Why are SSD hard drive prices dropping like a rock now?

[JEDI]

it used to be the lowest ssd hard drives price was slightly above $0.50/gig.
ie: 120 gig ssd costs like $70

and the price per gig stayed that way for 2yrs+!

now I just saw a 240gig ssd for $80

What happened?

 

[Engineer]

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/ssd-nand-flash-storage-price-war.html

 

[master_shake_]

price of dram is up so the ssd makers can use ram prices to subsidize the price of ssd's.

i'm not a crack pot

 

[JEDI]

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/ssd-nand-flash-storage-price-war.html

thx!

price war FTW!

so I should wait a little before buying?
(my 1tb hd has 100gig left, so somewhat in a hurry)

 

[mfenn]

Higher density NAND processes are coming online from Toshiba, Samsung, and IMFT (Crucial), so there suddenly enough margin for the big guys to have a price war.

 

[postmortemIA]

250GB drives are mainstream choices today, so it makes sense that all players are trying to make them affordable as much as possible.

 

[gmaster456]

Technology gets cheaper the longer it's been out. I personally am enjoying the cheap SSD prices. Remember when 1TB HDD's were $400? Or a 256mb RAM upgrade in 1998 would probably have run you a couple hundred dollars if I remember right. And that's if your system could support that much.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Technology gets cheaper the longer it's been out. I personally am enjoying the cheap SSD prices. Remember when 1TB HDD's were $400?

No, but I do remember paying $300 for a 1GB HDD.

 

[sm625]

What is irritating is the floor on SSD pricing. There is no way a controller and a pcb and a case should cost $40. I'm still buying X-25M 80GB drives off ebay because they are still the cheapest upgrade path to an SSD for older systems that arent worth an $80 upgrade.

 

[JEDI]

Technology gets cheaper the longer it's been out.

I thought so too, but ssd prices were holding steady at ~$0.60/gig for 2 years!

then all of a sudden, freefall!

don't get me wrong. love the freefall in prices.

but still surprised the prices held at that price point for soooo long (in tech time).

 

[corkyg]

New, ******, faster models necessitate clearing of inventory . It is totally normal.

 

[BrightCandle]

It goes along with improved silicon processes. Each new process double the number of cells available which means that the capacity at a given price point is more or less doubling every 2 years. New processes tend to be more expensive as the yields are somewhat lower and then as it becomes reliable the prices drop inline. So you are going to see the prices of SSDs jump as new process tech comes out.

Where it gets muddied a little is that all the different manufacturers of NAND are at different stages in their process. They aren't perfectly aligned with each other and they are also doing it different. Samsung just released a new 40nm process, those capacitive transistors are huge compared to their competitors and a lot more durable. Yet they also add 3D stacking which means that a single chip has quite a lot of capacity.

The price points for SSDs more or less follow the channels available. We have had for a while 2 - 8 channel SSDs with the performance and price varying depending on how many NAND chips were used (1 per channel). As the density increases what you find is that the same channel width now has twice the capacity it did before, but it also often means the performance now moves up to the next capacity as well.

Its just how the silicon industry works. Each new silicon process is meant to bring increased transistors at the same price point, in CPUs/GPUs that translates to performance and in SSDs it translates to capacity.

 

[piasabird]

Maybe before they were just ripping off the public because they could get away with it.

 

[Engineer]

No, but I do remember paying $300 for a 1GB HDD.

Or $379 for a 20MB MFM - 4 to 1 Interleve ATA drive. As I said in another thread, spoiled kids!

 

[BurnItDwn]

Due to anti competitive and likely illegal practices prices have been artificially held higher than they should be. Prices are coming down since production has increased to the point where demand was exceeding the supply at that price range, they simply had to come down as not many people were willing to pay those inflated high prices with high margins.

 

[Ayah]

What is irritating is the floor on SSD pricing. There is no way a controller and a pcb and a case should cost $40. I'm still buying X-25M 80GB drives off ebay because they are still the cheapest upgrade path to an SSD for older systems that arent worth an $80 upgrade.

gotta pad your profit margin and number of products sold though.

 

[KentState]

Or $379 for a 20MB MFM - 4 to 1 Interleve ATA drive. As I said in another thread, spoiled kids!

I remember having to install Wing Commander 2 multiple times due to only have 35MB of total space.

 

[Pariah]

Prices are coming down since production has increased to the point where demand was exceeding the supply at that price range, they simply had to come down as not many people were willing to pay those inflated high prices with high margins.

I think you mean supply exceeded demand. Prices go up when demand exceeds supply.