Flash Memory Plummets to One Buck/One Gig

Karloff

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Flash Memory Plummets to One Buck/One Gig

Sales data shows the cost of SSD memory dropped by almost half in the last year alone.



Looking to upgrade your gaming rig? It can be a daunting prospect, but there's some reason to be cheerful. Though the price of hard drives has gone up over the last twelve months, thanks in part to floods that severely damaged Thailand's manufacturing plants, there is a viable alternative to the spinning drive that comes as standard in the average desktop machine. Flash drive memory has fallen in price by more than half over the past year alone according to a recent Tech Report analysis of sales figures, and in some cases the price per gigabyte is in the $0.82-0.90 range; less than a buck per gigabyte.

According to the data, the most expensive drives come with Intel Inside. The Intel memory drives come at a minimum price tag of $1.39 per gig for the 520 Series, which is a 240GB device. Meanwhile the cheapest alternative 240GB item is the OCZ Agility which prices at $0.86 per GB, almost 40% less expensive than its Intel counterpart. However if you wanted even more memory at less cost there's always the Crucial m4 256GB, which can cost $0.82 per gig.

Though HDDs will continue to be the default option for desktops for the immediate future, this may well change. Windows 7 supports SSD, and Apple is very much in favour of flash for its laptops and MacBooks. Meanwhile sales of SDDs have gone up dramatically, increasing by seven times the sales volume they generated this time last year, while the demand for HDDs has dropped by as much as 40%.

So long as SSD prices keep falling while HDD costs stay high - and at this point in time there's no reason to expect otherwise - if you want to tweak your machine, solid state may be the most cost effective way to achieve like-for like (or better) memory capacity.

Sources & Image: Tech Report [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/jun/22/ssd-prices-fall]


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mad825

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Mean while, HDDs are dramatically cheaper.

Won't mind getting an SSD however it's still too expensive. My computing lifestyle requires at least 1TB in the machine at all times. Even if I got An SSD for my computer external devices will remain HDDs because there's no point having lavish storage for backing-up films/games/music.
Karloff said:
So long as SSD prices keep falling while HDD costs stay high
Where did you get this from? HDDs have gotten even cheaper.
 

Wolfram23

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There's now hybrid HDDs out like the Seagate Momentus XT which have a fair bit of flash memory onboard paired with 750gb disk storage. They actually are super fast. After a few days of usage, any files you use frequently and that slow down loading things are automatically stored on the flash memory, and in some applications the hybrid is as fast as if not faster than an SSD (I believe it was a Crucial M4 used to compare).

However, I'm a firm believer in the SSD ever since I got my Intel X25M 80gb 2nd generation SSD around 2 years ago. Really was impressive. So impressive that I bought myself another SSD for Christmas - a Corsair Force Series GT 120gb.

From the get go I had 2 500gb 7200rpm drives in RAID 0 (doubles the read/write speeds, 1TB total) which is very fast, but with an SSD it was noticeably faster in all areas.
 

The Lugz

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yep, ssd prices are floping
been looking at these myself:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-016-KS&groupid=701&catid=2104&subcat=1427

a quad sd array on my z77 at 0.42/gb cant be bad!

hdd's have risen in price in the uk over the past 2 years, cant comment on the us or anywhere else though

i could pick up 2tb for £45 at one point now were back up and over £75 in most cases
still far cheaper/gb but it should want to be
 

The Artificially Prolonged

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Good news that the prices are starting to fall although they're still a bit expensive for my liking compared to large storage hdds. Still if the prices keep dropping I think it will be sooner rather than later I pick a ssd and enjoy some super load times.
 

Worgen

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mad825 said:
Mean while, HDDs are dramatically cheaper.

Won't mind getting an SSD however it's still too expensive. My computing lifestyle requires at least 1TB in the machine at all times. Even if I got An SSD for my computer external devices will remain HDDs because there's no point having lavish storage for backing-up films/games/music.
Karloff said:
So long as SSD prices keep falling while HDD costs stay high
Where did you get this from? HDDs have gotten even cheaper.
I love my ssd, I have an ssd for my c drive and I use a normal hdd for my storage. About 5 months ago hdds almost doubled in price because of the flooding and they are still rather expensive, although much cheaper per gig than a ssd is.
 

mad825

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Worgen said:
I love my ssd, I have an ssd for my c drive and I use a normal hdd for my storage. About 5 months ago hdds almost doubled in price because of the flooding .
Ah, never knew that. In any case, it's likely that the pre-flooding prices may return after a while but then again it's also possible that the price may remain high if the introduce newer features such as SATA III or making them a hybrid component.
 

