New ssd cheaper than hard disk drive

With all of the complaints about the high price of solid state drives I think it is time for a reality check. There's been entirely too much whining, moaning, and groaning about the perceived high cost of ssd's. It is not justified.

I purchased my first desktop computer in December 1984. It was an original IBM pc. The operating system was an early version of DOS 2.0. There were no hard disk drives for consumers. Instead, the pc came with two 5.25 in. floppy disk drives. I had to insert a floppy disk containing the OS in order to start it. I also purchased one of the first IBM word processing programs. It came on two floppy disks. Depending on what I wanted to do I had to keep swapping the two floppy disks. The original version of Flight Simulator was a freebie. It was absolutely horrible.

The following Summer PC Magazine and Computer Shopper magazines published reports about hard disk drives. A company I never heard of was making them. That company was Seagate. I went to a local computer store and inquired about the new drives. The store had brand new Seagate 10MB hard drives with an access time of 140 milliseconds. That was the only benchmark back then.

What did it cost? That 10MB Seagate hard drive cost $350.00 and installation was free.

Time to pull out the calculator and do some math.

At $350.00 for 10MB the price works out to $35.00 per MB.

There are 1,024 MB in 1 GB.

At $35.00 per MB that works out to $35,840.00 per GB.

You think you're paying too much when you pay $2.00 per GB for a solid state drive? Gimme a break!

BTW - It took 26 years to for hard disk prices to drop from $35,840.00 to $00.50 per GB. It is a pretty safe bet that the senior citizens among you will be 6 feet under and Hell will freeze over before ssd's match hard drive prices.

A very interesting way to look at it! Puts things into perspective IMO on the true cost.

I think what people sometimes have to understand there is cost for performance and one has to understand that. I would love to drive a Nissian GTR but I don't have $80,000+ for one, which doesn't mean I complain about the cost. Heck, it is cheap compared to most cars that hit the 200 MPH mark. It is the same for a SSD compared to hard drive... you are paying for the performance difference. The issue than becomes, one of "real-world" & perceived differences in the two. This can't be truly measured except by oneself. 20 seconds difference for a program to load may mean the world to one person but mean nothing to another person.

> It took 26 years to for hard disk prices to drop from $35,840.00 to $00.50 per GB.

Hard drive prices are way, way cheaper than 50 cents/GB. You can buy a 2TB hard drive for about $70 bucks these days, which works out to about 3.5 cents/GB.


> It is a pretty safe bet that the senior citizens among you will be 6 feet under and Hell will freeze over before ssd's match hard drive prices.

Definitely agree. People seem to forget that hard drive capacities are advancing too, and flash technology faces some serious and fundamental limitations as they continue to reduce the cell sizes.

The sweet spot is to buy a relatively smaller SSD for performance-critical files and a much larger but slower HDD for bulk storage. It's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Intel's Trigate technology isn't about letting them "stack" circuits on a chip - it's a new way of designing the process layers to maximize the junction area of the transistor, which in turn lets them reduce voltages and power. The technology on it's own doesn't reduce the real estate required for a transistor. I don't see this on its own having any impact on flash memory densities. Densities will increase by scaling the process technology down below 25nm - but of course reductions in flash memory cell size have negative impacts on speed and write endurance.

Its possible that the 3D Trigate technology will allow an effectively greater area to store a flash memory static charge, which would mitigate the issues faced by designers when they scale to smaller cell sizes - but I've yet to find any suggestion of that in the announcements I've read.

SSD capacity increases will also help to circumvent the loss of PE/c as well.

that's about the size of it. 2 words sum it right up... PRODUCT PLACEMENT.

what we really need to know is how much the components actually cost compared with how much the drive costs retail.

i know flash memory (at retail pricing) for cameras is down to $1.25 or less per gb. i paid $1.65 per gb for my vertex 2s. compare this to the $0.09 i paid per gb for my hdds. theres a huge difference in price between any type of flash media compared to hdds. seeing as how long flash has been around prices should be much lower.

off topic:
the same sort of high pricing scheme can be seen with blank blueray disk media. dvd disks can be had for $0.16 a piece or cheaper while blueray disks are at least $1.60 a disk or more. this is for the LTH disks which re-use machinery that used to make dvds so its not costing them much more.