I surprised they didn't include any graphs. I'm very curious to see the trends visually.
Prices per GB are still very far off. It's hard to believe they will achieve parity that soon. Here's hoping though.
SSD Prices in a Free Fall
161–170 of 336 posts
Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall
#162Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350 Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40 Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity. In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.
Exactly. And how long until it achieves parity in the cloud hosting world. Hard drives and memory are so expensive you can buy they outright every other month it seems like.
Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall
#163Fab manufacturing capacity doesn't magically increase because of 3D chips.
Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall
#164So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry level?
> So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry level?
Apple's current entry level product, the iPhone 5C, ships with 8GB.
I have one. It's a little bit of a squeeze, but iOS 9 will alleviate that.
Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
To your LED point, I'm unaware of anyone not putting LED if cost of electricity or labor is of any importance. Consumers may not have gotten the message yet, but anyone running the numbers is going LED or nothing at all (small exceptions for grow operations or theater lightening).
LED fixtures are worth it, LED edison base bulbs (replacement bulbs) are not. So new installations get LED, but old ones are not retrofitted.
I don't know -- I just picked up a screw in LED bulb from Walmart for just over a couple bucks, about the same price as CFL. And I was surprised at how bright it was. Just wondering how long the electronics in it will last.
Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall
#166Is the hdd demise indeed expected so quickly?
It appears so. "By packing 32 or 64 times the capacity per die, 3D NAND will allow SSDs to increase capacity well beyond hard drive sizes. SanDisk, for example, plans 8 TB drives this year, and 16 TB drives in 2016. At the same time, vendors across the flash industry are able to back off two process node levels and obtain excellent die yields." Goodnight spinning disk; you've served us well.
I have no doubt that we will see devices that big. The question is will anyone buy them. So its really a question of cost. HD's will be dead next year if I can buy a 10TB SSD for $300.. If it costs $4000, i'm sure HD's will last another couple years.
Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that SSD performance tends to degrade as the drive approaches full utilization - even if the actual internal capacity includes margin, you're probably best off avoiding approaching the available capacity. Heck, for the 250GB SSD I put in my primary laptop this past spring I intentionally formatted it to ~80% of the available capacity - that gives me plenty of space (~100GB free after all software & data)…
Does the SSD actually use this unformatted space? I know that SSDs from the factory have a lower available space than their nominal space, to account for the eventual dimishing quanitty of functional floating gate transistors (ie 240GB is made available in a 256GB drive), and that OSes usually recommend keeping about 10% of the formatted drive free (for paging iirc). Didn't know that about unformatted space.
All clean pages (from overprovisioning, unformatted space, and trimmed space) should be treated the same by SSDs. In particular, Intel documents that leaving unformatted space will increase performance on their SSDs.
Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall
#168Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350 Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40 Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity. In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.
My need for SSD is rather modest. I have an SSD big enough for the OS and things I use often, and a huge spinning secondary drive for things I rarely access.
That's a good pattern, one I use too. But that's not what the article was about - it was making the case that SSD would soon reach similar capacities as spinning HDs, and at similar prices. I'm skeptical too.
I believe we are already at the point where SSDs are large enough and cheap enough for the majority of use cases. It's only going to get better. There has always seemed to be a price floor for hard disks, where making them smaller doesn't make them any cheaper, and I'm wondering if the floor won't be lower for SSD.
Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall
#169Fab manufacturing capacity doesn't magically increase because of 3D chips.
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Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall
#170Could someone explain the 3d storage innovation to me? Wouldn't stacking flash cells like that be susceptible to interference? (Heat/magnetic or electrical noise?)
Anandtech has some good 3D NAND info. I'm not positive they answer your specific question, but hopefully it's helpful.
Here are the two articles I remember:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb... (goes on for a few pages after this one)
http://anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/3 (This is mostly about how 3D NAND benefits TLC)