Charli

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Allllright finally. Knew this was coming was just a matter of when. Saving for my SSD was worth it.
 

Xanthious

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HDDs are still really bloody cheap. I recently picked up a bunch of 2TB External HDDs for considerably less than 100 dollars each delivered. If remember correctly I paid about the same price a little over a year ago for 1TB HDDs so I'm just not seeing the increase in HDD prices myslef.

I suppose it could have had to due with the fact I was buying in bulk for my tech/sales team at work but still even looking around online you can still find really good deals if you know where to look.

That being said when I build my next computer I will probably go with a SSD for my main drive and then use HDDs for simple bulk storage of video, disc images, and so on.
 

Worgen

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mad825 said:
Worgen said:
I love my ssd, I have an ssd for my c drive and I use a normal hdd for my storage. About 5 months ago hdds almost doubled in price because of the flooding .
Ah, never knew that. In any case, it's likely that the pre-flooding prices may return after a while but then again it's also possible that the price may remain high if the introduce newer features such as SATA III or making them a hybrid component.
They are expecting prices to drop but no one is really sure when that will happen, its getting a bit better but I don't think they are expecting hdd prices to return to pre flood prices till next year, I think the only major manufacturer that didn't get hit was seagate, their plant was rather high up so it didn't get hit but allot of the parts manufactures did so parts are a bit scarce still.
 

Yal

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I actually just bought an SSD last week, a Samsung 256gb is currently winging its way to me by the magic of parcel post. I'm going to have to do some spring cleaning, might even be able to get everything onto just the one drive. Almost all of this is just junk I've just let accumulate since, man, who cares. Hard drives are infinite now, right? I don't think I've actually filled one since the days when they were measured in megabytes....
 

Formica Archonis

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mad825 said:
In any case, it's likely that the pre-flooding prices may return after a while but then again it's also possible that the price may remain high if the introduce newer features such as SATA III or making them a hybrid component.
SATA 3 is common on new HDDs and almost useless. The mechanical drive just can't push stuff through that fast. And the prices had better go WELL below pre-flood because not only are they cramming more on less platters, but WD and Seagate both slashed their warranties starting this year. Most HDDs only come with one year instead of three.

I still wouldn't buy an SSD, though, since I don't need one and I know they're just gonna get way cheaper, assuming the new NAND flash plants don't get flooded [http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/cio-insights/tech-manufacturing-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen/39748883].

I did try to trade for one, though. A coworker won an SSD on a draw where I work and he hasn't used it yet because he doesn't know how. Two of us tried to pry it off him with our prizes (mine was a decent multifunction printer with wireless N) but no go. An Intel 120 gig or something and it's just SITTING THERE.
 

Rad Party God

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Hmmm... I've certainly been looking forward to upgrading my old 80 gb IDE drive to an SSD one, let's hope we get a reasonable price drop for my country.
 

Scrythe

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I've had two harddrives fail on me in the last three months and roughly five in the last two years. At this point, SSD seems like a good option no matter what the cost.

I've actually considered purchasing several and turning them into a backup/file server. The cost of a few SSD's may be high, but it's still significantly cheaper than disk recovery and/or replacing a 1TB+ hard drive every couple of years. Those fucking crooks charge several hundred dollars just to look at the hard drive to determine what the damage is (I've called around).

Unfortunately, they provide almost no noticeable performance boost to PS3's, but that may change some day.
 

Formica Archonis

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Scrythe said:
I've actually considered purchasing several and turning them into a backup/file server. The cost of a few SSD's may be high, but it's still significantly cheaper than disk recovery and/or replacing a 1TB+ hard drive every couple of years.
Cheaper still is buying two hard drives and either doing a RAID mirror or just backing stuff up. Assuming SSDs won't fail is as dangerous as assuming mechanical HDs won't fail.

Scrythe said:
Those fucking crooks charge several hundred dollars just to look at the hard drive to determine what the damage is (I've called around).
Clean rooms and platter readers are pricey specialized equipment, the estimates help subsidize that.
 

Scrythe

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Formica Archonis said:
Clean rooms and platter readers are pricey specialized equipment, the estimates help subsidize that.
Vehicle repair requires specialized buildings and equipment, yet I've never had a mechanic tell me "Well it's going to cost $950 to pop the hood open".

It's a niche service, so of course they're going to milk it for all it's worth.