Will there be a 1TB SSD by next Thanksgiving for $150 or less?

[hackmole]

Does anyone know if it will be possible to improve the SSD so that it will accommodate the market. Right now the drives are too small and too expensive. A 1TB or larger SSD drive for $150 or less would have great demand. Is the technology there and are potential advancements there to do this by next Thanksgiving?

 

[trungma]

No it won't. Everyone is spoiled with technology. It took decades for regular hdds to reach the capacities that they are at now but people expect ssds to do the same in a few years? They probably will but not at a price point the majority of people are willing to pay. Yes ssds are expensive but so is a Ferrari.

 

[frostedflakes]

Why would you need a 1TB SSD? Do your OS and programs take up anywhere close to 1TB? I know my OS install, a ton of programs, a couple games, page file, hibernate file, etc. takes up like 60GB.

Movies, music, etc. are another story, but these files don't benefit at all from the IOPS SSDs offer. These kind of files are relegated to cheap, spindle-based storage.

But to answer your question, no. Will be many years before 1TB SSDs are affordable.

 

[MagickMan]

That's the way I see them too. They're awesome, but not everyone can afford them. Well, maybe a 64GB for $90, but you'd have to be careful not to fill it.

 

[maniac5999]

In my opinion we will be lucky if SSDs hit $1/gb by the end of next year. (the best deals are currently around $1.50/gb) You want to know if they will hit $0.15/gb? maybe in 4-5 years if we're lucky. If you even think next year is a possibility for that, then I want some of what you're smoking.

 

[Rifter]

I'll buy one when they hit 500GB for $300 or less. Im expecting that to be 2-3 years from now.

Edit to add, i ment ill replace all HDD's with SSD on my main system when they hit that price, im going to buy a 80-120GB drive on boxing day for a boot drive but they are not large enough to replace HDD at this time.

 

[sxr7171]

Short answer:

I wish.


I think the NAND flash production capacity needs to grow by a few orders of magnitude for that to happen. Plants being built today won't affect market pricing for 2 years I suspect. I think it will be 2-3 years IMHO.

Let's take bets.

 

[hackmole]

One gigabyte drives used to be king and expensive too when your average drive was 240 megabytes.

Mass production always brings down price. It's just a matter of if they are capable of making a breakthrough to bring the SSD up to a terrabyte or more. I think they should be able to do it very quickly.

And yes, I need lots of drive space. On top of which I have about 100 video cassette movies that need to be converted to digital, I create videos which usually takes at least a dozen edited versions to get the final product. That ends up using a lot of file space.

 

[RebateMonger]

Since SSD prices are primarily determined by NAND memory prices, you can likely use Moore's law to get a rough idea of capacities and prices over time. That's basically what Wikipedia predicts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
A 2-year 50% decline in costs while capacities double at the same rate.

That still puts 500 GB SSDs at over $750 a year from now.

 

[frostedflakes]

I don't see economics of scale helping much more, the NAND flash market is already huge and has been huge for years. In the grand scheme of things, SSDs are a very, very tiny part of the market and will remain so for a while. Flash drives, MP3 players, etc. are where the bulk of NAND flash ends up.

Anyway, your digitized cassettes will see no benefit from being stored on SSD. Stuff like that you can just save to spindle-based storage. There's absolutely no reason to put it on an SSD, you'd just be throwing away money. Same reason you wouldn't buy a $500 video card to play FarmVille.

 

[corkyg]

Shortest answer - no!

 

[Absolution75]

Since SSD prices are primarily determined by NAND memory prices, you can likely use Moore's law to get a rough idea of capacities and prices over time. That's basically what Wikipedia predicts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
A 2-year 50% decline in costs while capacities double at the same rate.

That still puts 500 GB SSDs at over $750 a year from now.

This.


I don't see why people foresee a massive drop in SSD prices anytime soon. They are on a predictable schedule due to the fact that die shrinks (NAND shrinks?) are basically needed to increase performance and capacity.

 

[steve wilson]

Prices will drop a bit next year, but no where near that amount. I'm hoping to get one of the 3rd gen intel or 2nd gen S&Force drives early next year.

 

[Blain]

Will there be a 1TB SSD by next Thanksgiving for $150 or less?

Sorry, but you're not going to be able to buy them as cheap as $150.
My estimation is that they will be selling in the $172.49-$184.51 range by next Thanksgiving.
If you can hold off a bit longer you may be able to find some deals around $150 (after rebate), by next Christmas.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

Since SSD prices are primarily determined by NAND memory prices, you can likely use Moore's law to get a rough idea of capacities and prices over time. That's basically what Wikipedia predicts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
A 2-year 50% decline in costs while capacities double at the same rate.

That still puts 500 GB SSDs at over $750 a year from now.

I don't see why people foresee a massive drop in SSD prices anytime soon. They are on a predictable schedule due to the fact that die shrinks (NAND shrinks?) are basically needed to increase performance and capacity.

Both of these...

Prices will drop a bit next year, but no where near that amount. I'm hoping to get one of the 3rd gen intel or 2nd gen S&Force drives early next year.

Intel is releasing it's 3rd generation SSDs Q1 2011 (25nm NAND), so that should reduce prices to consumers.

 

[Lonyo]

One gigabyte drives used to be king and expensive too when your average drive was 240 megabytes.

Mass production always brings down price. It's just a matter of if they are capable of making a breakthrough to bring the SSD up to a terrabyte or more. I think they should be able to do it very quickly.

And yes, I need lots of drive space. On top of which I have about 100 video cassette movies that need to be converted to digital, I create videos which usually takes at least a dozen edited versions to get the final product. That ends up using a lot of file space.

