SSD Prices Falling Faster Than HDD Prices

I wonder if they include TLC SSDs in this prediction.

good to see. I would rather spend money on processor's and videocards.

Now all we need is better Btfs support on Linux for the mass proliferation of SSDs.

on a 160 gskill for 240 at the time want 250 for same price better keep waitin...

The gains in Windows general snappiness are worth it. I never looked back and never would.

What amazes me is just how quickly they chew through the bandwidth standards. When they first came out remember they were no faster (and often slower) than a HDD. The idea was that they were going to be for low power devices that required very little space. Within months they saturated the SATA standard, and within 2 years they saturated SATA2. When SATA3 came out it just took 2-3 months to saturate that as well, and we know that is where the bottleneck is because there are already drives that max (or close to max) out the PCIe2 x4 standard!
When I first started video editing 'way back' in 98 RAID was required to sustain the ~40MB/s required for 2 video streams, and you needed those 2 drives in at least RAID0 to have enough space. ~2002 you could do the same thing on a single drive, and have one large enough to store a project on a single drive. Things progressed rapidly until 1TB drives came out, which could sustain a good 60-80MB/s. But the build has been rather slow after that, and now most HDDs can only push a sustained 120-140MB/s, compared to the 550MB/s of an SSD. Seek times on HDDs have always hovered around 8ms, and have never really improved, while the SSDs are 0ms. It really is mind blowing to look back at.

SSD is like HD is to cable. Once you go HD or SSD you never go back!!

Yeah because we all know that the masses use linux everyday...

I think they should convert HDD plants to SSD plants. That will make SSD even more widespread and more affordable.

Any articles about the "heat assisted recording"?
I'm very interested in this and as yet can't find anything.

If HDD prices dropped as fast as SSD's, they would be practically free today. HDDs are close to reaching their price asymptotes, and won't fade away from the market in the next years - especially with ever-increasing media file sizes and internet bandwidth.

I'm guessing, people at the moment are more concerned with gb per £ than speed per £.

Its interesting to see the actual numbers, but this should be blatantly obvious to anyone as there are higher prices (and likely margins) to play with in RAM, and the transistor densities and production processes shrinking drastically, the technology has an obvious future whereas with magnetic discs, they need to invent a completely new way or organizing, writing and accessing those blocks of data before there can be huge technological leaps.

Many of the SSD prices have been going up the past few months from where i'm sitting.
ie: holiday demand is high

The M4 is more expensive than it was in october for example.

(JEDI gesture) This information is not useful to you...
(unless you're a HD manufacturer)

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)

A dollar per GB wouldn't be a bad buy now.... worth waiting for, atleast most people will be able to afford one for their frequently used programs and data stuff. I think it's worth the wait.
I bought mine for around 4$/GB so it'll be a welcome change if I got the another one at 1$/GB. That would be a good idea to RAID them out then.

Sorry Google "Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)"

Just like we all know the masses know about the differences between hard drive technologies or are willing to pay so much more for less space.

True: Hard drives prices will probably not drop further than their 2011 historical lows (pre floods), due to material costs... But that belittles the fact that the density will continue to increase. Hence, a hard drive 3 years from now, will still go for $50-$150, but the price per GB will drom from $0.07/gb to $0.10/tb...

Surely more than 0.8% though
...
With a good EFI instead of a traditional BIOS, no swap file and lots of RAM, then add an SSD boot drive with approx 500mb read and you can pretty much have a desktop PC with "instant-on", long term bulk storage will always be the reserve of traditional hard drives but for the speed benefits to the whole system you MUST get an SSD

Good to see, when low enough (.75Mb or so) I will do an upgrade to my gaming rig, but still use my 750Gb WD as a second drive. My HD is the slowest part in it according to the Windows experience index/test

Screw that index.

Once SSD drop below the $1 barrier and become more stable I can see lots of people moving away from HD's Unless they need massive storage.

How insightful.

I don't see many people who do understand the difference in speed to pay that much extra money for it. I don't see many people who are so impatient for their machine to boot that they will pay so much extra. They will still want a secondary HDD for actual storage. At that point, they will see that they are going to pay an extra $200+ to decrease loading times. My machine boots fast enough for me to be happy, without buying an SSD. My games load fast enough, my applications load fast enough. Would I like to have an SSD? Absolutely. Can I justify the expense? No.

I would say that SSD's are enthusiast and enterprise customers only at this point, with a few of the masses here and there with extra money to blow getting one in their new Dell or eMachine for a huge price increase.

I'd love to see $1.00/GB -- from what I see it's $1.25~$1.75+/GB. I expect the HDD prices to drop like a rock very soon back to $0.05~$0.09/GB since the flooding is over in Thailand and the factories are back to full production. $0.16/GB for a HDD is nuts today!

You'd think factories won't be in a Flood zone or Earthquake zone --- ??!!

Wow, I had to read it twice just to make sure, you really did use the word asymptote. *Slow clap*

Why on earth did they use a linear scale? Exponential decay such as this is much better suited for a logarithmic scale.

I subscribed to HD cable then switched back. Don't spend so much time watching tv.

This is a prime example of how you can lie with statistics.
The graph starts already in 1998 when the harddrives were extremely expensive per dollar.
They should have started it around a yearand a halft after the SSD;s came into the market, when the price for them did fall from the silly 40$/Gb to around 4.50$.

The result of this is that the graph looks like there is a small difference between SSD;s and harddrives and that they will cost the same very soon, when in reallity the SSD;s costs about 20 times more than the harddrives per Gb (when comparing the cheapest alternatives for both per GB)and when the supply of the good 'ol mechanical drives is restored the gap will widen more!

But I guess the 20 times difference wouldn't make a great article of SSD;s closing in on mechanical discs.