Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

'Gouging' is an epithet used by those who abhor the practice; that's the source of the confusion. It means more than "more than usual" or "temporarily more than MSRP"; it specifically means unfair. 'Gouging' is even a legal term, for a practice illegal in some circumstances and jurisdictions.

So by using the term, you've added confusion, including the need for your extra verbiage, to the effect of "...not that there's anything wrong with it!"

(I also think you're giving way too much weight to MSRP. Actual prices to the consumer always vary, even without a bid/ask 'market'. The MSRP -- as a coordination mechanism among producers and retailers used to loosely enforce pricing discipline -- is arguably a more-unfair practice than this market-clearing 'gouging'. So you're using a mildly-disapproving term, 'gouging', for the praiseworthy practice of maintaining a sellable inventory, and an mildly-approving term, 'standard', for a potentially-unfair collusive practice. The connotations of your chosen language are backwards!)

The first hard drive my father bought was 5mb. It connected to an Atari 800 through the Atari's 4 joystick ports. It's price was somewhere around $2000. That fact is utterly meaningless when comparing the price of HDs and SSDs (which are significantly more expensive than HDs) in the marketplace. Today.

OK, so.

A couple months ago I bought a new MacBook Pro and picked up the 256GB SSD option on it. The drive's Toshiba (Apple ships Toshiba and Samsung drives -- I don't know model numbers).

So far it's been wonderful. Everything in this machine (processor, RAM, etc.) is a significant bump up from what I'd had before, but the SSD performance boost is still easy to notice; even though it's not the fastest drive you can get, the impression I have from watching the various videos of people with Intel drives is that the difference -- for the sorts of things I do -- is basically negligible (in order to notice it I'd have to be regularly writing huge files and timing the process).

Typical time from turning the machine on to having a desktop in front of me is around 15 seconds; that goes up if I have lots of peripherals plugged in (as I often do at work, where I end up using every available port), but still makes my older laptop painful even to contemplate.

Of course, both boot time and cold launch of applications are really just for show (though it's all very fast). The real point, for me, is the sorts of mundane but read-intensive things I do all the time: grepping over big log files or large codebases, getting status and diffs out of local checkouts, etc. There's just no contest here; that stuff happens stupid fast, and by itself would make the SSD worth having.

It should be noted that I haven't really paid attention to or particularly cared about write performance; the only time it would be noticeable is when pulling lots of stuff from a remote repo (lots of small writes to a bunch of files), but any write-performance problems with that get drowned out by things like network latency.

I'm also not particularly worried about wearing the drive out or anything like that; Toshiba's estimates for the lifetime of their drives are almost certainly a bit optimistic, but a more conservative and realistic number (confirmed by various places where I've seen it discussed) is that I'd need to sustain a pattern of writing around 20GB/day to have a significant chance of wearing out the drive in five years.

Especially when things move as fast as they do with memory and storage. Just 5 or 6 years ago I was buying a new 80gb SATA disk for just over CAD$100 (iirc). We've gone from around $1/gb then to almost exactly 10¢/gb. Probably cheaper for you guys south of the 49th.

edit: DirectCanada has disks cheaper than NCIX by almost 2¢/gb as well.

In comparison the average price for an SSD is CAD$375 for ~120gb, so let's call it $400 to make things easy, it's going to cost more with tax anyway. So it's around $3/gb or $3.50/gb which is 35x the cost.

However if you are building a new box and spending $1500+ anyway then an SSD is probably a very wise choice.