You don't need an SSD if you are just converting movies. Your storage device is never going to be the bottleneck in the process.

You don't seem to understand the issues at hand both with your own requirements, and with the SSD/NAND market.

 

[Campy]

One gigabyte drives used to be king and expensive too when your average drive was 240 megabytes.

Mass production always brings down price. It's just a matter of if they are capable of making a breakthrough to bring the SSD up to a terrabyte or more. I think they should be able to do it very quickly.

And yes, I need lots of drive space. On top of which I have about 100 video cassette movies that need to be converted to digital, I create videos which usually takes at least a dozen edited versions to get the final product. That ends up using a lot of file space.

There are already terabyte SSDs. The issue is cost

 

[biostud]

I hope next generation SSD will bring GB cost down by 40%

 

[Voo]

And yes, I need lots of drive space. On top of which I have about 100 video cassette movies that need to be converted to digital, I create videos which usually takes at least a dozen edited versions to get the final product. That ends up using a lot of file space.

And you really need random access for editing movies? I'd wager that's a pretty sequential workflow at all, so several raided HDDs will be much cheaper and similarly fast (considering you can raid quite a lot of HDDs for the price of one SSD)

 

[taltamir]

No it won't. Everyone is spoiled with technology. It took decades for regular hdds to reach the capacities that they are at now but people expect ssds to do the same in a few years? They probably will but not at a price point the majority of people are willing to pay. Yes ssds are expensive but so is a Ferrari.

actually SSDs are quite competitive density wise with spindle drives. They actually trade back and forth on who has the better density (GB per physical size of drive) 50nm MLC was a bit lower, then 32nm MLC passed spindle drives, then spindle drives passed it, then 25nm MLC came along passing them. And SSD has the ability to (at a very high price) stack 32 high per chip (making it impractically expensive, but possible. Most commercial drives stack 2, 4, or 8 high... with 8 being much much expensive then 4 which is a little more expensive than 2)... The reason we don't see very large SSDs very often is because of cost. Interestingly, the 1TB drives do not use highly stacked chips, but more chips with multiple controllers in RAID0.
1TB SSDs already exist, they are just very very expensive. 25nm SSD are coming in the next month or two and will cut manufacturing cost by a little over half (half cost to make due to size reduction, further reduction due to reduced chip stacking costs), but NOT price to consumer because demand outstrips production and as price goes down and quality goes up (aka, transition to newer process tech), demand also increases. Not to mention that to start out there will be only one 25nm factory in the world, IIRC a 6 billion dollar fab which is co owned by intel and micron, so they can charge whatever they want for it.

Realistically we can see a 25% to 33% price cut from current prices which will be price gouged early on due to low supply and high demand.
Although the price cuts might be greater on the high end then on the low end. Anyways, the cheapest 1TB SSD I am seeing right now is from OCZ @ 2600$ (at one store, most charge more for the same drive).
Here they are at newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...CE&PageSize=20
Where they start at 3150$

Expect the price on it to go down by 1/3, give or take. so we should see them actually go under 2000$. Christmas next year is rather early to expect another process improvement, nor the opening of many more manufacturing plants. Even if prices drop more then expected it wouldn't even be CLOSE to 150$ by then for 1TB of flash.

 

[Soundmanred]

I won't buy one until they are $15 for a 2TB drive.
Then I will low level format it at 4k, then make crappy music to put on it.
It's gonna be a great 2011!

 

[sxr7171]

Since SSD prices are primarily determined by NAND memory prices, you can likely use Moore's law to get a rough idea of capacities and prices over time. That's basically what Wikipedia predicts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
A 2-year 50% decline in costs while capacities double at the same rate.

That still puts 500 GB SSDs at over $750 a year from now.

Good call. It seems we are looking at 3-4 years at a minimum. Any market that sells 1TB SSDs for $150 will have 2TB for $350 and 4TB for $800 (roughly). So that scenario is well into the future probably 4-5 years from now.

If I could get a 1TB for $499 I would be happy. Maybe Christmas 2012?

EDIT: Just read Taltamir's post. Looks like maybe mid-2013 I guess. It looks like NAND isn't replacing platters for mass storage for 5 years at least.

 

[taltamir]

A 2-year 50% decline in costs while capacities double at the same rate.

Moors law is that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit doubles every 2 years or so.
How many transistors can be used inexpensively doesn't entirely determine the cost and price and rate of technological development. And the word "inexpensively" is a bit flexible, intel has to pay 6 billion dollars for a next gen plant now, when just last gen it was 2 billion. So the cost of maintaining such a development rate increases.

In some ways its more of an observation of marketing, intel admits that it intentionally holds back technology to not surpass moors law, and on occasion there were issues that caused development to lag behind moors law. GPUs have always grown faster then moors law would predict, while most other chips are grown much slower due to lack of need.

SSD tech is not currently obeying moors law. It is developing at a faster rate then moors law, and intel and others have stated that their goals are to mainstream the tech by making advances and releasing them to the market faster (plus, there is tremendous competition in that field). In the first few years of SSD we have seen growth rates and price drops surpassing moors law. Best we have seen SSD do was doubling capacity/halving price happen in IIRC 9 months, the rate has crept upwards to taking over a year for it, but still faster then moors law.

Also, while costs (to manufacture) are going down at a great rate, prices are not going down as fast as costs are because of overwhelming demand and little supply.

 

[lmccrary]

In a word, NO.

 

[tyl998]

I have so many STEAM games that I'd want to wait for at least a 400 GB SSD for decent price before I'll go out and buy one 😀