SSDs - State of the Product?
- Thread starter ddrueding
- Start date
Intel P4510
I suppose 4 or 8TB drives will be expensive, but 3000MB/sec. reads and 2900MB/sec. writes (4TB) is pretty nice.
I suppose 4 or 8TB drives will be expensive, but 3000MB/sec. reads and 2900MB/sec. writes (4TB) is pretty nice.
Have you seen this announcement on the 8TB NVMe NF1 formfactor? Likely more vaporware for many months to come?
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Anyone else notice SSD prices have been dropping like a rock lately? 1TB SSDs were going for north of $300 early in the year. Now Newegg has a special on the 1TB 860 Evo for only $178. The regular prices of some of the off brands are under $150. Best prices I can find on mechanical 1TB 2.5" drives seem to be in the $40 area. Anything I would actually trust my data with is going for at least $60. So the gap is closing fast.
I don't need any myself right now but the fairly quick price drop is rather interesting. I had read that some new fabs were going online but that wasn't supposed to be until late this year. This was supposed to drop the price of RAM as well except that RAM hasn't budged much. I researched it a little more and found some articles:
https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-are-ssd-prices-plummeting/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ssd-prices-how-low-will-they-go/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/13/flash_oversupply_analysis/
In a nutshell, we're transitioning to 64-layer NAND (which in itself will cause prices to drop), and there seems to be an oversupply of drives using the older 32-layer NAND. The only caveat is so far the largest price drops seem to be for 1TB or smaller SSDs. Larger ones dropped in price as well, but not by the same percentage. 2TB to 4TB SSDs remain a lot higher per GB than 1TB or smaller drives. We'll probably have to wait for significant inroads of 64-layer NAND before the prices of larger drives drop.
I'm also not seeing as much movement of prices on USB flash drives. 256GB USB drives maybe dropped from $60 to $50 on average. In fact, 256GB SSDs can be had for about the same price as 256GB USB drives.
https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-are-ssd-prices-plummeting/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ssd-prices-how-low-will-they-go/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/13/flash_oversupply_analysis/
In a nutshell, we're transitioning to 64-layer NAND (which in itself will cause prices to drop), and there seems to be an oversupply of drives using the older 32-layer NAND. The only caveat is so far the largest price drops seem to be for 1TB or smaller SSDs. Larger ones dropped in price as well, but not by the same percentage. 2TB to 4TB SSDs remain a lot higher per GB than 1TB or smaller drives. We'll probably have to wait for significant inroads of 64-layer NAND before the prices of larger drives drop.
I'm also not seeing as much movement of prices on USB flash drives. 256GB USB drives maybe dropped from $60 to $50 on average. In fact, 256GB SSDs can be had for about the same price as 256GB USB drives.
What's interesting about the pricing now is you can get a useful size SSD for about the same price as the cheapest hard drives are going for, say, around $40. Yes, you'll get less capacity for that $40, perhaps 120GB instead of 1TB, but a lot of people don't need more than 100 or so GB anyway. That wasn't the case not long ago, when all you could get in SSDs for $40 was a rather useless 16 or 32 GB. In fact, I'm even seeing off-brand 250GB SSDs going for around $40. Unless you really need more space than that, and don't have the room for a second drive, it's a no-brainer to get an SSD.