SSDs: Price, Capacity Or Performance. You Pick

SSDs: Price, Capacity Or Performance. You Pick

Sunday, March 16, 2008 - by Chad Weirick
They say that beggars can't be choosers, but apparently consumers can be.  The choice that consumers are likely to be faced with in the near future is not whether to go down the SSD route, but which type of SSD do they want.

“Faster drives and a falling cost-per-gigabyte should help bring drive costs down from the stratosphere and into a price bracket more consumers can afford, but the focus in the manufacturing world right now is on boosting storage capacities and performance, not reducing costs. It's very much a game right now where every 12 months, we're going to see considerable breakthroughs in performance.”

With annual breakthroughs in performance come annual waves of 'obsolete' parts that could potentially be offered at discounted rates compared to the latest and greatest parts.  In the end, consumers are likely to end up with a three way tug-of-war between price, capacity and performance.
Via: Ars Technica | News Archive | Tags: SSD, SD, SSDs, DS, performance, Price, Ice, rf
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By AjayD on Mar 16, 2008

I wonder how long before SSD becomes capable of competing with conventional HD's in the desktop market? I think SSD's are advancing at a faster rate than HD's have been improving. HD's have certainly had impressive gains in capacity, but have yet to see any substantial improvements in speed. As far as price is concerned I think they are a ways off, but I am more interested in knowing how long it will take for their capacities to rival HD's.

By frg1 on Mar 16, 2008

 that will probably be a while considering the biggest ssd they got is 128gb

By turtle on Mar 16, 2008

Here's you answer best I can reason.


The biggest drive you see is 128gb because 4GB flash chips are (were) the best size/dollar to use when manufactured, and most drives use 32 chips, faster drives (like OCZ's new set) assumingly use less chips with more space per chip, or revised (smaller/faster) similar-space chips (I don't know what makes certain drives faster). 8GB/16GB is already coming down to almost parity, so expect 256GB/512MB drives soon for a similar price, with smaller drives going down for the obvious reasons...less chips used or older technology.

32GB chips are the hot new thing, and 64GB is coming extremely soon. These are (32GB) and will be (64GB) expensive, until the next doubling, which I assume to be 128GB per chip, in which they may start level off somewhat.

So take these sizes and amounts of chips into account and you can see what you can expect from solid state in the future. We might see a 2TB solid state drive (32x64GB) that may cause you to take out a mortgage, as well as a single chip 64GB drive that's fast as hell, with everything in-between.


By frg1 on Mar 16, 2008

 learn something new everyday on this forum

By AjayD on Mar 17, 2008

Thanks for the reply turtle and welcome to the forum. It would appear that SSD's with capacities to rival HD's are not too far off. Certainly the price of such drives will be outlandish initially. As with all technology, the price will eventually fall though. Given the design of SSD's I would think they would actually be cheaper to make, R&D aside.

By frg1 on Mar 17, 2008

seems like they would last longer with no moving parts 

By ice91785 on Mar 17, 2008

I know this sound like a dumb question but what interface are the majority of these drives?

By Grahf on Mar 17, 2008

Can't say I care too much about these for desktops (RAM is cheap, SSD is immature) but for laptops I can't wait. If you have to do anything on the road that requires heavy hard drive access your batteries drop like flies.

By on Mar 18, 2008

I wonder how many years do we have to wait SSDs to become accessible

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