical limit for NAND geometries. As cells get smaller and smaller it gets harder and harder to detect and keep electrons in the gates. I wouldn't be surprised if something (PCM, memristors, etc) comes along and replaces NAND for solid state storage before NAND SSDs have a chance to become cheaper than HDDs. That's not a bad thing.
 
you know, all the estimates and predictions are worthless. they have been saying the same about hard drives for years. and then they came out with perpendicular recording. next will be laser assisted recording. so really who knows what the future will bring for SSDs.
 
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