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.
I’m also reminded of when I was working for a financial institution where certain of our PCs were not allowed to be connected to the outside Internet, at all, ever.
My ASUS Ultrabook has a SSD for the operating system (W10) and HDD for storage.
From the moment I press Power On, my desktop appears in 10-15 seconds...and I have only 4GB memory.
That said...
I’m looking at new ASUS laptops and strongly considering a SSD for storage...and, of course, more memory.
My only concern is the long term reliability of SSD being written & rewritten.
Mine is the same way. Think it is a K52F with dual Intel processors. I can honestly say I have not had one problem with the SSD at all yet and it is about 12 years old. My linux login screen pops up in just a few seconds. For a much faster boot a SSD is the way to go.
Yep, of course you could use third party ware like the openoffice. But I am going to be honest and say that if you have to add third party ware you would be much better off at that point moving to Linux.
If you are using win 7 now you are going to hate how win 10 handles. The new Linux versions handle like Win 7 and much better than win 10. And they already come with an office suite bundled up ready to go included.
Know what? You just gave me an idea. Maybe I could get some pointers from these guys around here with it. But I should set up an online “testing” example on my server of the Linux OS for people to go and try out just to see how it works. :)
Timely thread for me.
Both my MBPs have died. A 2007 and 2012. Hardware problem.
Anyway I’m looking for a 15” PC replacement. Not gonna pay $2k + for a 15” laptop. Esp when you have to buy and cart around a bunch of dongles, dingles just to read an SD card, dvd, etc.
Have been holding out for one w/ a SSD drive. But if they are less reliable I might rethink my choice.
I see a bunch of laptops with 1T, 5400 rpm HDs. Might look for a 7200 rpm model.
Actually like prices for RAM, prices can fluctuate much, though usually on a downward trend, but the average cost of a SSD stayed quite high for a long time before a rather dramatic drop due to over supply and other factors. Which can go up as RAM prices have during periods.
With the high prices of Nvidia’s RTX cards and spotty availability of more-affordable alternatives, plus the continuingly high price of RAM, falling solid-state drive (SSD) prices have been one of the few bright spots in the PC building world in 2018. As we predicted early this year, new technologies and increasing die sizes have led to lower prices. And in higher-capacity 1 and 2TB models, the falling price trend seems to be accelerating, according to data from PCPartPicker.
In 2016 and 2017 NAND and SSD prices rose due to shortages due to strong demand and limited supply. Starting in mid-2018 the shortage in NAND flash memory was satisfied and with new 3D NAND factories coming on-line and with demand for smart phones slowing, the industry moved into an oversupply situation. This resulting in declining prices for NAND flash in the latter half of 2018. There are projections that the decline in NAND flash, and thus SSDs prices, will continue in 2019, with a 10% drop in price per GB expected in CQ1 2019. DRAM memory also declined in price in the second half of 2018, with continued declines expected in 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2018/12/21/digital-storage-projections-for-2019-part-1/#1fd439524428
In June [2016] the average retail price...for a 128GB SSD was $91.55; for an SSD in the 240GB to 256GB range, the price was about $165.34, DRAMeXchange's data showed. https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/ssd-prices-fall-2019/
Now the price for a 128GB SSD is as low as 21.00 and a 240GB about $32 .
Thanks ShadowAce.
There are 2 problems with that (IMO). First, the data on /home tends to change a lot more often. One of the big problems with SSD tech is that you only get so many writes to a given sector. Granted, with today's stuff, that's not as much of a worry as it once was, but depending upon how you use stuff, it very well could be. Second, per GB of space an SSD is much more expensive than a traditional disk. I can buy 4TB of space for /home on a spinning disk for the same price I can get 500GB of SSD.
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