SSD Price Reductions

[JohnnyLucky]

On September 8th, 2008 Intel released the X25-M, 80GB, SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) solid state drive. That same day Tom's Hardware published a review of the new ssd:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-x25-m-SSD,2012.html

When it was first released the wholesale price of that 80 GB ssd was $595.00 in quantities of 1,000.

The current price of that ssd at newegg.com is $174.49.

If I did the math correctly that is about a 70% price reduction in two and one half years. Someone correct me if I am wrong.

Toward the end of 2009 Tom's Hardware published an article explaining that we would not see any drastic ssd price reductions in 2010 and 2011 like we saw with hard disk drives.

Recently I stumbled into some interesting data over on the mainstream side about flash memory. The use of flash memory for ssd's represents only 6% of the total market. It is the equivalent of a drop in the bucket. The biggest share, about one third of the market is communciations - all those fancy cell phones/devices that can do almost anything - very very hot market. The second biggest share which is about 30% is electronics. For all practical purposes ssd's are at the bottom of the flash memory list.

Current mainstream opinion is that we will not see decent price reductions until 2014 or 2015 and the reductions will not be as great as hard disk drives.

 

[groberts101]

will boil down to supply and demand in the end. advances in tech and manufacturing can have great impacts as well but we're at the nand suppliers feet right now.

Really, if you think about it the profit margins with nand mfgrs is quite high at this point. Reduce the demand with greater market saturation and eventually they will surely drop prices as a result to keep making some profit however limited it may be compared to the initial release of the tech. That's when the major buyouts and monopolies will likely hit us.

Since the demand is only going up and mfgrs(competition) are few, they control the market to a large degree and I can't see that changing very much at all anytime soon.

I think the biggest gain we'll see is the actual performance bang for the buck we'll get. In 2-3 more years many drives will be moving to sata3 with backwards compatibility for older chipsets. So comparing those models with ones built 5 years prior will be night and day even if the $200 price tag remains the same. Just my dirty penny's worth.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

I tend to partially agree but with a different viewpoint. Industry sources indicate the demand for ssd's in 2010 did not quite meet expectations. It appears as if the actual demand is for flash memory in cell phones/devices and electronics. Combined they represent about 64% of the demand for flash memory while ssd's represent only 6% of the demand. Migration is slow.

In the meantime, the specifications for PCI-e 3.0 were officially adopted last year. Intel led a group of over 20 industry leaders to get it approved. Motherboards with PCI-e 3.0 slots will start appearing next year. Long term the implications for video cards and ssd's could be enormous.