Posted on 01/26/2019 8:07:27 AM PST by ShadowAce
For years SSD prices were annoyingly stable. Anyone looking to buy an SSD could rely on prices that hadn’t budged much since launch. Sure, you would see the occasional sale, but ongoing price drops for older drives were nowhere to be found.
Suddenly, that’s all changed. SSD prices are dropping like a stone. What gives? Is now the best time to buy an SSD?
The cause of this price drop is, as always, supply and demand. For some time, the supply of SSDs was restricted based on a shortage of available flash memory. But now, most fabs have completed the transition to 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory. This new NAND technology allows for denser storage and faster drives, increasing drive speed and capacity.
However, these new drives take time to make, and old drives don’t just disappear. Retailers still have a substantial stockpile of SSDs using the previous generation’s 32-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory.
As such, prices are being slashed on SSDs with last-generation technology, including older but still excellent 32-layer 3D TLC NAND. Newer 64-layer NAND brings improvement to performance and power efficiency, but older 32-layer technology is inexpensive enough to provide compelling deals.
When you hear about price drops, it’s important to keep perspective in mind. A decrease of a few dollars probably won’t change your purchasing behavior. But a drop of a significant percentage of price can send you reaching for your wallet.
Using Camelcamelcamel we can see that SSD prices have plunged for the top selling SSDs on Amazon. The top seller, the Samsung EVO 860 500GB, has dropped 30 percent from its price at launch, a decrease of more than $50. If we look at a more recent stable price back in the spring, the drive’s price is still down more than 10 percent.
Other popular drives see similar decreases. In the last six months the WD Blue 500GB SSD has dropped $51 dollars, or 36 percent.
Most consumer 2.5-inch SATA SSDs have dropped their price as substantially, with some plunging even further. Even m.2 and NVMe devices, which have historically been resistant to price decreases, are showing the same downward trend.
If you’re still running your system off of a spinning hard drive, you won’t find a better time to buy. No matter what type of SSD you get, the performance increase will be noticeable and dramatic.
What if you own an older or smaller SSD that you want to upgrade? Now is a good time for you to buy as well. SSD speed will increase with the newest technology, but only on the margins. Maximum capacity is going to be the biggest difference between 32-layer and 64-layer 3D NAND, rather than speed. So if you want to jump from 256GB to 1TB, the market is ripe with deals.
If you have an SSD you’re happy with or you want to purchase an SSD larger than 2TB, hold your horses. The same goes for users who need the fastest drives. Unless you want to build a RAID0 array from SSDs, wait for 64-layer SSDs to hit the market and drop in price. If you’ve been longing for a 5TB SSD, that day is coming soon.
That is, until next year when prices fall even further. And the year after that, and the year after that...
About six years ago, I changed my second MacBook Pro to SSD and loved it. That machine had networking problems and I replaced it about four years ago with a mid-2014 MacBook Pro with a 500 MB SSD. Love it. Dead silent and fast as blazes.
I only have spinning drives in my backup servers and audio/video servers. Everything quietly gets backed up via Time Machine and Synology.
Unless it’s windows 10. They it don’t matter what drive or all the ram in the world...it will run like crap.
Just upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I went from a great responding, almost instant response experience to click and wait. There is a good 5 second delay on just about every mouse click or hover.
Welcome to the future of Windows computing!
I know why. It’s because I just bought one right before prices start to fall. I’m also the guy who walks into the room when our football team is crushing the opponents 35-0 and things immediately start to go South.
Until one day you won’t even be able to GET a spinning hard drive any more.
On my home linux machine I run a relatively cheap and small SSD as / for the OS. The /home mount where all my files are is on a large conventional spinning HDD. Makes for really fast boots and updates at a very reasonable price. When the SSD starts to go bad I just replace it and reinstall linux without disturbing my data. That just happened recently after about 3 or 4 years of use. I’m still going to use spinning drives for my primary storage. But SSDs are working their way in. My next project is going to be a RAID 5 array for our home network.
My 2012 MacBook Pro was getting slow and I was considering getting a new one. Then I looked into SSD drives, put a Samsung 1TB drive and it was like getting a new computer. Spent $200 instead of $2000 and I avoided having to deal with new cables etc.
What is an SSD and how have I lived without one for so long?
That’s a fact. It is just incredible how they have been able to eat up every new resource as it became available for all these years. Almost like they filled it up with unneeded crap on purpose.
Mouse clicks used to be local. Now they have to route through Microsoft and the NSA before execution.
I’m going to guess maybe an over production and the trade war might be influencing these prices?
Solid State Drive. Faster response time than a traditional hard drive, but more limited lifespan which means you'll have to upgrade hardware more frequently.
I think you could be very close with this concept.
Maybe it’s just me and I don’t buy a lot of SSD, but the last couple I have bought have been for more memory than in the charts at 1TB and 2TB. In each case I paid about what the current price the chart is showing for 500GB.
Are most people just not that much of a bargain hunter? Or did I just get lucky?
Seriously thought every time I have looked at 1TB SSD in the last 2 years they have been about $80-120 which is what the charts above are reflecting for 500GB drives.
Maybe a speed thing? Though with SSD I wouldn’t expect that much of a difference that the average person would recognize.
You may as well put your home drive on the SSD and tar it up every night onto a spinning drive. As a matter of fact, tar the whole system.
tar -cvpzf backup.tar.gz —exclude=/backup.tar.gz —one-file-system /
So much for Peak SSD.
They must have discovered some very large Reserves.
That’s odd. I have Win10 (that upgraded from Win7) on a SSD from a few years ago. It takes about 10s to boot, and every operation is blindingly fast.
Now I will say that compared to XP, Win10 is a fat dog - but it’s also doing a lot more than XP did (which I don’t like).
If you’re having issues, you might need to do some reading on optimizing in a SSD environment. It’s not as obvious as it was previously.
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