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Good time to buy a SSD? (willing to play waiting game)

M

Mohdoo

Junior Member
Hey, everyone.

I've been thinking about getting an SSD some time soon, and I was considering getting the Intel 80GB G2, but I feel like it is a lot of money to spend on a hard drive without doing proper research. Obviously I could wait forever to get the most out of my money, but I would prefer to buy within the next couple months. Is it worth waiting right now? What would be the best drive to buy at the moment?

Thanks 🙂
 
It really depends on your usage and upgrade cycle. I mean, for me, I use S3 suspend (so no booting), and just surf, game, watch movies, and torrent. The only hard-disk intensive thing in there is loading a game, and I don't see "time to reach game menu" as a particularly meaningful performance statistic. ($300 to save me 5 seconds on load? I think I'll wait the 5 seconds.) I'm also on a relatively long upgrade cycle, so waiting 2 more generations for the technology to mature isn't a problem for me.

If you do a lot of disk intensive things now, and would be looking to upgrade in a year anyway, then the X25-M seems to be the SSD of choice. If your finances wouldn't let you upgrade to a gen3 or 4 unit, my hunch would be to wait. There just seems to be a ton of movement on the SSD front.
 
Intel released the G1 back in September 8 2008, the G2 was released on July 22 2009.

So that's 10 1/2 months between the G1 and G2 release. You're looking at June 2010 for the G3 and supply would be low so you will have to wait a few more months for prices to stabilize.

I personally bit the bullet and got a G2 80GB on order for $449 AUD, the only one I could find across Australia. I would have to wait until January if I didn't buy this particular one. And I'm replacing a WD 750GB faulty/dying boot drive.

It just depends on your needs man.
 
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ginbong said:
Intel released the G1 back in September 8 2008, the G2 was released on July 22 2009.

So that's 10 1/2 months between the G1 and G2 release. You're looking at June 2010 for the G3 and supply would be low so you will have to wait a few more months for prices to stabilize.

I personally bit the bullet and got a G2 80GB on order for $449 AUD, the only one I could find across Australia. I would have to wait until January if I didn't buy this particular one. And I'm replacing a WD 750GB faulty/dying boot drive.

It just depends on your needs man.
Click to expand...

G1 was not released when 50nm was released, so you can't go by the G1 release date as an indicator of the release cadence for SSD's.

50nm NAND flash from IM Flash was released in mid 2007. Two years later they released their next node, 34nm. This is in line with expected node cadence. The G2 was subsequently released.

The G3 will presumably be based on the next node, something around 22nm, and won't debut until 2yrs after the G2/34nm debut...so you are looking at mid-2011 unless they do start doing half-node refreshes every year like the GPU guys use to do.
 
Blain said:
Since you're willing to play the waiting game, why not wait and get a higher capacity, faster SSD? 🙄
Click to expand...

Well, although I am willing to play the waiting game (A little bit), I said in my post that I would like to only wait at max maybe 2 months. I know that there have been times in the past where though there are great options now, something great will be out in 1 or 2 months.

I was considering the OCZ agility. Would that be a good idea as opposed to the Intel G2 80GB?

EDIT: Also wanted to mention that this is all mainly for gaming. I will be using this on Windows 7 x64, playing mainly World of Warcraft and other Blizzard games (such as SC2 when it finally comes out).

Thanks!!
 
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Considering my SSD felt like a greater upgrade than an E66 --> 920 (and I do video editing / encoding!) I'd say scrap waiting and make a move now.

Intel 160 G2.
 
In terms of price:

This post (http://www.denali.com/wordpress/index.php/dmr/2009/07/16/nand-forward-prices-rate-of-decline-will ) claims that NAND forward prices will slow their price drop significantly. If we get our so-called "double-dip" recession, the recent NAND recovery will likely crash. Migration to 22nm for CPUs may free up excess 34,50nm capacity which would definitely result in lower prices, depending on how smooth the migration process will be. As a side note, serious quantum-mechanical problems (i.e. tunneling) lie below 22 nm that might require large changes to conventional lithography. As such, we seem to be at somewhat of a temporary peak in the recent NAND recovery.

Just my two cents. I'm not a flash memory market analyst.

Your purchasing decision though should not be based just on price, but on whether this drive will be useful to you now, in terms of productivity.
 
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jimhsu said:
Just my two cents. I'm not a flash memory market analyst.

Your purchasing decision though should not be based just on price, but on whether this drive will be useful to you now, in terms of productivity.
Click to expand...
We only care about performance first, then price.
Actual usefulness comes in a distant third. 😵
 
Well performance = usefulness. If it's not fast, why buy? (i suppose people here have similar ideas on how to define usefulness).
 
jimhsu said:
Well performance = usefulness.
If it's not fast, why buy? (i suppose people here have similar ideas on how to define usefulness).
Click to expand...
No...
If I build a web surfing, office app. rig "high performance" isn't "useful" to me. There's absolutely no reason to install something like a SSD in such a build.
If I build a rig for editing massive video files, then "high performance" is very "useful" to me in that circumstance.
 
Blain said:
No...
If I build a web surfing, office app. rig "high performance" isn't "useful" to me.
Click to expand...

As we measure the performance of the use, the link is intrinsic.

A 486SX 25MHz would not give you very good performance in web surfing or office apps.
If we add a parakeet, this adds zero performance to the aforementioned apps. A parakeet may have other uses, but they're not relevant to the current discussion. Along the axis under discussion, a parakeet is useless.
An upgrade to a DX4 100MHz, OTOH, would give a performance improvement to the uses in question. Is is useful. Whether or not the performance delta is worth the cost in an absolute or relative price sense, or how the cost/benefit of this particular upgrade stacks up against others, are separate issues relating to the implementation of the added usefulness, not determiners of usefulness.

vvv See: Not relevant.
 
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I was in a similar situation to yours a few months ago. I really wanted an Intel G2, but I knew that any of the Indilinx drives would also be a good choice. Because I was not in a hurry, I was able to wait until what I felt was a good deal came my way. I got the Agility 60 for $130 after rebate (I already have the rebate in hand). If you are willing to wait until after the holidays, I would think you could get either an Indilix 60GB for around $180 or an Intel at close to the original MSRP. Either way you should be happy.
 
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