Admit it, you want a solid state drive. The only thing stopping you is the price, which is understandable -- but Samsung says that won’t be a concern within a few years.
Gig for gig, nothing touches the old spinning magnetic-based storage for its value. While we may all want the performance and reliability benefits from solid state storage, the price differential makes it seem like an impractical choice.
It won’t be that way forever, says Samsung. We’re well aware the computing technology gets more affordable over time, but Samsung -- who makes both spinning hard disk drives and flash memory -- says SSDs will be on par explains why prices are where they are right now, though prices will drop continue to at a steady pace.
"Flash memory in the last five years has come down 40, 50, 60 percent per year," said Brian Beard, flash marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor, in an interview with ZDNet. "Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years."
"The difference in cost is fundamentally very different. A hard drive has a fixed cost of $40 or $50 for the spindle, the motors, the PCB (printed circuit board), the cables," he told the website. "To make the hard drive spin faster (increase speed) or to add capacity doesn't really add a lot of incremental cost to the drive."
"When you contrast this with SSDs, they also have a fixed cost for the PCB and the case and the controller, which is lower than the fixed cost of a hard drive," according to Beard. "But as you scale the capacity of the SSD up, the cost scales linearly. For example, if the spot price of the flash chip itself is $2, a 64GB drive is going to cost $128 just for the flash and then you would add the fixed cost of the PCB and the case.”
The sad reality here is that it will take quite a while for flash memory density and prices to catch up to current hard disk drive costs. On top of that is flash memory price’s volatility, which might not be so painful when buying 4 GB of RAM, but will really add up when buying a 256 GB SSD.
There will come a time when data storage will move to solid state, but in the interim we expect to see a transition where the operating system and program files will be stored on a fast SSD, while a more economical HDD will be in the system for storage of data where speed is not a necessity, such as photos, videos and music.
