Why are SSD's soo freakin expensive!!!? =0

[gamebro]

So I am browsing NEWEGG today, and I see that little flash drives are pretty cheap these days.... An 8gb usb drive can be yours for about $50 bucks! "Very nice" as Borat would say.
Now for a long time (since toms first reported on em) I have had my eyes on the Solid State Drives, knowing they would be wonderful for hardcore gamers such as myself..... Games like OBLIVION constantly choke and stutter as it pulls massive amounts of information from my harddrive with nearly every step I take in the outdoor environments... A hard drive that can pull this data super fast, is a very tempting option, not only for super demanding games but also windows and other apps!

But there is a problem, and this is it----

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147021

$430 bucks, for a 32gb drive!!! My goodness Even a 16gb drive will cost you a few hundred bucks, were the same amount of money might get you a 750gb hard drive! Heck a 64gb drive will cost you $1700+, or $3000+ if you want the 128gb drives...


Ok... So here is my question...

If an 8gb usb flash drive is only 50 bucks...

Then, why is a 32gb internal SSD more then $400??? Can anyone explain that to me? Shouldn't it be more like $200? Though even at that price it would still be a tough sale....


Gah, wake me up in 1 year from now when 256gb SSD disks are only 100 bucks

 

[Guest]

Its a brand new technology. Hell the Q6600 was almost $1000 for a year.

Back in college I paid $80 for a 256MB flash drive. Now 1GB drives can be had for under $10.

Its just how technology goes. That being said as soon as a 64GB drive is under $200, I'm buying it.

 

[Turas]

Well I would say it is actually much worse than that as the price you posted was for a 1.8 ide drive. Any new machine is going to use sata. The sata 2.5 ones are around $800 for a 32GB. But things are improving as I just bought 2 sandisk 32Gb sata's for $515. I am debating the 64Gb ones they have for $888. At that cost per gb it is around $14 dollars which is not bad considering less than a year ago the best I could find was well over $30. I believe there was the post that Micron is jumping on the bandwagon and also that Seagate is too, Both of which should be available in the early of next year. I image it wont be too long before the prices start coming down.

 

[einstein4pres]

These are probably being primarily sold to servers right now, where they offer a huge number of I/O operations per second (which is what counts in some kinds of server work). They are much cheaper than the alternative, a bunch of drives in a RAID array.

My guess is there is a non trivial cost in adapting the technology for use as hard drives, and within a year or two the tech will be cost-effective in desktop systems. They all probably need some kind of RAID controller to get good read/write speeds, and good wear leveling algorithms, but once such things are developed, they'll become a lot cheaper, a lot faster, I'm guessing.

 

[gamebro]

Hmm ok.... Well I hope Micron an Seagate make a big diff and quick! I am getting impatient, this tech sounds soo hot! =0

So the drives that are available right now are actually not that good? Sounds like yer saying the tech is a bit premature yet, and that's understandable if true.... I just hope that within the next year SSD are ready to go mainstream with desktop users like me!

 

[skyline0511]

Next year (Christmas lol) it will be bigger, faster, and cheaper. Going to these options are very important to step into mainstream.

 

[quantumsheep]

Perhaps it'd be easier faster and cheaper to call lombard direct.

 

[Turas]

I would not go as far as saying they are not good right now but say you more get what you pay for. There are drives like the super talent which are get 60MB/s read and 40MB/s write or you can pay more and get the Mtron/SmartModular and few others that can hit 100-110MB/s reading and sustained 80-90MB/s writing. All of the options are expensive but I would not say they are premature at this point.

 

[ethel]

Supply and demand. If you think about it, with low capacity per disk, high performance and high prices these are effectively in the server space. When there is more competition, prices will tumble.

For now, be prepared to be milked if you want the bleeding edge stuff.

But yeah, I can't wait to replace my SCSI 15K with something faster