Report: SSD Capacity To Soar, Reach Price Parity With HDDs In 2016

Remember when it was considered a big deal when SSDs hit the $1/GB mark? That seems high now, but remember that some of the first SSDs to hit the market cost about $8/GB. Then, mainstream Solid State Drives crossed the $0.50/GB mark, and today, it's super easy to find SSDs on sale that cost about ~$0.35/GB.

According to predictions at InformationWeek, SSD pricing could become 1:1 with mechanical hard drives in late 2016. Imagine getting a 4TB SSD for about $150 - I am salivating at the thought. If that happens, it will negate the last remaining technical advantage of the legacy hard drive - more capacity for a lot less. Soon, we could reach price parity and a point in which mechanical storage is far less ideal.

Samsung 840 1TB

With the advent of 3D NAND, some vendors have promised mammoth-sized drives by the end of the year. Right now, you can purchase 2TB SSDs from sites like Newegg, but they are truly enterprise focused. That will change, though, as the technology becomes further refined. SanDisk has said that it expects to ship 8TB SSDs this year, and 16TB next. That's big, in more ways than just storage density.

Intel SSD 750 Series PCIe NVMe Solid  State Drive - 1.2 Terabytes
Intel SSD 750 Series PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive - 1.2 Terabytes

It almost seems hard to believe. Could we really reach a point where SSDs become a no-brainer, and mechanical storage is completely avoided? On the density front, HDDs reign supreme, especially on mobile (we reported just yesterday on a 4TB mobile hard drive), but that too should change.

It's going to be fun to see how things play out over the next year. I am excited at the prospect of having mass storage in my PC that's 100% silent and blazing fast.

Tags:  Hard Drive, SSD, Storage