How fast and dramatic will the SSD price fall be?

[Drome]

Hello everyone. I'm sitting here dealing with a budget for my new build, and am considering SSDs. I've got the standard 5870 Vapor-X, Gigabyte 790FX UD5, Samsung F3 1TB, G.Skill Ripjaws 4Gb ram and Corsair 750TX build planned, but the point of this thread is whether or not SSDs at the moment is worth it for booting and perhaps a game. I've come to a dilemma with choosing between Lancool pc-k62 or going the more expensive route and getting a Silverstone FT02, which I think is considerably better and will last a long time (k62 probably will be replaced in 3-4 years, while ft02 can last several builds.) Also considering the upcoming Lian Li PC-60FNWX http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product/product06.php?pr_index=489&cl_index=1&sc_index=25&ss_index=62&g=f if it gets a fair price and quick release (I think it's supposed to release 20th of April) by the way.

Rather than considering the more expensive Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, I'm considering the Intel X25-V 40GB version, which in addition to being less pricey also seems to be more updated. I'm planning on having Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit on it, which unless I'm mistaken takes up 20GB, leaving another 20GB for whichever particular game I play the most at any time (most games don't surpass 20GB, and I think I can change the location of games depending on mood. If there's a MMO I play for a few months I'll place it on my SSD, but if then a new awesome Shooter gets released I'll change places.)

I know I probably won't notice much difference by spending another 100-150$ on a case, even if it'll have a long life, being more "future-proof", the question is more if it's worth it getting an SSD now, when you're on a strict budget? Super quick booting and quick loading times in games sound awesome, I'll surely notice it a lot more than I would a fancier case, but if I, say, can get an even better, updated SSD with ca. 150-250GB capacity for a price that competes with the current prices on WD/Samsung 1TB normal HDs, I'll gladly wait a year or so.

Certain articles found by google suggests that SSDs will replace normal HDs by 2011-2012 even for the normal, non-enthusiast budget user. Is this accurate? To clarify, if waiting a year or so will only shave of 10-30$ of SSD prices, I don't think I'll bother waiting, but if there are reasonable SSDs available fairly soon, I don't think I want to blow cash on it right now.

 

[sminlal]

The costly part of an SSD is the flash memory chips, and like other chips these tend to come down in price according to Moore's Law - prices fall by about 50% every 2 years. The SSD market is still young and so it may beat this by a little because early adopter products often have a price premium.

I don't disagree with the idea that SSDs will replace HDDs within a year or two - but ONLY FOR THE OS DRIVE which (for most people) is the most performance-sensitive. Hard drives are still a lot cheaper for bulk storage and they also continue to get even cheaper every year on a $/GByte basis.

 

[Shadow703793]

^ Yup. The HDDs become SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper once you start to go in to the 256GB+ area for SSDs.

 

[Drome]

I suppose I'll conclude that waiting is more economically sound then. The Samsung F3 1TB HDD is like 80$ in my country, and seems to be all a normal person needs for storage, so I don't really see a lot of money to be saved in that area.

 

[EXT64]

Yep, the F3 is a really fast drive. I think you'll be happy with it.

 

[kylo]

Newegg.com has a great 80GB ssd thats $220, or 30GB for $120. They are good to have for the operating system and main programs to run off of. Then get an F3 500GB, or 1T for bulk storage.

 

[soulfringe]

Well Sminal, situations like drome mentions happens.

Back in 2002/2003 I bought this nifty thing called a DVD+R which was a pretty new thing. It had a whopping 2.4 Write. It costed just shy of $300. Within 2 years, I was looking at 8x DvD+-R at a crazy price of about $30-$40. That was pretty brutal, and I still hit myself over that. That was one hell of an early adopter fee.

I don't doubt a huge SSD price drop within a year or 2. But nothing as crazy as the dvdr thing. I am imagining fairly standard HD price drops. What we pay for a 40gb now, is what the 80GB will cost next year, I am sure.

 

[spiceyweasel]

By the year 2020, they will be obsolete to a new technology based on carbon that has a much denser storage ability than silicon and will be dirt cheap. Of course, by then, super computers will all be the size of iPads, as well, and dinosaurs such as myself who insist on building a bigger, better system will hear the word overkill a lot in regard to the tower of power nestled in the corner. If you're like me, you already hear it a lot now. Oh, the possibilities. It all comes down to hot rods in the end. We build super fast computers instead of cars.....but we still love the bragging rights.

 

[adampower]

Bragging about not sitting in front of a screen whilst windows comes up? The difference is that the hot rod can only go the speed limit. The rig can go full speed all day.

Besides the tower of power in 2020 will have some terrible 3.5TB windows smorgasboard that will eat everything you throw at it.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

I bought my first pc in December 1984 at an IBM retail store in Atlanta, Georgia. It was an original IBM pc. IBM had just introduced the IBM AT model so prices for the original pc were reduced. My pc had two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives, 256Kb of memory, and DOS 2.2.1 was the operating system. The following year I read about a company called Seagate that introduced a 10Mb hard disk. I paid $350.00 for that hard drive. That worked out to $35.00 per Megabyte. There are 1,024 megabytes in one gigabyte. That works out to $35,840.00 per Gigabyte. Today you can purchase a 250GB hard disk drive for $35.00. That works out to $0.14 per GB. It took 26 years to accomplish that feat. Hopefully it will not take that long with solid state drives.